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.
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.
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.
You probably heard of la Tomatina, the tomato fight, in Spain, where each year some 50.000 visitors get together to throw 100.000 kilos of tomatoes at each other. And then there are water fights, pillow fights, foam fights, and so on, all of which are a lot of fun but also quite a waste of resources. Not so the Green Battle, or Batalla Verde. This way of fighting could be classified under guerrilla gardening and aims to green the battlefield, often an abandoned construction site or grey parking lot.
During the fight, the combatants throw balls of green mud at each other in order to cover themselves and the battlefield in this mix. The green mud actually contains seeds so that in no less than 2 to 3 weeks the battlefield becomes a garden, flourishing with resistant plants that don’t need much water
Slow Down London is a new project to inspire Londoners to improve their lives by slowing down to do things well, rather than as fast as possible.
The Slow Down London campaign held its first festival (24 April – 4 May 2009) offering activities and inspiration, through working with a range of partners. It gave Londoners a chance to explore slow music and arts, to try meditation and yoga, to sample slow food and crafts, to discover ’slow travel’ in their own city, to debate ideas about time and pace, and to find our own ways to challenge the cult of speed and to appreciate the world around them.
Slow Down London hopes to create longer-term networks and opportunities for trying life at a slower pace and enjoying improved quality, creativity and wellbeing.
The ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ programme of events, focused in Helsinki (Finland) and Kurzeme region of Latvia, explores the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing, biological and hydroponic technologies.
The traditions of finding and knowing about wild food in the local Nordic environment are slipping away from the current generation. How can one attract their attention: With books, online maps, workshops, mobile-guided tours, open-source information or DNA code? Or learn how to grow them yourself, over the dark winter months? The Pixelache Festival events introduce the different meeting points between the three collaborating partners, include presentations by international artists and Finnish botanical experts; workshops sharing that knowledge with the public in Botanical Garden of Helsinki; a round-table discussion about foraging in the urban context; a manifestation of the ‘WindowFarms’ project by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray(US) that will be built and exhibited in the Takaikkuna of Kiasma, the Museum of contemporary art of Helsinki.
Following, in a pre-midsummer expedition to rural Rucava in Kurzeme, Western Latvia, SERDE Interdisciplinary Art Group will lead fieldwork to learn about the cultural heritage of Balts using wild plants, and create documents for the younger ‘digital native’ generation.
As part of the Afternoon Travel Type performance workshop led by Professor Karel Boonzaaijer and Prof. Ilka Helmig on three-dimensional typography, the students of FH Aachen created more than 100 characters and symbols. The designs were then used in a four-hour performance in and around the central train station of Aachen.
The video shows impressions of the production of the letters, and of the performance.
Commonpeople is a project to inspire creativity in Singapore. Welcome to our blog, where we broadcast our thoughts on the question of what creativity means for us today.
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