Urban Interventions by OX

OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage.

The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on the Poster Time blog. Many of the interventions are quite playful, other times being rather loud with oscillating colours and lines.

Having just arrived back from the Creative Cities Summit, and hearing a really incredible presentation by the organizers of the Philadelphia Mural Arts project (which we’ve posted about before), I’m feeling rather anxious to consider how we could transform the many, many surfaces across the city that intensify the sense of non-place that seems endemic to Windsor.

Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine

I saw this project in one of its earlier iterations and had kind of lost track of it, but I was recently reminded of it through a Tweet fromDoug Coupland (he had referred to another project on the same page).

Avatar Machine by Marc Owens is a wearable system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

Watching the video is a kind of surreal experience—I’m not really a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the aesthetic created through this system really works to generate the same look and feel of movement in a game that uses this behind-the-head perspective. I thought it was worth noting just as a way of changing perspective, and working to change physical perspectives into a new kind of experience.

[via today and tomorrow]

Augmented Sculpture

Pablo Valbuena, Augmented Sculpture Series

Augmented Sculpture Series by Pablo Valbuena “focuse[s] on the temporary quality of space, investigating space-time not only as a three dimensional environment, but as space in transformation.” I remember coming across this last year, but was reminded of it by a post on vvork. It’s very refreshing to see projection occurring on a 3D object, thereby animating something very rigid and physical. Watch the video to get the full effect.