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.

Telectroscope's Suppression of Absence

Telectroscope started out as a dream of digging a transatlantic tunnel that turned into a terrifying and tragic nightmare. An eccentric 19th century inventor, Alexander Stanhope St. George began with the grand scheme to build a two-way tunnel connecting London to New York.

According to Alexander's plan, once the tunnel had boroughed through Altantic shore and the earths core, an amplifying set of mirrors and lenses would act as a giant telescope to transmit an image (almost like a fiber optic cable) from the City of London to the Brooklyn Bridge or from one side of the world to the other, so tells Paul St. George.

As legend has it, after raising some capital, Stanhope St. George hired a workforce of unemployed laborers from Liverpool and began digging the tunnel to America. Eventually, tragedy struck when on March 5th, 1892, the Atlantic ocean breached the tunnel roof and 15 men lost their lives.

As most visionary inventors would do in the face of tragedy and even death, despite all reasonable laws of physics, the unyielding Stanhope St. George vowed to soldier on and persevere with his dream. However, fearing for their lives his workers mutinied and Alexander, filled with shame from failure, died in a asylum in Bethnal Green after suffering deteriorating mental health in 1912.

What began as an idea for a “device for the suppression of absence” as Alexander wrote in his resurrected journal complete with elaborate drawings and plans, and then seemingly ended in a tragedy searching for a lesson, fell into the hands of Paul St. Goerge, Alexanders grandson. Where would Stanhope St. George legacy lead?



Paul St. George a professor of 19th-century chronophotography at London Metropolitan University picked up where his grandfather left off and with grants totally over $700 thousand from the British government, private sponsors and Artichoke has built the Telectroscope connecting the Brooklyn and London's Tower Bridge via visual amplification (transatlantic fiber optic cable perhaps?), arriving in time to celebrate the 125 anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Okay, so this story is almost true but not quite. Why let the truth get in the way of some elaborate and expensive fun? You may experience Paul St. George's Telectroscope at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or the Tower Bridge in London from May 22nd through June 15th, 2008 or visit the telectroscope's flickr group.

MUTO: Exterior Animation

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Running Time: 7 minutes, 26 seconds

This new ambitious short animated film by BLU was done in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2008. Created as a painted wall mural, ultimately due to its fluxus nature it only exists in its final form as hand drawn cell animation on digital video.

In order to get the most enjoyment I recommend clicking on the expand picture icon to view full screen and listen with headphones or turn up the volume on your computer to hear the sound effects. Great effort has been made to keep video and sound quality better than average YouTube or other internet animation.

Confounding Public Expectations

You've probably seen this video documentation of the Grand Central performance by Improv Everywhere based in New York City as it is hugely popular on the internet and has been viewed over 11 million times on YouTube. However, the group has done more than 70 missions using social networking tactics to draw together willing participants in their public works.

Reminiscent of Michael Kirby's 1960s New York Happenings and Adrian Henri Liverpool movement, a phrase coined by Allan Kaprow for performance art and spontaneous street theater, IE has taken public happenings to a whole new level. As interesting as missions can or cannot be, the social networking methods Improv Everywhere uses to assemble a group, focus the public on a temporary happening, documenting it and then just as quickly disperse into the ether, punctuates the surprise element the unexpected interruption can accomplish.

In a recent mission, three agents, as IE calls them, haul their desktop wifi enabled computer CPU, monitor and keyboard into a Starbucks and start working as if nothing is abnormal at all. "Their schlepping! Their computer! Their server! Their keyboard!" says one customer outside the coffeeshop in Manhattan. Improv Everywhere's missions are conceived to cause observers to rethink place and their routine expectations. Perhaps more skillful than any previous pubic art performance has been IE ability to document their missions on video for wide-spread dissemination and ultimately historic preservation.

You usually have to do a lot to break the ice and get noticed on the NYC Subway system but No Pants certainly can get a person noticed in New York. And if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere...

Improv Everywhere's Freeze in Grand Central Station has been watched replicated in 80 cities in 30 countries and No Pants has been performed in January every year in New York since 2002 as well as 12 cities worldwide. Comedian Charlie Todd, one of the founders of IE, says he is in talks to produce a national program based on IE performances.

Octocube: What is it?

What is that mechanical brain-like matter sitting in the corner?

Designer Vivien Muller has created this combination art object and space heater using a simple 90 degree plumbing elbow as the repeating nexus element of her design. The modular tubing increases the surface area producing radiant heat and you can make it just as simply at home but following the concept. That the beauty of simple elegant design - art following function.

Sixteen foot Multi-touch Obscura Digital Screen

You know you want it...

Counting Crows, Teaching Them New Tricks

Joshua Klein asks why we can't just get along with crows. Crows, we are finding out, are very adaptive in living around human beings and all we want to do is kill them. As a hacker and writer Klein embarked on a amateur study of corvidae behavior and he thought it might be great to harness the power of the intelligence of crows.

Urban Loft Cube Addon

As urban-living becomes more sacred and living space more valuable, the city dweller and country nomads alike look for alternatives to expand and parcel out life. Loftcube is a pre-fab personal mobile home modular structure consisting of 420 sq. ft. of living space conceived by German furniture designer Werner Aisslinger.

The unit sells in Great Britain for roughly between 65 and 80 thousand pounds ($125,000 to $150,000) depending on the kitchen and bathroom configurations (plus shipping unless perhaps you can get Amazon to throw in free shipping on orders over $25).

The modular unit could be used as an rooftop add-on to an urban industrial loft, a weekend cabin in the country, a bunk house at a ski lodge, or a backyard studio and guesthouse in the suburbs.

The various window spaces can be custom designed during prefabrication for transparent, translucent, and louvred coverings to match with its placement, room arrangements and lighting environments. Floor coverings can also be customized and an unique stone floor in the bathroom evaporates water quickly while messaging the feet.

The interior structure also uses a number of innovations to maximize floor and wall space. For instance, wall panels separating the kitchen and bathroom feature integrated waterspouts or facets that can be maneuvered to each side of the panel. Likewise, a shower-head flips down into the bath space for bathing while it turns out over plants in the living-room to water them. Water, lighting, and electricity runs up through narrow hi-tech fabricated panels minimizing wasted space.

Fixtures and appliances recede into their panels or fold into cabinets so that they are not openly visible during the day or at times when not in use, clearing space and clutter for alternative uses of the wide open living space.

Overall, the modular mobile loft space itself can be custom configured to match a variety of uses: disconnected office space, guest house, elderly apartment, relaxing retreat, crafts studio, or private apartment for returning parents or unemployable bounce-back children. The minimalist domicile makes use of flat rooftop urban space often wasted or left used in the conversion from industrial warehouse to residential living and accomodating backyard. We can only expect the demand for these structures to increase as urban living space and transportation demands intensify.