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CARTographyTO hacks Astral info pillars

Via BlogTO…

Several months in the making, CARTographyTO formed through word of mouth when the first Astral Media pillars were sunk into the sidewalk in Toronto: concerned citizens, artists and others with a creative streak came together with the desire to reclaim the lost public space in their neighbourhoods.

A spokesperson for cARTographyTO stated, “These structures are billboards masquerading as sources of useful public information. When you look at the pillars, it’s hard to find the maps, and this goes against the City’s own public space guidelines. How could City Hall allow this to happen? Beyond mere visual pollution, these pillars are a safety hazard. And Astral’s influence on our city is a public insult and embarrassment – more power has been given to those who already have the loudest voices, to the detriment of all who use these spaces.”

Love that this happened.

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Nail polish solution to jigsaw blade visibility troubles

Jigsaw rig into half ban saw with nail polish as visibility improver (1)

The rig Kevin built has been slightly improved. We added some shims (made of styrofoam) to raise the table top and added this slick coat of red nail polish.

Jigsaw rig into half ban saw with nail polish as visibility improver (2)

The blade was basically disappearing when we were cutting the styrofoam, so hopefully this fixes it. Also, makes any bloodshed less conspicuous.

Jigsaw rig into half ban saw with nail polish as visibility improver (3)

Nice lines … thanks table top reverse half ban jig saw!

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Evan Roth’s Art & Hacking Class

http://vimeo.com/37927700

Danielle, Michelle and I were over in Detroit at the recent INITIATE panel discussion and Evan Roth made a presentation on the early stages of some of this work. It’s awesome to see where it went — hopefully we’ll have a chance to head over and check out the show. Here’s the details from Roths’ site…

Welcome To Detroit
Works by Evan Roth
Curated by Gregory Tom

Eastern Michigan University’s University Gallery
900 Oakwood Street, 2nd Floor
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

Reception @ EMU’s University Gallery October 14, 4:30pm – 7:00pm

March 8, 2012: It is no secret that Detroit’s creative community has been attracting media attention of late. What started as photos of “Ruin Porn” and “$100 Dollar Houses” led to a flood of additional articles on creative activity in Detroit.

Evan Roth’s exhibition, Welcome to Detroit, will feature nearly all-new work, much of it made during his residency. The work follows his core conceptual framework of appropriating popular culture and combining it with a hacker’s philosophy to highlight how small shifts in visualization can allow us to see our environment with new eyes, whether online, at home, in the city or at the airport. His work acts as both a mirror and vault to contemporary society, creating work that reflects and withstands a world of rapid advancements in computing power, changing screen resolution and repainted city walls.

For Welcome to Detroit, Evan mines everything from the spray paint can, to hip-hop music, to airplane shopping magazines and flight safety cards, resulting in a show that moves freely across media, but always with a sense of pop cultural pranksterism. From individual art objects to video pieces to documentation, the work is designed to simultaneously serve as a record of activity and creative output, while also underscoring important issues concerning copyright, public space, and our offline and online identities.

Additional information on Evan Roth can be found at http://evan-roth.com/about/.

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Tools in Forgetting the Border

Part of our research for How to Forget the Border Completely is going to come from a lot of video. We’re not sure how many interviews we’ll do or exactly where we’ll be shooting, but we wanted to be prepared. I’ve had a Canon T2i for over a year now and it’s a very solid camera. I originally picked it up because of its video capabilities (specifically, the 24p option), but I hadn’t really made much time to shoot anything.

So, while HFBC seemed like the perfect opportunity to start, I also knew we needed to upgrade things a bit. I read about the Magic Lantern firmware hack a little while ago and finally got around to installing it — more in a bit on that — and with the advice from Karlyn‘s partner, John, I also picked up a Rode VideoMic and Zoom H1 for audio.

Continue reading “Tools in Forgetting the Border”

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Ok, I finally get #000000book

It took a while. A little over a week I guess. However, it finally clicked — FAT Labs’ latest project #000000book is starting to make sense to me in terms of how big it could be.

Part of the problem may have been just the early overview of the project that circulated the blogs: #000000book is an open repository for sharing and archiving motion captured graffiti tags. Tags are saved as digital text files known as GML (Graffiti Markup Language), which can be captured through freely available software such as Graffiti Analyisis (marker), DustTag (iPhone), EyeWriter (eye movement) and Laser Tag (laser). Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data.

Robotagger: GML + ABB4400 from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

It just seemed to me, initially, that there would be this collection of tags that had been sort of digitized through an open platform, but I kind of thought, so what? But, I knew that it had to be kind of groundbreaking. Most of the projects that involve this mix of technology and graffiti that I’ve seen come out of GRL or FAT have been very, very cool, in the way that they think about mixing tactics and tools.

#000000book is no exception, as you can see above, Golan Levin hooked up a robotic arm to read from the GML database to reproduce a tag. We are in the future.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Vanessa Harden: the Subversive Gardening

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Canadian-born / UK-based designer, Vanessa Harden has invented a number of camouflaged devices meant to ease the process of guerrilla gardening.

Among things like ankle-attached mechanical seed distribution, briefcases that dig holes, and purses designed to easily carry plants to the site of installation, Harden hacked a Pentax camera to create what she calls, the Precision Bombing Device 1, pictured above.

Continue reading “Vanessa Harden: the Subversive Gardening”

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SMS Guerilla Projector

Troika_sms_01

Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book. The SMS Guerilla Projector does what you’re seeing above, basically project the screen image from a Nokia phone onto surfaces around the city. The project is somewhat reminiscent of the Image Fulgurator, which I posted on back in July of 2008.

Troika_sms_object

Most speculation on the interwebs suggest it’s basically a hacked phone and slide projector mashed together, which is kind of ingenious in its simplicity. Basically, and LCD screen can have light pass through it and so by opening up a phone and shining some concentrated light at the screen, so the speculation goes, you would be able to project the image with a lens.

Some other notable and interesting projects of theirs that you should check out: The Tool for Armchair Activists, SMS Memory Wall, and Exploded Monologues.

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Turning Crisis into Opportunity

Firefox Plugin that changes the word crisis into opportunity

See the Opportunity developed by Leo Burnett Lisboa and Arc Lisbon is a Firefox plugin that automatically replaces the word crisis with the word opportunity throughout your internet travels.

Not unlike Steve Lambert’s Add-Art, this is another great use of the extensibility that is the Firefox plugin framework.

What are those plugins written in? Does anyone know how to do this? I think developing a Windsor-specific plugin could be a great summer project.

[via Scott Burnham]