“Prolongement d’espace privé” (i.e. Enlarging Private Space) is a short manual by french artist Cédric Bernadotte that aims at showing how using duct tape can help you reclaiming part of s atreet and turn it into a private space:
There are also other manuals to create benches/seats or hamacs out of duct tape in the streets.
This is obviously the last post of 2005. It’s devoted to an interesting installation in Geneva called “L’arbre Atchoum” (The Atchoum Tree, atchoum is, in french, the sound of someone who has a flu). This project, as part of the Arbres & Lumières Festival in Geneva has been developed by Genevieve Favre and Antoine Petroff (electronics and performing). Here is how the artists describes this tree:
The tree on Place René Payot has a cold. Given a voice by astonishing, fabulous musician Daniel Bourquin, the tree neezes, sniffles, whines, complains. It’s trying to rest but the approaching pedestrians passing under its branches or near its trunk distrub the tree’s nap. Their presence can trigger an outburst of repetitite sneezes or even cause it to lose its temper! This lime tree, spending the winter naked, is inhabitated by scintillating lights which punctuate its moods and accompany the tone of its voice. Fifty discreet LED spotlights dot the tree’s branches and light up along with the random voice samples.
Some picture I took yesterday:
A video is available here. If you happen to be in Geneva, go there and watch people being disturbed by the tree’s screams (”Have a good meal”, “Go dancing!”, “Always wearing ties…”) 
Via AEIOU I ran across an impressive article about a new and hilarious trend: the confluence of two rising cultural tides: crafting/knitting and street art in Houston Press:
“We’re taking graffiti and making it warm, fuzzy and more acceptable,” says AKrylik. “I like the duality there. Also, I really think there can be a lot more to the new, alternative knitting craze than meeting at the local coffee shop every Sunday afternoon to make scarves together — not that I don’t like to do that, too.”
(…)
Poly stands guard while AKrylik puts a pink, red and gray swatch on the bike rack at Poison Girl; it’s done faster than you can say “Christo.”
(…)
These gangsta mamas have big plans: cozies for car bumpers, hats for fire hydrants, carpets for sidewalks and, if only they can get enough people, curtains for bridges and covers for water towers.
Pictures by Keith Plocek showing AKrylik and PolyCotN work:
Why do I blog this? even though this seems to be pretty funny and nice, I am convinced than this take part a broader innovative trend: connected to ‘do it yourself‘ motivation, this kind of bricolage is meant to give some personalization feelings. It reminds me Ulla-Maaria’s manifesto:
1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.
2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.
So what we have here in the street is a mix of handcrafted-pleasure and space-based annotations as gently pictured by Timo. In this case, it’s less a matter of capturing spatial memories… well now it made me think of what Anne blogged about today…
MEART and the portrait series conducted by art-group Fish and Ships.
A web cam captures portraits of viewers within the gallery space. These images are then converted into a stimulation map and used to stimulate the neurons (this is the beginning of a drawing process). A multi channel electrophysiological recording from a neuronal culture (“MEARTS brain”) is performed in Potter’s lab. The resulting data sets are processed in two locations – Atlanta & the location of the arm. The processed outcome is used to control and move the drawing arm. The progress of the drawing is monitored and compared with the original portrait. The difference between the original portrait and the progressing drawing is then sent back to the lab as another stimulation map to complete the feedback loop and this whole process continues until a threshold of marks on paper is passed. This is the end of a drawing
A project from 1958 by Guy Riottier called “ARCHITECTURE EPHEMERE et de RECUPERATION“. I was interested by two amazing realisations. The first one (on the left) is a “holiday village made of old parisian buses (which price is way lower than real holiday houses as stated by the author). The second is a holiday village made of cardboard:
Via the excellent french blog gamism, Ben Fry’s new project: distellamap: a computer generated visualization that depictes all the “goto” connections in Atari 2600 games.
Seeing the operation of code in Atari 2600 games. Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there’s “go to” a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.
Why do I blog this? it’s an interesting way to visualize a video-game ’space’ with a different perspective.
mmmh buttoneye family is a cool serie of animals with button-eyes (please check the care instructions):
Designed by Marco Scheidegger (Zurich).
I am a tremendous fan of Glan Baxter, I recently stumbled across his website which is full of great stuff. This mix of absurd things and weird drawings is huge:
Non-cheese eater regine recently sent me this fabulous dust house (by Maria Adelaida Lopez). She surely knows my interest towards art project related to dust, dirt (apart duct tapes and inflatable things).
When Colombian Maria Adelaida Lopez moved to Philadelphia do a Master’s degree in art, she cleaned houses to help support herself, as she says, the way many other Marias do. Her series of Dust Houses are toy doll houses covered over in vacuum cleaner lint, representing the themes of domesticity and the other, the ideas of cleaning up after oneself and putting one’s house in order. Now an artist and educator in Miami, Lopez no longer cleans for others, but has filled vacuum cleaner bags given to her.
Via the locative mailing list , blubox’s blurb:
blubox is a unique bluetooth software and hardware application designed and developed by Maria N. Stukoff and Jon Wetherall for the creative use of mobile phones via bluetooth. as part of this development we are invited to trail the first phase of blubox
technology - called fotobox an interactive installation with a public LED screen display - at the 3rd Salford Film Festival in
salford/manchester tonight…If you can make it, please join the LIME Bar for 9pm by the Lowry Centre and be part of the fotobox. an up-date with documentation images will be available later on at: http://mobilebox.typepad.com
The next phase of blubox will platform a 3D game environment controlled and played via bluetooth technology. we aim to release the framework for this mobile phone game by march 2006.
I like this work by group c. They are prints derived from the “Tissue software” they developed.
Exposes the movements of synthetic neural systems. People interact with the software by positioning a group of points on the screen. An understanding of the total system emerges from the relations between the positional input and the visual output.
The “cells” are also nice:
Cells of color navigate through an abstract architecture to create an active ecology. As the user defined architecture changes, the cells redirect their movements, thus modifying the structure
Just find them to be nice visualizations (and because of my long-ago background in biology I may atill have an interest in this sorrt of neural phenomenon).
Katamari fans would be delighted to check this home-made Katamari, carried out by Harvey Cartel:
There is also this cake for hardcore fans.
It seems that some folks came up an 8 bits version of the google maps: google 8-bits maps:
According to aeropause:
Google 8 bit maps has taken some of the old maps from the first Sim City game on the SNES and introduced Googles map search. There’s no pages to go to really. It’s just something to look at and ponder. Dig that isometric Sim City view, eh!
This piece was created by YTMND which is an acronym for “You’re The Man Now, Dog!”, is a website community that centers around the creation of YTMNDs, which are pages featuring a juxtaposition of a single image, optionally animated or tiled, along with large zooming text and a looping sound file. YTMND is also the general term used to describe any such site.
Why do I blog this? a funny and old-school mash-up + I like this “You’re The Man Now, Dog!” concept.
