Posted on

Ghost Shoes

Ghost Shoes

I found this little gem while aimlessly seaching instructables for a good recipe for General Tao’s tofu.

“Shoefiti” is a necessary element of any urban space. They are of particular interest to me due to the various myths and truths surrounding them, be it an informal murder memorial, a drug users annotation, or the hijinks of a common ruffian. When we seem them, we attach our preconcieved purpose (in my experience, this purpose was birthed out of schoolyard lore) as we walk by allowing that ephmeral space to feel differently than the space that came before it and after.

Creating an ethereal version, speaks to the magic surrounding this urban act.

[via]

Posted on

Austin Green Art

Green Bench

The recent season change reminds me of how much our temperature drops during the winter and how much our city changes aesthetically.  On that note, I was wondering how other “green art”-type groups deal with their surroundings.

I found a group call Austin Green Art from Austin, Texas which seems to focus on using existing materials (disposed or excessively produced) to make useful structures and raise awareness of environmental issues.  While this group is about as different from Broken City Lab – they seem to market to children quite a bit and require constant donations for operation – as it is similiar, it’s nice to see participation from a wide range of age groups in their documentation.

I found this “Green Bench” to be a great example of a project that could encorporate ideas such as: static visual art display (in the plastic cover), shelter, sustaining plant life, and potential solar energy production.  I’d like to see benches like this line a few of Windsor’s streets.

Posted on

Home Movies by Jim Campbell

Home Movies by Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell’s Home Movies is a large-scale video installation consisting of hundreds of LEDs that render films spanning four decades into nearly illegible light and shadow. Seems like a good fit for such a cold night.

Oh, and I now have in my possession 200 10mm LEDs.

[via]

Posted on

SoundLAB 2008

I came across this last week while I was browsing for sound artists. It’s basically a collaborative sound art project directed by Agricola de Cologne, New Media curator and media artist from Cologne/Germany. There are  currently 10 curators and their contributions featuring about 200 sound art works from about 150 artists.

“SoundLAB is focusing on thematic aspects, i.e “memory and identity” and related themes, and is developed for being presented in physical space in media exhibitions and festivals, as well as in virtual space as streaming applications in online environments…”

I find the site a bit overwhelming, but like the ‘soundworks‘ section which features samples of current sound artworks. Listening to them one at a time is good, but playing a few at once is the real fun. This seems like a good example of current sound art and might be inspiration for any sound work we might create.

Posted on

Make an Encouraging Banner

Everything is not Broken

I’ve been pointed to Learning To Love You More on a number of occasions, though it’s only recently that I’ve dug into the site a little bit more. The project was initiated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher in 2002 and works around the assignments that participants are supposed to complete and document and send back to be posted on the website (and sometimes included in a book, an exhibition, a screening, or a radio broadcast). The image above is from Assignment #63 – Make an Encouraging Banner. I think if I were to have made a banner, it might have been something like that one.

That the project does get a fair amount of participants is inspiring, but the thing I like the most are the ideas of the assignments themselves and the fact that they exist, that they were written down, thought about, and attempted. Making a list is, at the very least, a starting point of fixing something.