Football As It Should be Played

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

POV Placemaking

In Melbourne, Australia Axel Peemoller developed a way-finding-system for Eureka Tower Carpark while working for Emery Studio a placemaking, branding, communications, publishing and graphics firm. Peemoller's distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position or while driving out of the ramp to direct your exit. This graphic design project won several international design awards.

Jam Design

Design is about learning from the materials and tools given to you in nature and crafting them into something amazing.

Julie Taylor makes jam but, of course, to say that is an litote. She makes fruit butters, marms, fruit oils, syrups, conserves, candied peels, fruit glazes for poultry and fish, and there is almost no end to what her creation might become in the kitchen or elsewhere.

In this video a statement by Taylor stands out, "Artisans do the work."

Taylor handcrafting and dedicated approach to the science of fruit, flavor, and natures combinations of elements brings art and design to her creations. Ultimately, as she suggested in her response to a customer who didn't want to eat her jam because it is so beautiful, she knows the temporary and passing nature of creation, "It's just food so just eat it and have good memories."

Generational Shift

Alternative energy is the answer to John McCain's idiotic call for offshore drilling along California Coast and Florida. Can a person be any more blunt than that?

The problem is that at his stubborn age he cannot imagine a future without all the entrenched dependencies and harmful addiction's the Arizona Senator fought to maintain all his life. Oil rigs. Grid electricity powered by nuclear. Automobile built on the combustion engine. McCain is not going to give these things up without a fight.

So this is going to be McCain's line of attack on his opponent Barack Obama? Line the coasts with oil rigs and use taxpayer money to subsidize big oil exploration! That's not a solution to the problem that is a continuation of the problem.

Philippe Starck has designed a miniature rooftop windmill, or wind turbine if you will, that will provide 80% of your home's energy. And it costs about a thousand bucks. A home owner can mount it on his rooftop in roughly 15 minutes and he's producing rather than merely consuming electricity. It's kindalike pirating cable TV.

The Rain Water harvesting is another concept that will, more than likely, piss McCain off. In the northeast regions of Brazil, one of the largest rain water harvesting projects in existence with government using it to increase moisture levels for urban greenry and bring up the ground water table and while it might require treatment before drinking it can certainly be diverted for gray water purposes.

On a neighborhood or association level these systems could radically change our dependency on water and turn back the privatization of water into the hands of a few as documented in FLOW: FOR THE LOVE OF WATER which probably has McCain grumbling about Hollywood celebrities who think they can change the world.

Alright, so it really is going to take a whole new generation to bring about change. Might as well start now.

Blobwall

Blobwall, made from a lightweight honeycomb material developed by Panelite, is “a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system made of a low-density, recyclable, and impact-resistant polymer.”

Designed by Venice Beach, California architect Greg Lynn, the idea originated while playing with his children and he began wondering how he might recycle his children's outgrown plastic toys to build outdoor architectural and reusable structures.

The elemental unit of blogwall is an innovative redefinition of the brick into a lightweight interconnectable object made of colorful plastic and reinterpreted into modular elements. Lynn presented the Blobwall Pavilion in Miami in December 2007 as a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system built of the recycled polymer forms.

The blob unit, or “brick,” is a robotically cut, mass-produced, hollow tri-lobed shape formed through rotational molding in collaboration with Machineous. located in Los Angeles performs precision multi-axis cutting using robotic arm technology.

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.