urban space

A photographer who worked on O'Connell Bridge for 50 years

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Man on Bridge is an interactive documentary about Arthur Fields, a Dublin based street photographer who captured an estimated 182,500 photos of passersby on O’Connell Bridge. Arthur was out in all weather with his camera 365 days a year for 50 years.

El Zorrero Films are producing a web-based documentary that lets people learn about Arthur and allows them to submit their own Arthur Fields photo or Arthur Fields-inspired photo into the online story of the photographer.

It has been entered into the Arthur Guinness Projects and the filmmakers are looking for votes to help them secure funding to complete the project.

3d Model of Dubrovnik Constructed from Flickr Photos

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This 3D reconstruction of Dubrovnik, Croatia was made entirely by computers from photos sourced on Flickr. It contains 4,619 images and nearly 3.5 million 3D points.

This project is referenced by Victor Burgin in his keynote presentation at Urban Encounters: The Image of Public Space a seminar at Tate Britain in October 2012. Burgin's talk is at the beginning of the podcast embedded below:

[mp3j track="http://static.tate.org.uk/1/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2012_10_06_urban_encounters_1.mp3" title="Listen Here:" autoplay="n"]

 

Loitering Theatre

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Loitering Theatre is a project by Nina McGowan and Caroline Campbell which "uses customised helicopters (the AR.Drone) to fly beyond the normal street view to access and film previously inaccessible and unseen views of the city". It was shown at the Science Gallery, Dublin as a part of Hack the City. Above is a clip from a longer video.

Nina and Caroline collaborate together also using the name Loitering Theatre.

Will Eisner and Francis Alys

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I have, here, undertaken a series of vignettes built around nine elements which, taken together, are my portrayal of a big city...any city.

Seen from afar, major cities are an accumulation of big buildings, big population and big acreage. For me it is not 'real.' The big city as it is seen by its inhabitants is the real thing. The true picture is in the crevices on its floors and around the smaller pieces of its architecture where daily life swirls.

Will Eisner, from the introduction to New York: The Big City

Eisner's Comic New York: Life in the Big City (of which New York: The Big City is sub-section) contains many short episodic comics, often with little if any dialogue, depicting people engaged in small interactions with architectural elements of the city; fire hydrants, lamp posts, bins etc. It reminded me of Francis Alys' work using similar elements in urban public space.  Below is a page from Eisner's comic and a video by Alys.

Momo and Francis Alys

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Above is a video by a graffiti artist named Momo about writing a  tag the width of  Manhattan by dripping paint from a can attached to the back of his bike. The tag was done in2006 but went unnoticed for several years and has recently been featured in this piece in the NY Times.

The video below is called The Leak and was made by Francis Alys in Paris in 2006. This video and others by Francis Alys are available to view or download and share under a creative commons license from his website http://francisalys.com/public.html

"These videos can be downloaded and shared with others as long as the authorship is credited and there is a link back to the website of the author. These videos cannot be altered in any way or used for commercial purpose."

Slime Mould Imitates Tokyo Rail System

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"The researchers decided to task the slime mold with a problem human designers had already tackled. They placed oat flakes (a slime mold favorite) on agar plates in a pattern that mimicked the locations of cities around Tokyo and impregnated the plates with P. polycephalum at the point representing Tokyo itself. They then watched the slime mold grow for 26 hours, creating tendrils that interconnected the food supplies. Different plates exhibited a range of solutions, but the visual similarity to the Tokyo rail system was striking in many of them"

Via boingboing

Katie Holten's Tree Museum

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There's an article in today's Irish Times about Katie Holten's Tree Museum and her upcoming show at the Hugh Lane as a part of the Golden Bough series. The Tree Museum was a public artwork that examined people's relationships to trees in the Bronx area of New York through an audio guide featuring recordings of local people. Below is a short video about the Tree Museum and the audio recordings are available through her website.

Pathways of Desire

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"This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.

In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren't designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go."

Using google maps I was able to find the shortcut across a part that I used to take to school.

From Sweet Jupiter via boingboing

Spy Box

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I was listening to a podcast about the Altermodern exhibition at Tate Britain and the curator mentioned a piece by Walead Beshty  which involved shipping laminated glass cubes which were cracked in transit. It reminded me of a piece which I saw a couple of years ago which I find more interesting. The piece is by British artist Tim Knowles which is described in his own words below:

A digital camera inside a parcel looks out through a small hole and captures images of its journey through the postal system.  The Spy Box was sent from my studio to the gallery taking an image every 10 seconds recording a total of 6994 images these were then edited together to create an animated slideshow.

Below is a short clip from his website which is found here.