Wanderlust: Location-Based Storytelling
After many location-based applications have discovered the possibilities of the smart phone to tell people where you are, what you do and what you’re going to do, a new generation of location-aware apps is currently being launched. Wanderlust is one of this specific niche apps that is not focusing on you sending and telling people […]
DIY Land Remediation
As great as the DIY movement is, there are some things that seem naturally beyond the capacity of the average individual non-professional. DIY Space Missions and DIY Nuclear Fusion for example, are two headings you’ll probably never read in an issue of Ready Made. Every once in while though it’s exciting to see our assumptions […]
Rent-A-Desk In The Ghost Office
As a consequence of the financial crisis plenty of large and middle-scale companies have to get rid of employees. This is terrible for the ones being sent out, but it also leads to a spooky atmosphere in the office. A lot of desks remain empty and on Monday morning there’s no one to talk to while waiting for the coffee machine. Many companies are oversized when it comes to the amount of available desks compared to the number of employees and the overhead expenses in general. The situation creates real ghost offices. Why not use this over-capacity and rent it in a flexible way?
Getting Closer…
Location-based media have changed the way people move in public space, how they perceive the urban realm, how they communicate and share information, and so on. The market for location-based applications is expanding rapidly. Recent research has amounted more than 6,000 location-based apps to be currently available for the iPhone alone. Here I would like to […]
Turn Your House Into A Billboard
Mobile advertising network Adzookie has developed a new advertising concept that helps people with a killing mortgage. As a consequence of the financial crisis many people experience difficulties paying their mortgage. Changing facades into huge ads might be a solution. In exchange for turning your house into a massive billboard, Adzookie pays your monthly mortgage […]
NYC's Urban Farming Style Shop
Urban farming is hotter than hot. Therefore it is not a surprise that the first DIY urban farming/gardening store in New York City is a huge succes. City Hydroponic is a full service shop that offers a complete range of gardening products for indoor as well as outdoor gardeners and farmers. The shop has all […]
The Folding Sauna
Studio Elmo Vermijs is about to launch its latest project, a mobile pop-up sauna. The so-called ‘folding sauna’ was initiated in 2010, based on the idea to enjoy a sauna at various locations and in different atmospheres. Think about festivals and campsites, but also more private scenes such as urban wastelands, your own garden, or […]
Follow The Street Food
Some days ago I stumbled upon a pretty nice app that functions as a useful link between food trucks and their customers. Under the slogan “Find out where your next meal is parked”, US-based mobile food vendors platform Roaming Hunger has launched an interactive iPhone application that enables its users to track, locate, and explore the […]
The Everyday Face Of Urban Art: An Interview With Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to visit a conference of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, a Cuban artist who lives in New York City and Barcelona. He started his career in the early nineties creating art on the streets, and starting the New York City Culture Jamming Movement along with the artist group Artfux. While in […]
There's A User For That!
In the minds of a new generation of smartphone app developers, the city is luckily absorbing a great amount of effort and tons of hidden information that are being revealed thanks to the work of creative minds collecting data from institutional sources or from the citizen themselves. It is interesting to notice which path a […]
Chalk Your Dreams On A Wall
American public installation artist and designer Candy Chang has turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard. Residents and others are asked to share their dreams and remember what is important to them. All messages chalked on the wall are a response to the main sentence […]
Thrown To The Wind
To most people, garbage is about as far from art as it gets. To Beijing-based artist Wang Zhiyuan, it is a medium like any other. Some time ago he just started collecting discarded plastic containers from the dumps in and around the Chinese capital. He discovered that it was not difficult to turn these objects […]
Boomwonen: Living In The Urban Trees
This is neither a huge wasp nest, nor a colony of grizzly bears hanging around in the Dutch suburbs. This is a man’s home. Boomwonen is a project by the Dutch artist Roel de Boer in which he explores what 'home' really means in a contemporary social context. Originating from an island (Texel), the big city feels stifling to him and leads to an increasing desire to live a more physical lifestyle, closer to nature. At the same time the social and cultural diversity of the city attracts him. The ideal place to live, assumes De Boer, would be a place combining these both characteristics. And since we cannot all afford a huge farm on Times Square, we have to come up with other ideas. By creating little places to rest (sleeping and sitting) in the middle of the city, the artist hopes to find his ideal way to live.
"Internet Of Things Is Crap, We Care About People Not Things"
In this present climate of excitement and apprehension around the ‘Internet of Things,’ Sen.se takes a decisive step to make sense of personal data. Open.sen.se, a recently launched open platform for data-based human expressions, is driven by a firm belief in “an ‘Internet of Everything’ where Humans, Nature, Machines, Objects, Environments, Information, Physical and Virtual […]
QR Storytelling
140 Years have passed since the happenings of the Paris Commune, the governance experience known to be the first historical assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution, that briefly ruled Paris between March and May 1871. Despite the relatively short life and the limited geographical range of the experience (the governance […]
