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Mobile Mobile: Upcycled Phones Make Music

To cut a long story short, after a company-wide upgrade the agency had a lot of old mobiles gathering dust. Lost Boys International took these, built and hoisted a gigantic interactive chandelier/mobile that plays christmas jingles in their reception area.

When no one interacts with the sculpture, it plays “Carol of the Bells”. But you can also play with it. You can control it through this website or you can send a tweet with #lbitree and it will react to it.

Given some upcoming projects that we’re going to be tackling are going to be a bit more technology intensive, and in one instance is actually going to use cell phones (though not in this capacity), I thought I’d post it to add to the research archives. What’s really great is that LBI creative director, James Theophane, offers a quick breakdown of how the installation works, well worth a read to get an idea of some of the magic behind the installation. Also interesting is the Ning project site that was used by the folks making the installation as it happened in real-time.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Spencer Finch: The River That Flows Both Ways

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIjV5yBxbLc&feature=player_embedded

Inspired by the Hudson River, The River That Flows Both Ways is a project by Spencer Finch that documents a 700-minute (11 hours, 40 minutes) journey on the river in a single day.

On June 12, 2008, from a tugboat drifting on Manhattan’s west side and past the High Line, Finch photographed the river’s surface once every minute. The color of each pane of glass was based on a single pixel point in each photograph and arranged chronologically in the tunnel’s existing steel mullions. Time is translated into a grid, reading from left to right and top to bottom, capturing the varied reflective and translucent conditions of the water’s surface.

Much of Finch’s work relies on scientific, or at least methodological process, to re-present natural occurrences or phenomenon. I really enjoy the processes involved in his work and his continuing translation of information and data, or at times, the failure thereof.

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Commanding: Urban Signs

Commanding

Commanding is a group of artists/educators/students at NYU who hope to create a dialogue about the changing environments in which they live.

They post signs based on simple computer commands that relate directly to the gentrification, development and hopefully preservation of the neighborhoods that we interact with everyday.

A really basic idea, but quite effective to comment and critique, again another quiet project.

[via Make]

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Little People: Tiny Street Art

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Little People is a project by Slinkachu, a street artist based out of London. The works are often (literally) little scenarios ranging between the fantastic and the banal.

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These images in particular are from a recent installation entitled, What brings us together and what keeps us apart, in Grottaglie, Italy, which was part of the Fame Festival. A lot of the work is pretty humourous and I’d imagine nearly impossible to accidentally stumble upon.

Given that we’ve been discussing some potentially quieter projects, I thought it would be worth noting this one, given just how quiet it is.

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Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine

I saw this project in one of its earlier iterations and had kind of lost track of it, but I was recently reminded of it through a Tweet fromDoug Coupland (he had referred to another project on the same page).

Avatar Machine by Marc Owens is a wearable system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

Watching the video is a kind of surreal experience—I’m not really a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the aesthetic created through this system really works to generate the same look and feel of movement in a game that uses this behind-the-head perspective. I thought it was worth noting just as a way of changing perspective, and working to change physical perspectives into a new kind of experience.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Paying for Art with Billboards

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Beautiful City is a new campaign based out of Toronto that is trying to persuade the city to create a tax for billboards that would do the following:

  1. A historical 53% increase to the annual municipal funding available to all artists, festivals and arts institutions,
  2. Close to $100 000.00 dollars for public realm improvement for each Toronto ward, every year — for projects such as greening,
  3. Almost a 1/3 of a million dollars for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund accessible youth arts programming, and
  4. Hiring 17 dedicated officers to enforce the new billboard bylaw.

The premise of the campaign is that billboard advertising, unlike all other forms of advertising, provides no content to the public in exchange for taking up public space (editorial to advertising ratios for TV is 75/25, for print is usually 50/50 but for billboards is 0 to 100).

Sounds like a fairly genius idea. What other ways could we think of generating new revenue for arts organizations in the city, given the likely continuing or eventual decline of funding for the arts in the city?

[via View on Canadian Art / image of Three Billboards About Love by Peter Fuss]

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Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day

Pierre Huyghe's Streamside Day

I was watching Season 4 of Art21 today and was reminded of this work by Pierre Huyghe, who creates films, installations, interventions, and public events.

Streamside Day was a work in which Huyghe scripted a celebration for a small town named Streamside, which included costumes, deserts, songs, speeches, parades, and decorations. You can read more about the project in the interview, and there’s also a video there of the project.

So, I have to wonder, when will we begin our plans for a Windsor-based parade? A “Windsor Day”, a celebration of everything that makes this city what it is (which will by definition have to include the numerous things wrong with the city), a parade with small floats, inflatable sculptures, and marching bands. We’ve talked about it before, maybe we should plan one for next summer.

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The EyeWriter

In case you haven’t already seen it floating around the interwebs, I had to post it.

Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.

This project, which I’ve posted about before, was developed using OpenFrameworks, a cross platform c++ library for creative development (somewhat similar to Processing, which uses Java as its base), is hugely inspiring. A project like this shifts the role of the artist / the programmer / the open-source advocate in a really interesting way.

Not that we have the technical skill base to develop anything near this in terms of software / hardware, but this project is a perfect example of why I still get excited by the idea of working in that medium.

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A Love Letter For You

Steve Powers

In Philadelphia, an artist named Steve Powers is working alongside the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create this large-scale mural project that paints huge sentiments of love letters onto the sides of 50 buildings on one street.

The project is called A Love Letter For You and totally made me think that there might just be potential in murals after all.

Take a look at the project blog and read it from first post to the most recent, it really gives some great context to the project.

[via an email from Nathan]