Graffiti Research Lab, FAT Lab, and a number of likely affiliated technologists, artists, and graffiti writers are spending the week working on an eye-tracking system attached to a pair of plastic frame glasses to write graffiti with light. From what I gather, this would allow them to avoid using those super-powerful lasers.
Follow their adventures on the blog, or on their own twitter-esque microblogging tool, fucktwitter, based on the free software, Laconica.
Work Worth Doing is an interdisciplinary design studio working to understand the intersection of design, society, and the environment. They’ve been working on retrofitting wartime homes with sustainable design and technologies, getting them down to zero energy use through affordable practices. This model would be a no-brainer for any city, but particular Windsor, which has a huge number of neighbourhoods scattered with wartime bungalows. It’s also similar to the Green Corridor’s Ecohouse initiative, which is still underway.
Oh, and by the way, this is happening in Windsor.
The Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation has 125 wartime homes in their portfolio of social housing. The Now House Project team is working with Windsor Essex CHC to design the retrofit of five houses in their portfolio to net zero energy use and greatly reduced operating costs. The houses would serve as demonstrations for the possible retrofit of the other wartime homes in the portfolio. Work Worth Doing is the head consultant on this project in Windsor, which will also involve St. Clair College students, and maybe also University of Windsor students.
Amy Franceschini of San Francisco, is a contemporary American artist and designer who’s practices span from drawing, painting, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. She teaches media theory and practice courses at both Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute.
In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers as a way to bring together multidisciplinary art practitioners to bring together new work. They are, “teachers, researchers, designers, gardeners, scientists, engineers, illustrators, people who know how to sew, pattern makers, cooks and bus drivers with a common interest in creating work that challenge current social, political and economic systems.” Amy Franceschini explains, “The name [Futurefarmers] is a product of my childhood,” explaining the influences of her father, a corporate farmer and owner of a pesticide company, and her mother, a New Age type devoted to the notion of organic farming.
Continue reading “Futurefarmers: Cultivating Consciousness Since 1995”
I saw this on Render’s blog, and considering our work towards an artist-led community garden, I had to repost it. Not much to look at lightly dusted in snow, but the idea is incredibly great.
Running from April 2009 to the following winter, GROUNDWORK will function as a community garden and creative research site. The project will take place on the grounds of Rare, a 913-acre nature preservation and agriculture education site located on the Grand River between Galt and Blair. GROUNDWORK will bring together a core creative group of a dozen youth from the Gaweni:io School (Six Nations) and Waterloo Collegiate Institute’s Collision group to develop and cultivate a community garden/site of creative research and knowledge-sharing.
The community-outreach on this project is considerable, and it’s projects like these that involve such deep integration and collaboration with different parts of a community (and it seems Render is taking on more and more of them) that really interests me as an artist and parallels some of the bigger things I think we’d like to do in BCL.
Thinking about the many ways to work with fences, given that we seem to continually insist of putting them up, I found a couple examples lately of artists and designers working to interweave new patterns into chain link fence.
“Lace Fence” by Joep & Jeroen Verhoeven van Demakersvan
“L’Univers”, 2007 by Nicolas Milhé.
A Windsor strategy not fully exploited. Inserting vertical (or horizontal for that matter) strips of plastic of material into a fence could allow other patterns to emerge.
[via DesignBoom & vvork]
It seems I keep running into projects that attempt to visualize pollution levels. I’m not sure what intrigues me about this particular project, but I do connect with it on some level. I might just be drawn to projects which use real-time or near-real-time data. Here is a summary this project’s purpose.
“Eclipse is an interactive artwork that alters and corrupts appropriated photographs of United States national and state parks based on real-time Air Quality Index readings from the web (AQI or particle pollution data is available from airnow.gov). Eclipse was commissioned by Turbulence.org and was created by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir, who produce ecoarttech.net.”
After meeting with Massey’s Junior Physics Club again today and then discussing that project further at tonight’s Office Hours, trying to figure out exactly what we need to do to make a really large-scale projection happen, I saw this video on Jenny Holzer’s latest Projection for Chicago, as part of her ongoing Xenon Projections series.
Check out the size of her projector near the beginning—insanely huge, but also insanely bright.
[via Art21]
Now wouldn’t this be a good idea for some of Lebel’s windowless rooms? This light transmitting concrete was developed in 2004 and is called LitraCon. I’m not having a very easy time thinking of many applications for this recent invention, but I’m sure it could save on lighting costs for rooms in which activities would be carried out during the day.
“Litracon is a combination of optical fibers and fine concrete. The glass fibers lead light by points between the two sides of the blocks. Because of their parallel position, the light-information on the brighter side of such a wall appears unchanged on the darker side. The most interesting form of this phenomenon is probably the sharp display of shadows on the opposing side of the wall. Moreover, the colour of the light also remains the same.”
I’m not sure if anyone visiting this blog has seen this specific project, but from an ecological standpoint, this house seems quite easy on its surrounding flora and fauna. I also think it’s quite elegant and well designed. Compartments are integrated into the home for trees and surrounding soil doesn’t look like it’s been modified much. I’d imagine this type of structure would only be inhabitable in tropical-type regions. Nonetheless, where do I sign?
“This house by Hiroshi Iguchi is part of the Fifth World project which aims to promote eco friendly, sustainable architecture. The house takes natural elements and blends them all into the design of the interior. Warm, natural materials are used. Wood for the floors, light, traditional Japanese panels for compartments and white canvas to protect the interior from excessive heat. Even more, some of the trees were literally incorporated into the house, by letting them grow up to the sky in between the walls of the house.”
Though I’m not sure that “decorating” is the correct term (my vocabulary is failing me right now), I know that this idea has come up a number of times in various discussions on what to do with the houses on Indian Road, and other abandoned properties throughout the city. Doing something like painting the boards over the windows on abandoned buildings highlights them in a way that helps to keep them from fading into the periphery, while also arguably helping to raise the aesthetic of the surrounding area.
A similar project involving literally highlighting urban blight that’s probably more well-known was the Detroit Demolition Disneyland series of interventions where buildings marked for demolition by the city of Detroit were painted bright orange by an anonymous group. I think it worked for what is was, though the issue is entirely different than what’s going on here in Windsor.
So, do we need to consider tackling the vacant property throughout the city? I would be curious to figure out just how many vacancies we face, but beyond that, does a project like the one above, which is in Liverpool, do anything else other than decorate the neighbourhood, and is that enough?
[via Wooster Collective]