A Communicative Bunch Of Bags
This truly fantastic breathing beast named 'One Hundred and Eight' is an interactive, wall-mounted installation by Berlin-based media artist Nils Völker.
Design By Many
Along with Hewlett Packard, AutoDesk University has launched a fresh online initiative called ‘Design By Many’. ‘Design By Many’ is an international challenge-based design technology community which enables participants to post challenges, together with their design source files. The community can then post responses with their own source files to solve the challenge. They can […]
Art Has A Hidden Message
From 1994 — when the Japanese invented them — till now, QR codes have been used for many purposes that have no immediate affinity with the original aim they were used for. In 2008, for instance, La Pluma Eléctri*k, an art collective based in Madrid, decided to use QR codes as a modular element for […]
Celebrity City Tours 1: Reyner Banham Loves L.A.
There’s something indelibly charming about the colour-faded city documentaries of the seventies and eighties. During this time, national broadcasting networks like the BBC and the CBC put out a slew of celebrity-hosted city tours as hour-long TV specials. Half-documentary/half city-marketing, there is something undeniably kitsch about the final products. Yet, placing the celebrity as the […]
Please, Don't Spill Coffee On The Laundry
Munich has the first ‘style laundromat’. Wash & Coffee is a laundromat and a coffee bar at the same time. This place, which PSFK describes as “probably the coolest laundromat you’ll see”, has opened its doors earlier this year. The bar, that obviously smells good, serves coffee, tea and snacks such as fresh bagels and […]
Offline Dating
If you feel sad spending the winter evenings alone, but online dating is not your thing, maybe it is time for you to send your parents to the Shanghai Dating Market in order to hook you up. Actually this is much more innocent than it looks at first glance. Every Saturday at Peoples Square in […]
Tweetjemee: A Restaurant In The Cloud
Dreaming of running your own neighborhood restaurant? Then start here. Tweetjemee is Dutch web service for home-based cooks to serve people nearby. The idea is that anyone with cooking skills can prepare some extra food and sell this to others that do not feel to cook. A ‘buurtchef’ (neighborhood chef) can easily start a so-called ‘webtaurant’ […]
Virtually Mediated Wilderness
In the context of big contemporary cities, tracking flora and/or fauna seems to be important for achieving data regarding the behavior of nature in front of men’s realm, but may be also important for the conscience of the citizens over their environmental impact. Experiments are continuously held. One of the latest is the Talking Tree, […]
Bread From The Rocket Oven
A new bakery in Hackney is adapting a technology from the developing world to produce artisan bread in a space traditionally used for light industry and storage. The E5 Bakehouse has been set-up in railway arches alongside London Fields. It uses a rocket oven, a simple solid fuel oven developed in the 1980s to provide […]
Spin A Yarn, Granny!
Are traditional arts and crafts reclaiming their position in contemporary urban innovations? Yarn bombing, graffiti knitting or yarn storming is an example of how the past is able to regenerate new forms of handmade street art installations manifested in public spaces.
Chicago Auctions Subway Names
Soon, Chicago’s public transportation system will have names such as ‘McDonald’s Line’ and ‘IBM Station’. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is about to organize an auction for companies enabling them to buy names of subway lines and stations as promotion for their brands. “CTA President Richard Rodriguez announced Wednesday that the perennially underfunded transit agency […]
Staircase Urbanism
Upon recently completing a competition entry for a new public space in Toronto, where my studio (Department of Unusual Certainties) proposed a giant staircase to nowhere, it was quickly pointed out to me by friends and colleagues, how it reminded them of other staircase projects that have gained popular attention in the last few years, the […]
Rising The Park
Hauster Park, located in the little city of Chaudfontaine, Belgium, hosts the yearly Cinq Saisons Festival, which gives many artists the possibility to create a work in situ. Every year, the participants are invited to take residence in town during the realization of their work, looking forward to create a new season of intense dialogue […]
Buy An Original Piece Of Polar Ice In Amsterdam
This week Amsterdam-based artists Coralie Vogelaar and Teun Castelein will launch their latest business called MyPolarIce in the Dutch capital. MyPolarIce gives people the opportunity to get themselves a unique piece of history. From 26 November to 5 December original pieces of polar ice will be sold at the temporary MyPolarIce store on the Museumplein […]
Places Have Memories
Do places have memories and how shall we treat and question them? ‘Rotterdam Weg’, a project by the Spanish artist Carme Nogueira, tries to reflect over these topics in a long, interactive trip with the city, where she finds and tells us stories about the particular places she visits. It is nice to see how […]
