The Corners Project

Bankers, b-boys, and why diversity and solidarity are not NYC’s strangest bedfellows.

New York City. Was there ever a more diverse, colorful and eclectic hub of humanity? Fascinated by the incredible hearth of culture that is NYC, strategic planner and hobbyist photographer Friko Starc set out to document it at its rawest, most candid form. For three years, he took portraits of strangers and passers-by at five Manhattan corners in what became The Corners Project, an inspired cross-section of New York’s living matter.

The five corners where the candid, spontaneous portraits were taken — Clinton & Rivington, Chrystie & Grand, Wall & Broad, Lex & 116th, 19th & 8th — stretch all across the island, from Chinatown to Wall Street, Lower East Side to Chelsea to Spanish Harlem.

From hipsters to homeboys, executives to entertainers, the project spans the entire social spectrum, with all its vibrant richness and charming quirk. Often presented in pairs, the portraits bespeak a unique blend of diversity and solidarity, the unmistakable we’re-in-this-together-ness of New York.

Last September, All Day Buffet awarded The Corners Project as one of the 100 best New-York-centric creative initiatives. And we tend to agree.

The project is part Ari Versluis’ fascinating Exactitudes, part Jason Polan’s wonderful illustrated Every Person in New York, with its own gritter, more unfiltered take on the ambitious goal of cataloging NYC’s incredible diversity and energy.

Explore The Corners Project and find it on Facebook, then go stake out a street corner of your own and marvel at the living runway of urbanity.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Dan Witz’s Dark Doings

What hookers and tigers have to do with reclaiming your awareness.

Brooklyn-based artist Dan Witz has been one of the defining forces in contemporary street art.

It was Dan Witz who, back in 2003, first showed us how powerful street art could be. Each summer Dan’s projects take street art to new levels by adding elements of “surprise and delight” into the city landscape. For us, Dan Witz is the consummate street artist. He’s provocative. He’s dedicated. And most of all — he has absolutely wicked skills.” ~ Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective

Witz spent this past summer working on his latest project, Dark Doings, which opens as a solo exhibition tonight at the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in LA.

Inspired by a recent visit to the Red Light District of Amsterdam, Dark Doings explores the tragic obliviousness we’ve developed to our surroundings through subtle, haunting images of human and animal faces trapped behind dirty glass windows.

I’m trying to exploit our collective tendency towards sleepwalking by inserting outrageous things right out there in plain view that are also practically invisible. My goal is to make obvious in your face art that ninety-nine percent of the people who walk by won’t notice. Eventually when they stumble upon one or find out about it I’m hoping they’ll start wondering what else they’ve been missing.”

The project embodies the true purpose and power of street art — to challenge, to compel, to jolt us out of our self-constructed comfort zones and stagnant defaults. Dark Doings is a remarkable reminder of, to quote the theme from TEDGlobal, the substance of things not seen.

See more of the installations from the series, and remember to look a little closer — in the street, and in life at large.

Editor’s Note: On a related note, I’ve explored the importance of mystery in street art in my first article for the wonderful GOOD Magazine, investigating the greatest guerrilla art mystery never solved.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Play Me, I’m Yours: Reclaiming Public Space

What the London Symphony Orchestra has to do with skate parks and the Sydney homeless.

You may recall UK artist Luke Jerram and his brilliant glass microbiology from our Biology-Inspired Art issue. But besides exploring the beautiful intersection of science and art, some of his work transcends aesthetic art, entering into social experiment and anthropology.

Play Me, I’m Yours is a fascinating project, touring the globe since March 2008 and placing street pianos in locations all over the world. From train stations to laundromats to skate parks, the pianos emerge in public spaces, inviting the community to engage and interact with them in a way that creates a playful and vibrant canvas for grassroots cultural self-expression.

Questioning the ownership and rules of public space ‘Play Me I’m Yours’ is a provocation, inviting the public to engage with, activate and take ownership of their urban environment.

Since its launch, the project has received wide media attention from NPR, The New York Times, BBC, and a myriad other culture-purveyors. And the 112 pianos installed so far have been played by anyone from school children in Sao Paolo to the London Symphony Orchestra.

Next year, Play Me, I’m Yours is hitting London, Belfast, Barcelona, Pécs, Cincinnati, San Jose, Medellin, Cartagena, Bogatoa and 17 more cities.

The project is a much better-conceived and more ambitious analogy to Volkswagen’s recent Fun Theory effort, which tests the simple hypothesis that giving people something fun to do will change their behavior and their relationship with public space.

Explore Play Me, I’m Yours and more of Luke’s amazing work for a glimpse of art’s transformative power in human behavior and sociology.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Kidrobot QR Scavenger Hunt

Why vinyl is at the cutting edge of technology, or how to scan your way around Manhattan.

Since 2002, designer Paul Budnitz has been pushing the boundaries of what art toys can be in his iconic brand of super-premium vinyl toys, Kidrobot. Now, he is pushing the boundaries of what technology can do. As Android and other mobile platforms make QR codes an increasingly prevalent data tag format, why not have some fun with it? That’s exactly what Kidrobot is doing in Dunny Hunt 09 — a QR-based scavenger hunt around Manhattan, promoting Kidrobot’s Dunny Series 2009, from strategic creative studio WeArePlus.

The five-day hunt kicked off yesterday, offering Kidrobot fans daily clues leading to a promotional displays — posters, stickers, postcards, t-shirts — hidden all around the city. Kidrobot also provides links to free smartphone apps which, once installed, can be used to scan the QR codes embedded in the promotional displays. (Although their choice of iPhone app is BeeTagg Reader, we’d recommend UpCode instead.)

Victorious hunters can collect the day’s Virtual Dunny Collection image, with a chance to win various prizes, including limited-edition Dunny toys. The first person to scan the QR Code from the day’s hidden item wins a special reward. The grand prize is no less than a full set of the Dunny Series 2009 designer toys.

Dunny Series 2009 drops on September 10. Artists behind the collection include Amanda Visell, Mori Chack, Brandt Peters, Gary Taxali, Amy Ruppel, Travis Cain, Thomas Han, and more.