Last night Laura went out to install some PL1999 payphones, Kyle Bishop of Andand Collective arrives, and Josh does some more inventions.
SRSI, Day 23: Payphone Interventions
Tactical Gardening Workshop in Guelph
Danielle, Rosina, Michelle, and I were up in Guelph over the weekend as part of the Kazoo festival, leading a workshop on making those magnetic planters we were working on last summer .
The workshop was a lot of fun and I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the more abitious designs and fun installations of the planters in downtown Guelph. The “lookin’ good” planter above didn’t last more than five minutes — when we returned to where we put it, it was already gone.
Another planter hiding in a kind of forgotten garden. Taking a quick walk around the neighbourhood surrounding Ed Video (where we had the workshop), and putting up these planters was a lot of fun — we need to find some more time for pedestrian scale exploration in Windsor again.
Another planter with an ambitious design on the parking meter. Thanks for having us, Kazoo, and thanks for coming out to play with us, Guelph! Making these is a lot of fun, so easy, and we still have some that survived from last summer. Maybe doing another workshop at some point is in order…
Interrupted Light: Luzinterruptus
Luzinterruptus is a Madrid-based light art intervention collective. They’ve done some really large-scale works in streets around the world, this project, Garden for a not too distant future, being one of their most recent.
From their site, “For this installation we used 110 transparent food packaging containers, inside which we put leaves and branches found in the trees in the area and lights of course. Afterwards, we placed them on a wall in an ugly square in the center of Madrid and there we left our form of fashionable vertical garden.”
The work critiques the arguably impractical value of vertical gardens in public spaces, with the collective stating, “… if we continue to eradicate it from public spaces or reducing it to inaccessible vertical faces, the only form of contact with nature will be in supermarket refrigerators, packaged with expiry dates.”
I suppose what I find most interesting about their work is the relentless necessity to encounter it at night — and that they insist on working in the context of outdoor space. According to an interview on UrbanArtCore, they head out nearly once a week to create an installation; here’s hoping summer gives us that kind of time.
Photos by Gustavo Sanabria.
[via Designboom]
Urban Interventions by OX
OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage.
The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on the Poster Time blog. Many of the interventions are quite playful, other times being rather loud with oscillating colours and lines.
Having just arrived back from the Creative Cities Summit, and hearing a really incredible presentation by the organizers of the Philadelphia Mural Arts project (which we’ve posted about before), I’m feeling rather anxious to consider how we could transform the many, many surfaces across the city that intensify the sense of non-place that seems endemic to Windsor.
FREE by Sean Martindale
21,633 feet of salvaged nylon string was strung between the two parallel fences over a 24-hour period to spell out FREE in a fenced-off parking lot for the AGO.
We’ve written about Sean Martindale’s green sleeves in the past, and with this project, I really liked how the string stretched across the lot and connected the two sides. I just wish the entire lot had been done.
[via Torontoist & Wooster Collective]
Commanding: Urban Signs
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]