Art Rush at CMWC Tokyo

Maybe you've heard that CMWC festivities will be tearing it up in Tokyo this September? A new feature of this year's extended championship, Art Rush, requires some planning. Which is why we're telling you all about it NOW.

Art rush hopes to integrate art and messenger culture. It's a contest for art that messengers will wear while they compete. The messenger riding will become a moving piece of art.

The medium? The ever-friendly, athletic favorite: a t-shirt. Each submission much be an actual t shirt, of course, as the riders themselves will hand select one to wear while they race. The t-shirt should serve as the canvas, but beyond that the possibilities are open to all variety of media, except maybe Etch a Sketch. Stitch it, draw it, print it, paint it! You're creative! You figure it out. It's a great way for people unable to travel to Tokyo to still participate in the event.

Your submission will not be returned to you after the competition wraps, as your work will be transported across the globe, worn by a competitor even after the race is over. A way of connecting people across the world through a love of bikes and art and comraderie. Their website whispers, Your artwork will be running through streets, somewhere in the world.

Organizers plan to display artist profiles and submissions, as well as the recipient of each shirt, on their website.

Yuki has all the details, but you can also head over to Art Rush for more information. The only cost to enter is the price of shipping your shirt to Japan, and the longer you allow for that part, the cheaper it will be! All submissions must be shipped by September 7, 2009.

Do it! This is your time to shine!

Unknown Artists

Stumbled across this piece by filmmaker Matt McCormick and narrated by the now famous Miranda July from 2001. It seems to straddle the distinction between ironic and critical documentary film, as I find myself both amused and interested at the same time. The short film entitled "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal" contends that graffiti removers are artists themselves, creating public works sometimes unknowingly that accomplish much the complexity and well, simplicity of many of the Abstract Expressionists. The film seems to have earned both praise and criticism, both flung widely across demographics including graffiti artists themselves and bystanders alike.


the subconscious art of graffiti removal (excerpt) from matt mccormick on Vimeo.

It won all kinds of awards back in 01, though despite my appreciation of Miranda July and her kindreds, I've never seen this. Have you? Any thoughts about whether this is genius or rubbish? It poses some interesting questions about the urban medium which is so prone to attracting contradictions; in fact, the film does a superb job of mirroring the nature of graffiti itself. I'm not sold on the idea of graffiti removal equalling the original artists' work in aesthetics or historical relevance, but it is an interesting spin on the issue. It suggests there may be some value in those mundane, neutral splotches increasingly clouding the surfaces of our cities, which is a rather optimistic scenario. I am one for optimism...but...still...

Design Philadelphia

Yesterday kicked off DesignPhiladelphia, Philly's contribution to an accompanying National Design Week, an annual homage to the role of design in our culture. It hosts a staggering number of lectures, exhibits, demonstrations, screenings, discussions and recreational activities for the aesthetically minded. Sound pretty broad? Well, it is. In the best possible way.

DesignPhiladelphia boasts events in many many types of venues addressing issues of sustainability, including the technology of green materials, context and innovation across an expanse of medium. And the hosts include people from both traditional fields, like architecture, craft and textiles and not so traditional fields only now factoring into design, like food and ahem, cycling.

Daily Program maps, originally designed by Brian Kelly, available for download on the DesignPhiladelphia website

Here is the link if you'd rather head straight over to the event's calendar. But these are some of my picks for things I wouldn't miss if, alas, I were in the vicinity of Center City this weekend:

Hard Hat and Finished Tour of Green Affordable Philadelphia for a tour of Philadelphia's first affordable LEED certified homes by Habitat Philadelphia
Date: October 18, 2008
Time: 10:00am – 5:00pm
Location: 4200 block of Stiles Street
West Philadelphia

Craftadelphia! hosted by Philly Etsy at Mew Gallery
Date: October 18, 2008
Time: 11:00am - 4:00pm
Location: Mew Gallery
906 Christian Street

Bikes and Bricks, a slide show and demonstrative talk at Trophy bikes on the history of urban cycles from the 1930's to the present, including test riding.
Date: October 18, 2008
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Location: 3131 Walnut Street
University City

Lecture, Sustainable Strategies for the Urban Infrastructure hosted by Minima & UArts, discusses components associated with sustainable urban life: food production & bicycle culture. Contributors include Spencer Finch – Director of Sustainable Development Programs, Pennsylvania Environmental Council, Alex Doty – Executive Director, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Mary Seton Corboy – Founder and President, Greensgrow Farm & Nursery. This is presented along with A Clean Break, "an exhibition of modern, pre-fab architecture and high-design, low waste innovations for the urban environment" up at Minima Gallery. The exhibit allows visitors to wander through an urban green development and showcases the role of prefab components in urban design.
Date: October 18, 2008
Time: 3:45pm - 5:00pm
Location: The University of the Arts
CBS Auditorium in Hamilton Hall
320 South Broad Street (across from the exhibition lot)

