Creative Allies gives passionate art students, designers, creative types, writers, photographers, videomakers and fans (Allies) the opporunity to work with their favorite bands. Allies can from anywhere in the world upload their creations inspired by music. The creations can be licensed by the musician it was made for.

Musicians on the other hand can post requests for whatever they need made,  and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes their creative chord.

Each day, we are surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects, taking them from one place to the other, or leaving them on a table for weeks, without paying any attention to them. We ignore or forget them, using things only when we need to, making sure they don’t interfere or inhabit our space. But what if they were not so stable and subservient? What if they could swivel, bounce or even fly. And what if they did so all at the same time?

Julien Vallée and Nicolas Burrows want to imagine a place where objects could live and move, harmoniously, and of their own accord. Without interfering with each other these objects would bounce, roll, turn and cross each other’s paths. This experiment is about re-discovering our daily surroundings.

Above  is the making of the interactive video that was originally made for the If You Could Collaborate exhibition. Each object is assigned to a letter on the keyboard, and can be activated or deactivated at any time. The online version will be soon available to play with at dansedance.com

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.

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.

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.

Arts Mobile Sydney, which is happening this month, is a free interactive arts event that encourages community participation and facilitates wider access to the arts by presenting creativity beyond the traditional gallery context. Multi-media artworks will be simultaneously displayed, performed and created at a mysterious location. All artists will be present on site and invite passers-by to watch, play, create and take home works of art.

Why mysterious location? The organization isn’t aiming to encourage specific visitation to the event, but rather engage people that move through these spaces in their daily routine. Anyone can register on their website to receive a text message on the day of the event with the time and location.

Click here to view the participating artists.

For the 2009 Music Blog Zeitgeist, The Hype Machine tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2009 by blogs on The Hype Machine. Then they invited 50 visual artists to create a new piece of artwork inspired by the band’s music and including the band’s name. The Top 50 Albums of 2009 were sourced from 550 bloggers personal Top 10 lists weighted according to their ranking.

Click here to view the artworks.

If You Could Collaborate is the self initiated project of London art directors Will Hudson and Alex Bec. Aiming to provide a platform for the finest creatives from all over the world to question their conventional working methods and outcomes. The contributors have been challenged to produce something a little unexpected, by working with a partner of their choosing from any discipline, profession or background. There is no brief to answer, or format to honour – the only limit being the enterprise and imagination of the artists involved, and a liberal 12 month deadline.

Click here to view the pairings, and their outcomes.

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 five stories tall.

They used 3 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.