Truth from Poland

Installation / intervention by Truth in Wroclaw, Poland

Using found plexiglass, PVC, and other found materials, Truth has put up a number of installations around Poland, most recently in places outside of cities. His earlier work is more geometric, often cubes, and small squares coming out of buildings; little additions to the architecture where he tests the public’s perception of a known space.

While You’re Sleeping

While You're Sleeping by Andy Uprock

I saw this work by Andy Uprock, while trying to search out some more info on EINE. While I really detest this “cuprocking” terminology under which Uprock has framed this style of street art, I thought it would be a good example to note for our fence-text project.

Project Citizens Band

Project Citizens Band Container

I’ve found a group of individuals who have been creating some absolutely amazing work bordering on sound and technology called Intermod Series.  I may post a few of their works as I feel many of them are extremely interesting.  This particular project consists of a sound transmitting device and is called Project Citizens Band.

“This project was a month long broadcast over CB radio using prerecorded sounds designed to be mood altering. Four different audio tracks corresponded to common emotions experienced at the scheduled time of day. These were transmitted for a 5-minute duration, creating a sedative or stimulating affect.”

Tools for Actions

Canadian Centre for Architecture's Tools for Actions website

I saw an ad for CCA‘s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition in the current issue of Border Crossings and the title got the best of me. I quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine, then went about exploring the Tools for Actions website.

On the site, you’ll find 99 actions, ranging from a seed bomb missile launcher to the Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s Map of Least Surveillance. There’s a lot to look at and ideas abound, feel free to note any particularly interesting projects in the comments.

Art Shanty!

Ice Shanty

Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.”

As you can see, they have experimented with ice lettering in a more permanent fashion.  These are more like ice gravestones, aside from the text.  I think ours could be more thoughtful, but it’s nice to see examples of something we’d like to accomplish.

It’s also an interesting idea to create an artistic community for a set period of time in a temporary natural setting.

Continue reading “Art Shanty!”

Neglected Energy

Joshua Allen Harris

This work is by a New York base artist named Joshua Allen Harris, who creates characters that essentially become alive and animated once they harness unused, unrealized city energy. i.e. Air conditioning units, subway trains, fans etc.

I really like this idea of trapping energy and illustrating/quantifying it and infusing it with an unnatural property to animate it in some way.

Can we give the surplus of superfluous Windsor energy a colour, a materiality or a taste?

Hektor, the Spray-Paint Output Device

I was looking through the book, Design and the Elastic Mind, which accompanied the eponymous exhibit, and came across Hektor. I had seen this somewhere before, or something like it anyways, on my Internet travels, but glad I was reminded of it, as it is surely worth a post. 

Hektor is a simple 2-motor controlled plotter that has toothed belts and a can holder that handles regular spray cans. By programming a graphic in Illustrator using the Scriptographer plugin, you can have Hektor output nearly anything. It was created in close collaboration with engineer Uli Franke for Jürg Lehni’s diploma project at écal (école cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 2002.

Guelph Rainwater Research

Rainwater Harvesting Diagram

This concept may not be overly fitting for Windsor’s current financial hardship in terms of unit costs, but rainwater harvesting units could prove to be very cost-effective in the long-run.

Research has and is being done at the University of Guelph to produce a successful rainwater harvesting system. The system was designed by two engineering graduate students in collaboration with a local supplier of rainwater harvesting technology.

According to University of Guelph, the harvesting process goes like this: “Rainwater that lands on the home’s fiberglass roof will be collected in roof gutters and downspouts and diverted to a filtration device before it is carried to a 6,500 litre underground cistern. The stored water will be pressurized and piped into the home to supply water to three toilets, the washing machine, and the dishwasher. The collected rainwater will also supply water to an underground irrigation system. This would account for over 50% of water consumption in a typical home.”

I was unable to find photos of the U of Guelph version of this project, but did find some diagrams which visually explain the process quite well.

[Article]

Moss Wall

Olafur Eliasson's Moss Wall, living arctic moss installed in a gallery

I’d been meaning to scan this for a while, Olafur Eliasson‘s Moss Wall, which consists of living arctic moss. While we’ve posted about pictorial or textual uses of moss before, I like that this work was done in 1994 and exists as just a large span of green. So, in thinking about our past interest in relocating moss, and my anticipation that we’ll want to think about this more when spring comes around, I wanted to get this posted as a reference for later.