Creative Time’s latest project, Key to the City, involves artist Paul Ramirez Jonas and the City of New York.

For centuries, the key to the city has been used to honor a city’s heroes and visiting dignitaries. Now, artist Paul Ramírez Jonas has created a Key to the City that is not only a symbolic award, but also a functional key—opening spaces across all five boroughs of New York City. This Key to the City is intended for everyday citizens, who will award one another the key for reasons large and small. Once in hand, the key launches a citywide exploration of backdoors, front gates, community gardens, graveyards, and museums that suggests that the city is a series of spaces that are either locked or unlocked.

Curated by Nato Thompson, with curatorial assistant Shane Brennan. Produced by Gavin Kroeber with production assistant Elissa Goldstone.

Real-Time, 24/7 Interaction. Virtual Street Corners is a digital media public art project by John Ewing, in collaboration with Carmen Montoya, Kevin Patton, Christopher Robbins and Minotte Romulus.

Beginning in June 2010, a storefront in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, and in Dudley Square, Roxbury will be transformed into large video screens, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into one another’s worlds. Running 24/7, life-size screen images and AV technology will enable real-time communication between residents of the two neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods we have chosen to connect are transportation and cultural hubs with rich and intertwined histories. They are only 2.4 miles apart and a city bus runs directly between them, yet very few people from either neighborhood visits the other. Using technology developed to bridge geographical distances, Virtual Street Corners instead traverses the social boundaries that separate two important neighborhood centers with significant historical connections.

A Love Letter for You is a project by Stephen Powers a.k.a. ESPO with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.

It’s an ongoing graffiti love letter stretching across 50 building facades over 20 blocks along the Market-Frankfurt subway line in West Philadelphia. Powers first started painting on these rooftops as a teenager in 1984. 25 years later he returned home to Philadelphia in the summer of 2009 to write a love letter across the same rooftops facing the Market-Frankford line.

The letter, meant for one, with meaning for all, encompasses 50 walls on a 20 block stretch of market street. Drawing input, inspiration, and work from the community Powers created a letter to and from west Philly. The project required 1200 cans of spray paint, 800 gallons of bucket paint, and the skilled hands of 20 of the finest spray painters in America, who Powers put into the legendary ICY club.

I’m Not An Artist is a work in progress project commissioned by Elisava School of Design with concept, creative direction and design by Soon in Tokyo, a communications agency made up of former Elisava students and teachers.

It started with 56 animated gifs directed by Johnny Kelly and Matthew Cooper and aims to grow and to be a platform with the participation of young designers and creatives from all over the world.

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.