Posted on

Marcos Zotes’ CCTV / Creative Control

Marcos Zotes, an architect and artist living in New York, recently completed CCTV/Creative Control, an intervention consisting of the projection of “an over-sized eye onto the lower surface of the 10-storey-hight Milton Street water tower in Brooklyn, New York.” This particular tower is a very ideal fit for an oval-shaped projection and since it does not display any external lighting fixtures, allows the projection to take center stage.

About the water tower: “Still the highest point in the area, until it is dwarfed by new gentrification plans, the water tower exists as a relic of the neighbourhood’s industrial past. The intervention temporarily transforms this iconic landmark into a discernible CCTV tower, raising questions of private control over public space in the urban context. By intervening in the everyday order of contemporary urban life, CCTV/Creative Control aims at both producing moments of antagonism –however transitory, fragmentary or ephemeral– and finding new ways to practice the city, not simply as consumers but as creators.”

On a conceptual level, “CCTV/Creative Control seeks to question the oppressive mechanisms and discourses implemented in the city through the temporary appropriation of public space.” I find this project interesting in principal, but also because it was executed by an architect who probably looked at the water tower with a special kind of criticism.

Posted on

Homework: Folder Frenzy

As I promised on Friday’s meeting, I went out in search for the perfect folder to distribute to our guests, who will be attending Homework: Infrastructures and Collaboration at the end of this month.

My first stop was Dollarama. There, I arguably found the worst selection of folders I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t even worth taking pictures. I quickly moved on to Staples where I was much more successful. Below are quick phone photos of folders I thought to be appropriate for the conference.

Posting everything on here is probably the best way for us to collectively choose the best fitting folder.

Continue reading “Homework: Folder Frenzy”

Posted on

Moveable Type: Cross-Country Adventures in Printing

This mobile letterpress service-in-a-truck looks similar to the camper we occupied this summer at Truck Gallery in Calgary. The truck pictured is part of a touring project called Moveable Type. It is as it sounds: a truck with printing equipment installed where camping amenities used to reside. “It was originally a fleet truck for American Linens, and their logo is still faintly visible beneath the white body paint.” The truck conversion itself is a feat of ingenuity, but its touring schedule is also pretty ambitious. I counted nearly 100 stops from June to December of 2011. I hope to catch it during one of its future Canadian appearances.

Via: Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas

Continue reading “Moveable Type: Cross-Country Adventures in Printing”

Posted on

MIT’s Place Pulse

Place Pulse, a sort of rating system for locations within a city, enables pedestrians to form a database of their opinions and findings. More importantly, this project allows participants to share information with those who might have a part in future urban development. Five cities are currently available to rate through Place Pulse: Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, Boston, and New York.

“Place Pulse, by the Macro Connections group, is a website that puts the full force of science behind fuzzy things like how safe or rich or unusual a city seems, and it does it in the least likely way: by crowdsourcing people’s ratings of streets, using geotagged images, and turning those answers into hard, eminently crunchable numbers.”

This project should be a helpful tool in determining “aesthetic capital”, but the question of superficiality appears. Place Pulse could garner usable information for the remodelling of urban commercial spaces, parks, roadways, and structural facades, but can not hope to solve the pressing problems of crime and poverty. I’m aware that the purpose of the project is not to tackle these social problems, but it’s possible that Place Pulse could plug in to other social efforts for urban improvement.

Via: Fast Co. Design

Posted on

Olaf Mooij – Braincar

The Braincar is a new mobile sculpture/multimedia project by artist Olaf Mooij. His general idea, inspired by his interest in our connection to automobiles, was to create an car that could capture images throughout its day travels and “dream” about them at night. By “dream”, he means modify or “remix” the images in some kind of random way. These images are then projected onto the underside of the brain sculpture.

In an attempt to understand the connection between our daily experience and that of our vehicles, Mooij questioned “what it would be like if instead the car itself could experience with a kind of consciousness its own passage through space and time.”

Via: Designboom

Continue reading “Olaf Mooij – Braincar”

Posted on

Josh Dickinson’s Medical Trials

While not every art school graduate has a hard time finding a way to pay the bills, some graduates find financial refuge far outside the realm of art.

Josh Dickinson is one such person. He “has participated in almost 100 medical experiments in order to pay his rent. He’s been wired up with electrodes, stuck with needles, interrogated, subjected to pain and intentionally suffocated. In any other context, some of it might be considered torture. For him, it’s turned into an art project.”

He initially had no intention of documenting his experiences, but after about a year of strange tests and odd scenarios, he decided to capture what made up a large part of his life.

“Finding answers is entertaining to me,” says Dickinson. “I like the process. And if an audience can learn a little something while being entertained, it’s worth it.”

Via: WIRED

Continue reading “Josh Dickinson’s Medical Trials”

Posted on

Urban Stargazing

Here’s a project which is particularly interesting for its subtlety. Designer Oscar Lhermitte created twelve groups of artificial stars and added them to the night sky of London, titling the project Urban Stargazing. Oscar and his team installed a group of lights on thin transparent lines. These lines were then anchored to nearby structures. I find the modification of an ‘image’ humans have lived with and interpreted for thousands of years is a pretty powerful statement.

This project “attempts to have us raise our head again up to the stars in the city sky by adding new constellations that narrate contemporary myths about London. They can only be observed by the naked eye at night time and from the ground they look so uncannily like the old constellations that you might never notice that any change has occurred.”

Via: We Make Money, Not Art

Continue reading “Urban Stargazing”

Posted on

Swings: Los Angeles

People installing swing sets throughout the city of Los Angeles. I believe to be an interesting use of public spaces that citizens all share! Its interesting way to think what other things people could do to evoke feelings of community within shared spaces…or to imagine using certain spaces in different ways.

I really enjoy the sets installed in unconventional places that aren’t particularly meant for use as a recreational space. Such as: underneath the docks, under bridges, and in that final shot along the ditch. The shots of pedestrians using the swings are awesome.

“In June, 2011 The L.A. chapter of The Awesome Foundation awarded a grant to install $1000 worth of swings throughout Los Angeles.”

Via: Swingsetting.org

Posted on

Blasbichler’s Twenty-One

Architect Armin Blasbichler recently presented 21 of his architecture students at the University of Innsbruck with an interesting and secretive assignment. His students had been assigned to “pick a bank in the city, study it, identify its Achilles’ heel and plan a bank robbery.” I’ll include the assignment statement below because it is incredible.

“The task: Develop a bank robbery plan for a bank branch within the city limits of Innsbruck. Use only information you find out yourself. Your alter-ego is your team mate, listen to what he/she says. Do not tell bank staff who you are and what you intend to do. Identify weak points of the chosen bank branch. Develop a concept to detract assets from the bank according to the weaknesses identified. Include action-, time-, and escape plan in a paper document of 70x100cm of size. Use graphic design techniques and text in order to provide a viable instructions manual document. Calculate or estimate the potential loss of assets.”

Via: We Make Money, Not Art

Continue reading “Blasbichler’s Twenty-One”

Posted on

Mid-Week Work Period

Yesterday a group of us met at the School of Visual Arts building to work on completing the sub-projects which will appear in our How to Forget the Border Completely publication. It is exciting to see our ideas come to fruition and our publication take shape. We are now at the stage of roughly laying out the publication and seeing how our individual works get along with each other.

Pictured above: Sara and Hiba work on laying out the HFBC publication in InDesign.

Continue reading “Mid-Week Work Period”