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Fallen Fruit Collective

Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by artists David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (ps. you should read it).

Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. A number of their projects look at the social, political, and ecological issues surrounding local food, public food, and land use, though it all began with the process of mapping local fruit trees in LA.

From their site…

“Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.”

I really enjoy the social side of Fallen Fruit‘s work. This communal jam-making being perhaps the most interesting, as it involves a kind of process that highlights interaction and time. As well, their consideration of the legalities and local community practices seem to be very balanced with the rather “nice” focus on fruit at the centre of their questions — a tactic in which I strongly believe. How much more productive of a conversation can you have about these issues when you’re (somewhat subversively) framing it around fruit?

[via Art 21]

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It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston by kanarinka

kanarinka is a new media artist whose research interests include the politics of digital information, feminist performance art, participatory culture and the emotional landscape of Homeland Insecurity. She is Co-Founder of the non-profit collective iKatun, a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and teaches at RISD’s Digital+Media Graduate Program and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In Spring 2007, kanarinka ran the entire evacuation route system in Boston and measured its distance in breaths. The project is an attempt to measure our post-9/11 collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity.

The $827,500 Boston emergency evacuation system was installed in 2006 to demonstrate the city’s preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks.

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston consists of a series of running performances in public space (2007), a web podcast of breaths (2007), and a gallery installation of the archive of breaths (2008). There’s also an online collection of podcasts, with audio recordings made during each running performance.

The work is being shown as a part of Experimental Geography, an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth. I picked up the book from this traveling exhibition a while ago and it’s an interesting read. There’s some inspiring work, but as is often the case with these kind of collection books, the introduction is far more enlightening than many of the preceding chapters.

What I like about this project is the physical translation of a kind of bureaucracy along with the gesture of exploration through so much of the city under the restrictions of urgency and evacuation. It makes me want to imagine ways for exploring bureaucracies of Windsor.

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New LCDs and Serial Ports and some Max/MSP for good measure

I haven’t posted on this project for a little while, partially because of the preparation for the ongoing Save the City project, and partially because the little time that I’ve had to work on this has only resulted in small increments. So, I figured I would wait until I had some more significant updates to make to post, and here they are.

Basically, I’ve been working on a couple parts of the project. I’ve been updating a Max/MSP/Jitter project that BCL had previously used for our projection performances to try to automate some of the scaling of text depending on what the input is, while also continuing with the Arduino and LCD integration.

Continue reading “New LCDs and Serial Ports and some Max/MSP for good measure”

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Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation

Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal histories of the city.

We’ll be going through all of this material over the next little while to turn it into an audio documentary that we’ll distribute online, hopefully on some local airwaves, and also through a contribution of the final work to the Windsor Archives. We’re hoping that this documentary will serve as a marker in time that will have captured a very specific kind of conversation happening right now, and maybe happening for the first time. It’s going to be something very special.

We want to thank everyone who came out and participated — this literally could not have been possible without you! There’s a number of photos and some overview of the discussions after the jump of what was our absolute most favourite night of the year so far.

Continue reading “Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation”

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Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm

Thursday night Cristina and I were up in Toronto at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, participating in the Christopher Hume curated exhibition, Public Realm.

We did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we created, responses on Twitter, and conversations amongst ourselves.

Public Realm is up until January 31st, and there’s documentation of the projections up in the gallery along with a growing collection of our questionnaires with a ton of great answers. If you’re in the neighbourhood, stop by, there’s a lot of great work in the show!!!

After the jump, there’s a photo from all 100 fill-in-the-blanks that we projected.

Continue reading “Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm”

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Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events

Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event.

We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto.

Continue reading “Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events”

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Public Realm Questionnaire

We’re participating in an upcoming exhibition entitled, Public Realm, at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto. For the exhibition we’re going to be doing some outdoor projection around the gallery, and we want to have your input!

We want to know what you think about the public realm, and about public and private space, and about what you can do in that space and maybe even, why you’d want to bother doing something in that space in the first place.

To participate, you can do one of two things …

Download this fillable PDF, fill it in and email it back to us, or fill in this form below:

[form 2 “Public Realm”]

We’re going to project all of the submissions we get on Thursday, January 21st, as part of the opening for the exhibition!

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Public Realm at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts

On Thursday, January 21st at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, we’ll be doing a projection performance that examines the language and ideas surrounding public space, intervention, urban surfaces, and city infrastructures. As part of Propeller’s Public Realm exhibition, we will curate a text-based list of ideas, statements, and questions, that address the concerns embedded in our practice and that appear to be at the heart of the exhibition itself.

We will ask for the participation of those in attendance, along with other momentary collaborators through tools such as Twitter and SMS, for submissions during the duration of the performance. The projection itself will consist of white text and will be projected onto the façade of a nearby building. Photographic documentation of the projection will be installed in the gallery space afterwards.

Public Realm opens on January 20th and runs to January 31st, 2010.

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Quick Update: LEDs Survived, Postcards are Being Distributed!

Just a quick update…the LEDs in the freezer are still going strong, more than two days later, which is good news for any potential LED-embedded ice or snow project. The glow was way more exciting than this photo makes it appear, as I had assumed the battery wouldn’t have lasted this long at all.

Finally had the chance to pick up some more postcards, and yet continually finding myself not having them when I’m actually talking to people. Cristina picked up a bunch to distribute downtown, Josh went to Walkerville, Michelle went through campus, I’ve mostly been doing hand-offs.

Here’s the remaining pile — 250 goes pretty fast, but we need to get rid of them all by the 24th! We’re excited, hope you already have the date in your calendar!