Hybridizing Art and Energy

The Land Art Generator Initiative announces its submissions and finalists for their Abu Dhabi based competition for artists to merge sustainable energy production with art.

The NYTimes provides a nice write up. 
..."Its aim is to help participants to develop and ultimately attract investment to construct power-generating plants that are aesthetically and functionally integrated into the landscape.
The contest was established by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, whose firm Studied Impact is focused on the environmental effects of design...."

They plan to hit NYC next!

Pop-Up Spaces

Real Estate Bust - Allissa Walker

When there is lemons, you make lemonade. At this moment of numerous empty store, a growing concept in "pop-up" galleries are taking charge in a number of large cities. Emtpy storefronts become temporary exhibits, empty spaces become temporary buisnesses, classrooms and any sort of mash-up programming a creative type could think of.

NYTIMES: Designing Through a Depression, by Allison Arieff

"At its heart, design is about problem-solving, but it’s also about problem-identifying. Instead of creating a need for things, designers can now focus on responding to things we do need. We may have never been confronted with as many problems as we are today; the blame for them can’t be attributed to designers, but many future solutions can — and will be."

The life of clothing

Artist Zoe Leonard

Within the city a number of environmental, economical, cultural flows move in and out and around. From water to the water shed, to immigration and GDP. Artist/photographer Zoe Leonard documented the life chain of clothing. The simple item, created for the material culture of America...doesn't begin here or end here. Her work almost could act as a photographic mapping of clothing.

"The project then expanded in scope as Leonard concentrated on tracing the circulation of everyday commodities, particularly secondhand clothing, as they were sold and resold in far-flung destinations. The final compilation includes images captured in Mexico City, Mexico; Kampala, Uganda; and Warsaw, Poland."
Dia Art

"...While exploring the neighborhood, she became intrigued with clothing resellers who purchased garments from thrift stores, sorted them by type and quality, and then packed them in large bales for export to Asia and Africa. In 2004, she traveled to Uganda to see how these items were distributed to their end users. Leonard also visited markets in Poland and Cuba, constructing a meandering travelogue that links images of mom-and-pop shops in New York with shots of jackets, pants and Nike T-shirts in African market stalls. A visual diary illustrating the flows of international commerce, the images also explore how objects are reassessed and reused in different contexts, raising questions of relative worth and the affluence and poverty that influence it..."
Time Out New York

A City Drip System

urban sewer grates along the streets of San Francisco color coded with drops of altering primary colored paints.

Graffiti artists or City employee? Physical demarcations noting status of rainwater catchment system?

What are the physical or virtual notifications of the efficiencies of a network?

Seed Project

David Cohen's The Seed Project

This "art" project asks people to plant organic basil seeds anywhere and everywhere. Its invites one to take the element of nature and imposes it upon the more "unnatural" environments within our everyday lives.

In regards to our urban environment, existing visual cues of "natural" have become so urbane that many fail to even recognize it as plant life. This project shakes up your daily commutes, questioning place, location and purpose of plant life in our built environments.










In a time of extreme greenwashing, what are the new visual cues of true environmental action?
What locations, programs, buildings, forms of employment within a concrete jungle of a city can programmed for understanding basic living processes?
What new forms of urban gardening can harvest not only moments of contemplation, but todays lunch?

Similar movements:
Guerrilla Gardners

Public Space - Private Affairs

link: New York Times

The new Chanel Pavilion in Central Park opened recently, celebrating fashion thru architecture and public space - perhaps missing the mark completely, especially in such economic and environmental/social urgencies.

"Opening the pavilion in Central Park only aggravates the wince factor. Frederick Law Olmsted planned the park as a great democratic experiment, an immense social mixing place as well as an instrument of psychological healing for the weary. The Chanel project reminds us how far we have traveled from those ideals by dismantling the boundary between the civic realm and corporate interests."

What becomes of a public space composed of elite showings - with required previously purchased "free online" tickets? Where do the boundaries of open and closed, elite and common, spontaneous and prepared, fashion and environment meet in a city like New York, within a site like Central Park?

Media and the automobile

Identity, expression, advertisement, protest, exclamation.
The auto has vehicle for thought.

How does the automobile allow for self expression and how much of it is determined upon the this ears model designer? What sort of information is placed upon the automobile for expression? What is being told, sold, expressed, questioned?

Bumper sticker, graffiti, advertisements, tribute, initials, love relationships, anger, humor, ownership, phone number, cleanliness, additions/alterations, color, lights, sound, tinted windows.

What if?

What if bridges worked water instead of just only spanning over it?

Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfall installation, NYC
image from New York Times (25 June 2008): http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/24/arts/0625-WATERFALL_5.html