Some zany hipsters in Pittsburgh found out when the Google Street view car was going to come along a certain street, and staged a big party with a marching band, costumes, and confetti dropping from the balconies above.
Visit Street with a View for more.
Gotten off of Flickr.
Looks like notorious street artist Banksy has traded in his spray cans and stencils for animatronic hot dogs and chicken mcnuggets. Extremely surreal.
Fun clock screensaver that simply changes text highlights to denote time. Not at all practical, but fun.
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in a random two-child family, one of the children is a boy. What is the probability that the other one is a girl?
It’s very unintuitive, but it’s 2/3. Very neat.
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Bruno Taylor’s Public Play Spaces
71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now. Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?
This project is a study into different ways of bringing play back into public space. It focuses on ways of incorporating incidental play in the public realm by not so much as having separate play equipment that dictates the users but by using existing furniture and architectural elements that indicate playful behaviour for all.
I’m back from my trip to California. The Bay Area was fantastic, but I’m too worn-out to write much of anything. Here are some photos.
Clarion is a small, one-block long alley in the Mission. Practically every surface in the alley is covered in some sort of art. Here are some photos I took:
This escalator was a nice piece, but I thought what was most amazing was the inscribed date - 1993. In 15 years it had hardly been touched. Either the taggers backed-off out of respect, or the artist has been good about passing by and touching it up.
This one is hard to read; It says: “I’m not hiding my love anymore.”
Here are some photos I snapped in Downtown Montréal of some of Roadsworth’s new pieces.
Hoefler and Frere-Jones have a post on their blog about those random strings of non-letter characters used to denote swearing. Apparently there is even a name for it:
The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.
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Radiohead’s new video is pretty neat. It was done without cameras, using laser-based 3d scanners instead.
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Schwartz’s & Roadsworth Movie Trailers
One makes smoked-meat sandwiches, the other does street art. But both are institutions in my home town of Montréal, and both are now getting documentaries.
World Changing on Worldwide Energy Policies
A report on renewable energy. Not for everyone, but has some information on Germany’s renewable energy program, one of the most extensive in the world:
Germany generates 14% of its energy needs–a total of 31,000 MW–from renewable energy. This share has increased 1 percent each year for the past decade.
In Germany the typical consumer pays $1.97 USD/month (1.25 Euros/month) to invest in the renewable energy infrastructure.
Just goes to show how renewable energy doesn’t have to be as expensive as some people think.
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Martha Cooper’s Vintage Hip Hop, Graffiti, and B-Boy Photos
The Current has a piece on the great photography work done by Martha in the 70’s and 80’s, before Hip Hop had gone mainstream.
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It’s a simple drawing/physics program that lets you build whatever you want from the ingredients they give you (springs, elastics, water, gas, fire, etc. Shown at left is a kettle boiling water and turning a small windmill.
If you’re anything like me you will be able to spend hours at this.
Montréal-based street artist Roadsworth first endeared himself to me by using his stencils to create illegal bike paths where there were none, in response to the municipal government’s then lack of accommodation for cyclists. His artistic pieces have been some of my favourite in town for many years - they’re extremely playful, topical, and play off of their environment in a way that makes people take notice of the urban environment.
While walking down the street at mid-day several years ago I stumbled across a stencil of an owl on the sidewalk. It was obviously Roadsworth, but I was stumped as to why he had placed it at the bizarre angle he had chosen. His pieces almost always play off their location, but I was confused about the meaning of this one. I passed a few nights later, and realized that the owl was in fact perching on the diagonally-falling shadow of a street light.
He gained fame in 2004 for his much-publicized legal problems after being caught stenciling on a public road. I had feared that his work would never return, but it seems that him and the city have put their problems behind them, and Roadsworth is now doing some commissions here and there. Spacing Montréal’s Christopher DeWolf has a gallery of his recent work.
When I first came to Vilnius, Lithuania, from Berlin, it seemed like there was virtually no art on the street. Then I started to see more and more little, subtle pieces spread around the city. Here are some of the photos I liked best.
