Smiley Face Visualizations from Mood Data of a City
Project Stimmungsgasometer, by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, is a giant smiley face that changes based on the mood of Berlin citizens. When they are collectively “happy” the light is a smile, and when they are not, it is a sad face. Input comes from facial recognition software (contributed by the Fraunhofer Institut) that [...]
Robert Montgomery: the Post-Situationist Tradition
Robert Montgomery works in a poetic and melancholic post-Situationist tradition. He’s created a number of projects that disrupt and hijack illuminated advertising billboards as well as working more directly with custom-fabricated signage. I clearly am in love. [via an email from Rose]
Pablo Valbuena’s Quadratura
Quadratura is a new site-specific light installation by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena. He projected a perspective grid between two rows of columns and onto the wall behind them, thus creating the illusion of an infinite pathway. Pablo reminds us that “Quadratura was the technique used in the baroque to extended architecture through trompe l’oeil and [...]
DIY: Air Quality Balloons
I found this post not too long ago and have been wanting to make one of these ever since. What’s making these balloons glow is the pollutants in the air around them, with colours ranging from green (signifying excellent air quality) to red (poor air quality).
Interrupted Light: Luzinterruptus
Luzinterruptus is a Madrid-based light art intervention collective. They’ve done some really large-scale works in streets around the world, this project, Garden for a not too distant future, being one of their most recent. From their site, “For this installation we used 110 transparent food packaging containers, inside which we put leaves and branches found [...]
Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson
At any one time there are around 6000 lightning storms happening across the world, amounting to some 16 million storms each year. Such dizzying statistics are useful to hold in mind while experiencing Streetlight Storm, a new artwork by Katie Paterson. Paterson’s work often deals with the translation of experiences of nature to representations of [...]
Yochai Matos: Fluorescent Installations
Here’s a really beautiful work, Eclipse done with fluorescent lights by the Israeli artist, Yochai Matos. Along with light installations, he also does some interesting street art that deal with highlighting perspective, glitter, and 8-bit aesthetics. I know when we were up in Peterborough, I had wanted to work with fluorescent lights, but from the [...]
Light Painting by SWEATSHOPPE
SWEATSHOPPE is a new multimedia performance collaboration between Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw that works at the intersection of art, music and technology. Their project, Light Painting, is pretty slick, using a LED-tipped paint roller along with some custom software and projector to reveal a video projection through painting movements. [via today and tomorrow]
Beautiful Light by David Therrien
4 LETTER WORD MACHINE is a giant illuminated computer-controlled / live performance text display by artist, David Therrien. Recently exhibited at part of Nuit Blanche this past Saturday attached to Toronto’s city hall, the installation displays “the phenomema of light and electricity and the role of light in our belief systems, language, biology, natural world [...]
TACET by Ulla Rauter
So we didn’t get a Rhizome Commission, but it doesn’t mean we’re not still planning a way around making Cross-Border Communication happen. In the meantime, we’ll keep collecting images and reference points about ways of imagining the project happening. Above is TACET by Ulla Rauter, which refers to acoustic pauses by drawing on the urban [...]
![Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/picture-87-150x150.png "How to Make a Randomly Assembled Text")
![Danielle and I have been in St.Catharines at Brock University working with an Ecopsychology class on a public art project (details to follow in coming week(s). We’re only here for a few days to help get the class started, but it’s been incredibly fun working with a bunch of strangers. We’ve explored the campus and [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/IMG_0155-150x150.jpg "Field Report from St.Catharines")
![Danielle and I spent the better part of the afternoon a couple days ago going through wheatpaste recipes, ultimately going with the simplest. We had wanted to avoid having to use a hot plate to make it, and after 4 different recipes requiring varying amounts of heat, we were successful. Flour. Flour + cold water. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/the-setup-150x150.jpg "Wheatpaste Research")
![We met last night and started our list of 100 Ways to Save the City for our projection on Saturday night as part of FAM Fest. We’re also spent some time putting together a rough schedule for 2009 Micro-Residencies, which will likely start in November. If you’ve thought about applying, but haven’t yet, now would [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_5311-sm-150x150.jpg "Planning Our Projection for FAM Fest")
![The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor. For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/BCL-STC-MAY-5x7-french-outlines-520-150x150.jpg "How to Save a City")
![We’ve spent the last couple of weeks developing this project, and somehow waited until the coldest night yet to install the first successful Text On Ice (You Changed Everything) project. I’ll post some more details on the (ongoing) process later this week, but wanted to get this image up first. This first iteration of the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/img_8660-edit-150x150.jpg "Text On Ice")
![We’ve spent the last couple of weeks settling into our new headquarters, working on applications and ideas for the fall and winter. We’ve also cleared our consultancy out of the downtown space, seeing as Visual Fringe is over and it was high on the to-do list. Having a dedicated space has been incredible so far, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_4539-150x150.jpg "The Last Couple Weeks at BCL HQ")
![Our rate of posting on here has slowed down considerably since the summer. We’re still busy, it’s just the pace of the work and projects now seems to span longer and longer time frames, and with so many ongoing and overlapping projects, it’s just a lot more challenging to find the time to keep track [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/wpid20294-IMG_1485-150x150.jpg "Calendars, Notes, Installations, Vinyl, Camouflage, Drywall, Tests, and Hearts")
![Another week, some more steps forward in our attempts at a planter that can have a magnet embedded in it. While it wasn’t looking like we were making any real progress, this idea came up near the end of Office Hours—plastic cups with holes, paper pulp, and a small cup on the inside to make [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_3849-150x150.jpg "Progress on Making Paper Planters")
![The details: Sunday, January 24, 2010 (8pm) at Phog Lounge (157 University Ave W, Windsor) As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab researchers will facilitate a community workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share personal histories of Windsor, inviting a range of community members to participate in the process. The workshop [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/BCL-STC-Jan-5x7-front-outlines-1024-150x150.jpg "Save the City: Listen to the City")
![Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon. Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_4080-150x150.jpg "Cross-Border Communication: Want to Be Friends? (and other things we needed to say)")
![We’ve been working on paper planters for a while, but over the last couple of days I started experimenting with magnets as well. Ideally, these could work with having some rare earth magnets embedded in the paper. Still more research and development to be done, but I think it’s getting closer. The first step was [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_3950-150x150.jpg "Researching Planters")
![Thursday night was a night of decisions and tests. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks just trying to get caught up generally with projects and Thursday marked the beginning of the deciding how to start wrapping up How to Forget the Border Completely and what direction to move in to make some more progress on [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9596-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)")
![Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above). A part of this project involves us going around to each [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_7554-150x150.jpg "Making Lists: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope (Part 1)")
![Equipped with a vehicle, Michelle and I spent a few hours on Wednesday out and about in the city gathering materials to further the process on our upcoming project in Hamilton. Our first visit was to The House, a thought factory of sorts where Jodi has been fruitfully working on our collection of sewn squares [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screen-Shot-2012-01-28-at-11.58.23-AM-150x150.png "Errands! The Next Steps for Two Tales of a City")