The Intimate Goes Public

Everyone start text messaging!

While the cell phone SMS message and "bluing" have become contemporary social networking phenom, there is something slightly tantalizing about bridging the intimacy of a two-way discourse and throwing it up onto twenty-foot thought bubbles in the heart of Paris or New York.

TXTual Healing is the concept of New York public artist Paul Notzold and deploys mobile phones and SMS to project private inner voices in massively public spaces with a degree of anonymity.

The way it works is that Notzold projects photo images from a hotdog vendor cart with a Mac laptop and digital projector on the side of buildings. Passerby's send SMS messages via their phone that Notzold, using proprietary software, places inside thought or dialog bubbles as you might see in a comic strip or a Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney. All very automated and instant public messaging.

This concept takes very well to a city like Paris, where the private affairs dialog is often scandalously public proportion (witness newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy and his highly public martial affairs) and concepts like bluing (text messaging strangers in bars or on the street using bluetooth capabilities) are normative.

Notzold projects dialog bubbles onto the side of a residential multi-story apartment building. As street pedestrians enter text into the dialog bubbles, it is as if we are witness to intimate conversations between apartment dwellers in the building.

Roughly translated from French: Woman: "...good luck with all the things which you trusted in this moment!"

French Man: "I just want to dance with you, just to feel the heat with you..."

In Austin Texas, Notzold projected a large decal-like image of an American Flag on the University of Texas campus building. UT Police shut down the performance after a couple of massagers wrote the ‘n’ word along with asian slurs from their cell phones. Notzold understood the police reaction, however, he commented, "...given today’s politics, seeing the ‘n’ word being said by the American flag is somewhat appropriate and telling."

Climbing the Wall

Boys of summer upstaged or not?

Playing the Industrial Space

David Byrne, 80s pop artist of Talking Heads fame and experimental musician, takes Boing Boing TV's Xeni Jardin on a tour of New York's Battery Martitime Building where the composer has wired up an old pump-style organ to play the building. Crawling around the underbelly of the building Byrne and Jardin find an old slide transparency of former New York Mayor Ed Koch.

In early 80s when I was working at the ICA in London, Byrne and Brian Eno (formerly of Roxy Music and British art rock) frequently used the ICA's flex multimedia performance space to collaborate in recording samplings, making Polyrhythms and experimenting with world music that emerged out of the British melting pot of post-punk and ska London art music scene.

The environmental musicality of Brynes industrial music invention remind me of living in my East Village walk up and lying in bed at night listening to the symphony of pipes surging with... hot air and clanking sounds, groans, hisses, banging for which there was no explaining their source.

Crazy Cool Shop Toys

Ever wonder how they make things that are fabricated in metal and huge signage and bend steel?

TechShop in San Francisco is an open-access workshop with a bunch of awesome low tech heavy weight industrial tools. Think of it as a giant ErectorSet playroom for real men and women too.

Power coating systems, sandblasting cabinets, computer driven vinyl lettering machines, cutting and grinding equipment, large metal lathes, large vehicle project bay... and a brainstorming lounge -- you name it, they've got it.

One TechShop member shows us his all-electric two-passenger car that zips around like a motorcycle that he has prefabricated and built inside the facility. As Xeni Jardin explains, TechShop is an incubator for inventors and entrepreneurs and an environment for people at all skill levels to experiment and pursue their own crazy ideas.

Every city should have one of these and plans are for this concept to spread across the country.

Rainbow Flag

There are simple graphic designs that become iconic, axiomatic, and emblematic in the eyes of almost any viewer. In culture we might think of them as the incidental pop art of our times. As we approach Pride Season there is one image that cannot be mistaken by lovers and haters alike and it is the Rainbow Flag.

Not unlike the red streamer of the Solidarity movement created by Kaz Bascik, the red rose clenched in a upraised fist for the French Socialist Party under François Mitterrand, or the London Underground logo, these graphic icons are unmistakable and transcendent by becoming a bookmark for a epoch.