Cre­at­ive Cit­ies seeks to ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tion about why inclus­ive, sus­tain­able and cre­at­ive cit­ies are bene­fi­cial, and neces­sary in a rap­idly urb­an­ising region, and to use pro­jects, research and opin­ions to sug­gest factors that aid the devel­op­ment of cre­at­ive cit­ies. They seek to identify and cel­eb­rate the local skill base of cit­ies in the region and to high­light the value of devel­op­ing tra­di­tional skill sets and indus­tries to con­nect with a global know­ledge economy.

The blog doesn’t seek to provide neat “solu­tions” to the diverse issues faced by cit­ies across the region, or to impose the val­ues of one city on another, or to replace the in-depth and ongo­ing work of experts in this field.

Rather, they seek to use a short-term strategy to plant a seed in the minds of a broader audi­ence about the ideas around cre­at­ive cit­ies, and to con­nect that audi­ence with sources for fur­ther inform­a­tion about issues of sus­tain­ab­il­ity, inclus­ive­ness and the poten­tial of the cre­at­ive eco­nomy with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to cit­ies in East Asia.

Thir­teen coun­tries are included in the scope of the Cre­at­ive Cit­ies pro­ject. They hope to secure con­tri­bu­tions from them all and to high­light the skill sets, strengths and unique con­di­tions of major cit­ies in each of these countries. The countries are: Aus­tralia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malay­sia, New Zea­l­and, Phil­ip­pines, Singa­pore, Taiwan, Thai­l­and, Viet­nam and UK.

In this installation YesYesNo teamed up with The Church, Inside Out Productions and Electric Canvas to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground. Their  job was to create an installation that would go beyond merely projection on buildings and allow viewers to become performers, by taking their body movements and amplifying them 5 stories tall.

They used three different types of interaction – body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones. There were six  scenes, cycled every hour for the public.

How To Explain It To My Parents is a Documentary series by Lernert & Sander in which nine abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about.

Above, episode 1 with fantastic artist Arno Coenen.

‘SixthSense‘ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

We’ve evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about what is facing us. That information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take in a situation. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Moreover, Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. ‘WUW’ attempts to free information from its confines and releases it into the world, seamlessly integrating it with the physical world.

With the miniaturization of computing devices that fit inside our pockets, we are always connected to the digital world. However, there is no link between our interaction with these digital devices and interaction with the physical world. ‘WUW’ bridges this gap by augmenting the physical world around us with digital information and proposing natural hand gestures as the mechanism to interact with that information. ‘WUW’ brings the intangible information out into the tangible world. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted on a hat or coupled in a pendant like device, ‘WUW’ sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects you are interacting with. ‘WUW’ projects information to any surface, walls, and the objects around us, and to interact with the information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or with the object itself.

Fascinated by the incredible hearth of culture that is NYC, strategic planner and hobbyist photographer Friko Starc set out to document it at its rawest, most candid form. For three years, he took portraits of strangers and passers-by at five Manhattan corners in what became The Corners Project, an inspired cross-section of New York’s living matter.

Frico made 5 books of portraits. By sitting for days at a time on one spot, he  captured a glimpse of that amazing mosaic that is New York.

Find the The Corners Project on Facebook.

More than 50 artists, designers and producers from three continents have worked on KesselsKramer’s latest art project. New Tapestry is an updated version of a very old and famous Medieval piece: the Bayeux Tapestry.

The original Bayeux Tapestry showed the news events around 1066 in one enormous strip of cloth. In form, it resembled the Middle Ages equivalent of a comic book or film storyboard. KesselsKramer’s New Tapestry will also record news events presented as a visual story, but this time for 2009. Like the Bayeux it will comprise a vast cloth strip, divided into 52 panels, one for each week of the year. Each panel is drawn in black and white by a mix of fresh young artists and established talent, including Laser 3.14, Joe Morse, and Christian Borstlap, voted one of the top illustrators in the world. In style, the New Tapestry surprises continuously, switching from energetic graffiti to the best commercial art to naïve scrawls to incredibly elaborate pieces.

In total, it’s a topical retrospective of a tumultuous year, featuring the historic rise of Barack Obama, swine flu, the tale of the ailing world economy, and the strange death of Michael Jackson. Each of these subplots can be seen weaving in and out of the larger piece, referenced in different ways by different artists.

The final New Tapestry will be more than 21 meters long and flow continuously around the walls of Amsterdam’s prestigious Steendrukkerij Gallery. In the centre of the space, a miniature exhibition-within-an-exhibition will show sketches and works-in-progress by the best New Tapestry illustrators, helping to show how the piece was created.

The exhibition opens 28  January and runs through 2 February. Click here to view more artwork.

Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work.  By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens.  Field recording  is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence.

Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist.  Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions.

AR-Yulia is a new project by New-York based photographers (Pamela) Reed + (Matthew) Rader. AR or Augmented Reality is the compositing of the physical real word environment with virtual computer-generated imagery to create a mixed reality for the user.

What do you need? Scissors, your face, a computer with a webcam and the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Click here to continue … wicked!

The Context Project is an Independent Study Project through the University of Central Oklahoma created to explore the contextual relationship between examples of Industrial Design and their surroundings. In short: What if everyday items had museum tags next to them? Are they now a piece of Art?

Adam LeNaire is writing a book to attempt to address, or perhaps just ask, these questions with the hope of providing a different viewpoint to both industrial design and works of ‘found’ art. The Context Project blog was set up to increase the spread of objects in the book to global proportions instead of only local works.

Adam invites people to go and take amazing photographs of things with little cards next to them. This includes: fences, sewer grates, metro cars, train tracks, anything that is manufactured. Visit the website for more details.

The Artvertiser by Julien Oliver, imagines a near-future where advertising in public space can be replaced by art. It is an urban, augmented-reality project, consisting of custom-made handheld binocular devices and specially designed software. The Artvertiser considers Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Times Square in New York, and other sites dense with advertisements, as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser software recognises individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual ‘canvas’ displaying artworks when viewed through the Artvertiser binoculars, and what’s best: the art will appear instead when viewed through the binoculars regardless of the surface the corresponding advertisement is on. The Artvertiser allows artists to create a new visual layer onto the topology of the city, which can only be seen when viewed through a device which cogently blends the aesthetics of the past, with a futuristic functionality. transmediale.10 presents the Artvertiser binoculars and video documentation of ‘artverts’ being placed into urban locations within Berlin.

The Artvertiser is part of Berlin’s Transmediale Festival which opens on 2 February.