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BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)

Over three days this week, we got a lot done. And, as I write this, stuff is still getting done. This is why collaboration is such a valuable model for art practice.

But, it’s not just about getting stuff done, it’s the challenges, the insights, the novel perspectives that can be brought up around a table that push the work forward. With some of us having worked together for nearly three years, we can anticipate one another and move ideas and projects that much further along because there’s a context, there’s a history, there’s a resonating understanding of what we can do together.

Collaboration FTW.

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Fire Painting by Sanela Jahic

Fire Painting is an interactive installation made by Sanela Jahic. “The viewer can set off explosive levels of kerosene by subtle movements of a sensory data glove. The image can be manipulated, yet it constantly escapes control.” Sanela asks “What happens if a painting is no longer an independent, selfcontained position, bound by standstill, unalterability and light in site?” Interesting.

Via: Today and Tomorrow

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The Night Sky Billboard Project by Charlie Michaels & Bird

The Night Sky Billboard Project from Charlie Michaels on Vimeo.

In collaboration with a local sign painter named Bird, who has been leaving his mark along Detroit’s streets for decades, an artist and our friend, Charlie Michaels turned an old vacant Detroit billboard into a big painting of the night sky – for star gazing in the city.

Above the intersection of Mack Ave. and Mt. Elliott St. on the east side of Detroit, a billboard that’s been sitting empty for decades displays an image of the night sky. Allowing those who pass underneath to see the stars more clearly than they are visible in the city, it offers a quiet reminder to notice what is always present but cannot always be seen.

Charlie says, “The collaboration with bird came out of a desire to integrate the project into the neighborhood somehow instead of simply using it as the destination. Streets on the east side of Detroit are covered with hand painted ads and murals – seeing this project as an addition to this gallery already in the street and wanting to acknowledge those artists whose work is already so present, I decided to seek out a collaborator. Bird was amazing to work with because his work is really everywhere, an entire lifetime of painting on view all over the east side.”

The video provides a very cool behind-the-scenes look at the installation and creation of the work. I heart billboards and this project.

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Another Look at Portals

Art Project of the Day

While we’ve been imagining and devising our own portals for How to Forget the Border Completely,  San Francisco artist Jeff Waldman has been creating his own type of imaginative gateway in an endeavour he’s called ‘The Happiness Project’.

Pictured above is Waldman’s first installation called ‘Shut In’, which features a couple interior locks, and a large keyhole that emits a strong light from within.

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I made an iPhone App and so can you !!!

 

For one of my last projects with Sigi Torinus as part of my BFA degree I made an iphone App.

I was able to speed up a usually lengthy process by skipping over the coding portion of creating the app. This was made possible by using Buzztouch, a web-based content management software (CMS) out of Montery California that helps build iPhone and Android apps. Buzztouch provides tools that allow people to create mobile apps and provides a back-end database to support those apps over the long-term. They do both of these things for free, for anyone. The source-code that app owners download for each of their applications is released under an open-source license.

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Retroreflective Materials Test

Earlier this week we received a couple of samples of various retroreflective materials for use on our letters for CAFKA.

One material, the one on the roll, is a vinyl (3M Scotchlite Reflective White Vinyl), perhaps most famously used in the Bright Bike project, while the other is an industrial substrate (3M Engineer Grade White Prismatic Sheeting) used on municipal road safety signs.

I’ve been doing a variety of tests with a flash, the one above  where it appears that the Scotchlite vinyl is brighter was taken with my DSLR with the body flash, but the lens I have on there blocks the flash in the lower part of the frame. Tests with photos from my iPhone seem to favour the Prismatic Sheeting.

We’re still examining the costs of each and we still need to do some more rigourous tests, but it’s amazingly helpful to be able to see these side by side (thanks Sarah!) The vinyl has an estimated 7-year service life, the prismatic sheeting is about 10-years. Not sure on the cost difference yet.

Thursday is catch-up night, so there should be lots to talk about. I know Hiba and Karlyn were working on a budget and I think a whole bunch of the crew met up on Monday to do some work. We’ll have to plan some really well-thought-out tests for these materials, in the outdoors, etc., to see how they fare in the weather. I put up a spec-sheet for both materials to our Dropbox. Anxious to figure out the best plan forward!

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Sao Paolo: City With No Ads


From Text-In-Transit to …And Then The City, we’ve spent a lot of time  researching ways in which we can subvert some of the advertising spaces in Windsor, but what if we were to just eliminate all of the advertisements entirely?

In January of this year, the mayor of Sao Paolo, Brazil decided to ban all the 8,000+ advertisements in the city in order to “rid the city of visual clutter.” I’d be interesting to see how this changes a person’s behaviour or the city’s culture and personality.

What do you think?  Would you be able to live in a city completely empty of commercial advertising?  What if this happened in Windsor?  How would your re-think all of the empty spaces?

Via: DesignVerb

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Dan Tague’s Live Free or Die

Dan Tague‘s recent body of work reminds me of a brief period in my undergrad when I had an interest in the power and aesthetics of currency. While I tried to duplicate the look of Canadian bills with paint, Dan uses American bills to spell out phrases such as “Reality Sucks” or “Don’t Tread on Me”. Dan’s project statement suggests that “The cost of war has created an internal war on our economy, where the generals are CEOs and the tanks are toxic assets. […] It is not coincidence that our money mimics military camouflage as illustrated in this new body of work.”