Signs from Here and There

These are a few of those common, everyday signs which in a context familiar to you would not be anything but a sign. However, travel to somewhere else in the world and signs are at the same time familiar but not the same.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Phone Box in Durban, South Africa."][/caption]

Transporting Art

 

 

 

[caption id="attachment_89" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Poster from Barriball's series on the London Underground. Credit: Flashboy Flickr."][/caption]

The New York Times reported on 26th December (2009) that Show Media and Art Production Fund have combined efforts to temporarily replace current NYC taxi cab advertising which appears on the tops of vehicles with commissioned works by Yoko Ono, Shirin Neshat and Alex Katz. The strongly message-orientated artworks will adorn 160 taxis including amongst others Neshat's illustration of a handshake (symbolizing unity), and Ono's 1969 'The War Is Over' slogan in English and sign language.

The use of public transport advertising space for the display of artworks, of course, is not new. London Underground has a long history of using its advertising hoarding spaces for public announcements as well as commissioned artworks as part of Platform for Art. One of the more recent popular campaigns was created by American writer Judith Chernaik, 'Poems on the London Underground' (1986) where  selected historical and contemporary poems replaced advertising spaces in the tube trains. Her idea was to 'bring poetry to the wide ranging audience of passengers'. In 2008, British artist Anna Barriball's typographic works from the series 'About 60 miles of beautiful views' consisted of phrases taken from the back of found photographs. The phrases were represented in the now familiar New Johnston font and recontextualised in the format of large-scale posters inserted into spaces across the London Underground network. The tube passengers were jarred by seemingly banal phrases such as 'Looking back the way we had come' and 'Off to work 8.15AM. (Nylon uniform.)' interspersed amongst more conventional advertising and safety posters. tt

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/arts/design/26taxicab.html

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/projectsandschemes/artmusicdesign/pfa/

The Bubble Project

Although 'The Bubble Project' has been around for some time, it is worth reminding ourselves of the ways in which subvertising might be used in public spaces to amusing or political effect. The DIY nature of downloading a speech bubble, printing it off, cutting it out and pasting it in chosen locations of an urban space, empowers the participant to comment on corporate-owned advertising spaces. At the same time the process uses existing informational platforms (e.g. street signs, billboards, advertising hoardings) thereby enriching our reading(s) of the cityscape. tt

http://thebubbleproject.com/

Test from iphone

A test to see what happens.

Pricing structure announced for Blue Mars

Waterfall in Blue Mars

Just released is the pricing structure for developers on Blue Mars online environment.

Riley at New Venice

A new era of online environments is here. Blue Mars uses the Crysis gaming engine to deliver high quality virtual environments. Interfaces with industry standard computer modeling programs such as 3DS and Blender make this an accessible and rich environment for quality development.

rt

India

LAX flight arrivals and departures

Realtime arrivals and departures at LAX in SL


Amazing this can be shown when thinking of security concerns (but really - there are easier ways of finding this information if so desired). A view of traffic in and around Los Angeles airport (LAX) using realtime data streams. I assume these are web scraped data sets. What does seeing this information in three dimensions do to the info? Make it more real and less like abstracted information? More easy to experience/understand data versus simply knowing it?

LAX Departures and arrivals in SL.