83,7 Kilo Ohm: Hug, Kiss and Play in Public

What kissing in public has to do with sensor data and Norwegian art.

In May, we highlighted several experimental sound and music projects challenging the definition of art creation. A recent discovery spotted at The Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo should be added to the list. 83,7 Kilo Ohm is a sound installation by German artist Erwin Stache. The project is meant to inspire people to play in public spaces, while interactively conducting a series of musical pieces produced and recorded by Erwin himself.

The installation includes a series of wooden platforms with a varying number of metal tubes that spring up from the base. When you touch two or more tubes at the same time, sensors trigger an array of music from attached speakers. If two people touching separate tubes make contact, they can create music together by holding hands, hugging or kissing — encouraging public interaction in the process of art-making.

Depending on the pressure, speed and location of the contact, the music will change tempo, tone, pitch and volume, making each musical creation completely unique.

See it in action below:

Brian W. Jones is a designer, etc. who moves often to embrace the inspiration found in new places. Last year Brian helped open PieLab, a pie shop and community space in rural Alabama, and now lives in coastal Maine helping organize Project M sessions, riding his bike, and writing about his love of coffee.

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Neighborhood Design Watch: Cardon Copy

What an exotic cat and a stellar cleaning lady have to do with visual aestheticism.

Imagine, if you will, the days before Craigslist. Local business was done mostly through neighborhood flyers announcing anything from a yard sale to a lost cat. Today, these dinosaurs of communication still exist, although much rarer, and remain the same visual atrocities they always were.

Enter Cardon Copy — designer Cardon Webb‘s bold mission to hijack these unseemly pieces, redesign them with a powerful visual message, and replace the original with its aesthetically upgraded version.

Part neighborhood Banksy, part Pixelator, part utterly original, the project is pure conceptual genius.

Besides being a noble crusade for everyday visual literacy, Cardon Copy is also the most brilliant self-promotion by a designer we’ve ever encountered.

And we love the extraordinary lengths Cardon has gone to with this, indiscriminately and cleverly redesigning even the most illegible to make it, well, just as illegible but oh-so-much easier on the eyes.

We can’t wait until someone (psst, Cardon, need a new project?) hijacks Craigslist listings, no less visually atrocious than your typical neighborhood flyer, and embarks upon a similar digital mission.

Dev-design geeks, start your engines.

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Banksy’s Pet Project

Street art, sausage and social commentary.

DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?

We’re known here for our love/hate relationship with Banksy. (That, and our sometimes-excessive-always-obsessive hyphenation.) We’ve followed the legendary guerrilla artist through his greatest feats, his most questionable street-cred-dampening moves, and his alleged outing.

But today, we find him in the limbo between all these things, on his first official show in NYC — a part-pet-shop, part-meat-store Frankenstein.

The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill offers anything from pet supplies to packaged meats to animatronic foodstuffs to monkeys watching primate porn on the Discovery Channel.

We suspect the intentionally paradoxical project is intended as critical commentary on humanity’s extreme egocentricity and our toxic tendency to use the rest of the natural world as props in the grand production of our vanity-driven civilization.

Or, you know, it’s just for shits and giggles.

The most compelling piece in the show has to be the stunningly convincing jaguar napping lazily in the storefront window, swinging its tail oh-so-drowsily. But when the camera turns the corner, it reveals the “jaguar” is actually a fur coat lined with blood-red silk, its “tail” nothing more than a coat belt.

If you find yourself in the Village sometime between now and October 31, stop by 89 Seventh Avenue for an existential reality check or, you know, some monkey porn.

>>> via Creativity

(P)hilly PARK(ing)

You heard it here first. And now you hear it here second.

GREENLIGHTING THE TRAFFIC PROBLEM

Remember The PARK(ing) Project? On September 18, Philly finally joined the 50+ cities that partake in the annual phenomenon of National PARK(ing) Day, and now we’ve got the pics to prove it.

All throughout Philly, those mythological entities known as parking spots were transformed into mini-parks, complete with grass, benches, and random hipster types hanging out.

Over 30 local groups took part in this global event, with art exhibits and educational displays giving the whole thing a distinct Philly-culture twist.

There’s even a Google Group — we’ve been drinking the Gool-Aid long enough to know this only bosts street cred. And now that Philly has officially put itself on the proverbial map with a solid urban greenification statement, we would’ve liked to see the Google vans and satellites swing by that day to put it on the digital one as well.

Because, while street cred is great when it comes to activism and cultural statements, Street View is always better — nothing gets the word out better than some 1’s-and-0’s help from the Big G.

>>> via Bicycle Coalition