Notes, collectively gathered, micro-blog
Pa++ern is a project by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi. Basically, they found a way to convert Twitter messages into a design code that an embroidery machine can sew into fabric. The designs are a bit random, but the idea is pretty novel.
Via: Today and Tomorrow
TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.
A simple and gorgeous project from the artist, JR. I wrote about his last project a little while ago.
INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Upload a portrait. Receive a poster. Paste it for the world to see.
Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.
INSIDE OUT is a collaboration between the artist JR, the TED Prize and you.
[via GOOD]
Josh posted on Candy Chang‘s last project, I Wish This Was, late last year and it was really inspiring. Such a simple gesture is such a powerful tool for re-imagining a community.
Today, I saw Chang’s latest project, Before I Die in NOLA — another lovely participatory public art project. Perhaps not quite as transformative as I Wish This Was, but the density in this project perhaps makes up for it.
Here is a new alternative to internalizing your anger! This vending machine, created by Yarisal & Kublitz, is a mechanism of anger therapy. After inserting a coin, you can choose which piece of china you would like to drop to the bottom of the machine and shatter. This, in theory, will make you feel better.
Via: Today and Tomorrow
The incredible weather has me getting excited for the summer, and in the process, thinking back to our past couple of summers, and imaging the summer ahead. I recalled the city workers strike back in 2009 and it reminded me of the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and I thought it was long past due that I post about her work.
From the description at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, Ukeles spent eleven months from mid-1979 to 1980 creating Touch Sanitation, a public performance art work. She crisscrossed New York City ten times to reach all fifty-nine sanitation districts to face, shake hands with and thank every sanitation worker for “keeping New York City alive.”
And as noted over at the Green Museum, Touch Sanitation was Ukeles’ first project as the city’s new artist-in-residence […] Ukeles traveled sections of New York City to shake the hands of over 8500 sanitation employees or “sanmen” during a year-long performance. She documented her activities on a map, meticulously recording her conversations with the workers.
At the conclusion of the performance she was made Honorary Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation and also Honorary Teamster Member of Local 831, United Sanitationmen’s Association, and I believe she’s been an artist in residence there ever since.
Also worth checking out — her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969. After child-birth in 1968, Ukeles became a mother/maintenance worker and fell out of the picture of the avant-garde. In a rage, she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969, applied equally to the home, all kinds of service work, the urban environment, and the sustenance of the earth itself. She viewed the Manifesto as “a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of survival who could, if organized, reshape the world.”
This is the kind of work that makes me want to make more art.
Happy Friday.
The pitch was great, obviously; the rapped overview of the entire movie, an actual response from the mayor noting the city had no plans to create a Robocop statue, and eventually, an endorsement from the folks behind the Robocop movie.
They reached their $50,000 goal, so the statue is being built. And that’s incredible.
But, in all of this online commotion, which Loveland and Imagination Station are great at pulling together, there’s a lesson in how to approach big ideas. From the Kickstarter page for the Robocop Statue project:
When something like a RoboCop statue comes along and gets people psyched about collectively crowd funding something in Detroit, that energy needs to be encouraged, and ultimately it can be channeled into other efforts and a general awareness that things like this are possible (and in fact happen) here.
And, this, arguably, is going to be the foundation for something much larger. If someone had suggested five or six years ago that Detroit was going to become a haven for artists buying up property and thinking about things like community building, it might have sounded kind of absurd. This is, of course, not to suggest that Detroit wasn’t home to an incredible number of artists at that time, but rather, that it may not have made sense to draw all the dots between those projects and the things actually happening on the ground now.
There’s something about the small, the incremental, the gradual that really seems to be an appropriate response to the situations we face in our communities. There are no overnight solutions, and even if the Robocop statue was arguable an overnight success, I’m inclined to agree with the folks behind the project when they suggest that this statue can actually be the start of some much larger money and ideas being put into Detroit. If a city get puts on a national or even international map because of a strange, small initiative, one certainly has to pause about all the money dumped into larger and seemingly less effective multi-million dollar marketing regional campaigns, etc.
The lesson for anyone in a position of authority out there: just listen and allow creative people with great ideas do great things.
Here is a magnificent use of billboard space created by architect Didier Faustino. He has titled the work/installation/swing-set Double Happiness for pretty obvious reasons. Clever ideas like this usually don’t come from passivity towards the city, but an engaged, analytical, and curious attitude. I found this summary of the conceptual framework behind the project:
“Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.”
After a long day of classes and studying, a few friends of mine wandered into the Lebel gallery to let loose and make ridiculous things out of heaps of cardboard boxes. The creating of the ‘box city’ was open to anyone curious enough to take part. Of course the essentials (boxes, scissors, coloured tape, paint and brushes) were supplied and all that was required was a bit of imagination!
This has already been passed around a number of blogs, but thought it was worth noting on here — this one goes out to Michelle.
Robo-Rainbow is a work by Akay, as part of his instruments of mass destruction (complicated technical solution to aide in simple acts of vandalism).
In the event you didn’t catch the Superbowl. A commercial about a new car, abandoned buildings, a choir mysteriously singing in the Fox Theatre, oh, and Eminem. Epic.
via Julie Sando (IRL)