Art Buggy Derby 3.0 presented by MAKE:Philly, a competition of buggies built from recycled materials judged on speed and ingenuity.
Date: October 19, 2008
Time: 2:00pm
Location: Washington Square Park
(south side of park)

DIRT - clean design on 4th Street: Bicycle Revolutions, showcasing custom built bicycles for urban riders and especially hand built wheels in custom colors and unusual spoke lacings.
Date: October 19, 2008
Time: 12:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Bicycle Revolutions
712 South 4th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

This expo seems much more inclusive than I would have expected before reading the schedule. It brings together designers in Philadelphia that I associate on a theoretical level, but that rarely seem to be collaborating the rest of the time. Hopefully the event will bring together the disparate parts of Philly's very talented creative community and make design in Philadelphia a more cohesive force.

Well, well, well...

What do we have here?



However reminiscent of the early 90's, this interesting storage solution was spotted by me at the residential intersection of 61st and Canning in Oakland. Rather flashy bike rack for a low key neighborhood I thought at first, but on second glance, I really like it.

Mapmaker, Mapmaker, make me a map.

Not to quote the great alaskin governor herself, but when in the heck did maps get so doggone trendy? Not that the idea isn't a bright one, it just feels almost supernatural the recent and veritable debutante ball for mapping. And I'm not talking google maps exactly, although their technology has certainly contributed to putting the skills formerly reserved for cartographers at the fingertips of the masses. I mean maps of things we never dreamed mappable. Maps of things that aren't visual, but audio; geographic, but not in terms of land forms. Maps are all of a sudden a new way to catalogue ideas and emotions and memory. I, for one, think it's pretty genius.

The genius lies mostly in that the maps evolving right now in cities across the country (and the world, probably) are made by many sets of eyes and ears. They are interactive, they are wiki and constantly being changed. I think their new digital character traits have much to do with their popularity of late: they are more accurate, more meaningful and in many ways, more like the things they represent. Traditionally, maps stood in for one person's approximation. And generally, the only thing they seemed to signify was that one person's subjectivity and bias. Lately, however, the genre has been reclaimed by many many well-minded groups who've been reinventing the concept of the map and along the way, authoring the new geography.

The first example I saw of this was the recently launched PGH Bike Map, a map of Pittsburgh's bike traffic, marked by information like accident reports, bike shops, interesting landmarks and events. You can print off a static copy of the simple geography to take with you, but the project is more engaging on the internet when you contribute and participate with the record itself, adding your own experiences of riding and thereby making the map more accurate. The subjectivity of the information actually makes the final product closer to accurate. And the stated purpose of the thing is to help make Pittsburgh, an unconventional cyclist's city, more friendly to new riders and to keep current riders informed and aware of the general cycling climate of the city. It is a new medium, by which community members communicate their experiences with one other and do so in the production of this terrific tool: the map. Every city should have one.



Open Sound New Orleans is another such visionary project. Only in New Orleans they're mapping sounds, music, dialogue--something the city is rich with, and putting the information into a very accessible, also collaborative map. Even in its early stages, the project has effectively created a document that describes many of the things that make New Orleans so verbally indescribable. And the map seems to infinitely illustrate that indescribability. The creators want more and more people to contribute sound to the map, show the many faces of their city and in the process, create a map to communicate their city's depth of character with one another and the world. The project currently has audio recording equipment available to rent out to anyone who wants to contribute bytes to the map and the Google image seems to grow more populated with little teardrop-shaped sound markers each time I visit their page. Talk about new media.



The nuance in these ideas is their public nature, keeping the information amassed by the project's participants in the hands of their city, in the most open sense of the word. They may be trendy, but also important. In some ways I have the sense people right now in time are grasping at the public experience as a way to reconnect and identify with place in the increasingly placeless reality of this contemporary American life. And maps let people do this. When you map something, you claim it. Public maps, therefore, are a way of collective reclaiming something people want to hold onto. Not so different from how graffiti once enabled people to reclaim urban spaces.

Know of any maps I missed? I'd love to hear about them.

Free Parking!

What to do when your city is lacking green space? When you've got all the spirit of an urban designer coursing through your veins and no clue how to satisfy her? While all the world is your stage? I think I may have the ticket.

Park(ing) Day, a one-day global event through which activists, artists, treehuggers--in a word, people--takeover metered parking spots and temporarily transform them into urban greenspace. They use bicycles usually, to haul plants and parkbenches and rolls of verdant sod through city streets where they literally park, for two hour chunks at a time, or as long as someone feeds the meter, and declare public space. The project takes place in TONS of cities all over the United States and internationally, with local variations depending on its ambassador and by the looks of things in 2007, warrants our undying praise and affection.

The project was founded by the San Francisco based art and activism collaborative REBAR and coordinated through the Trust for Public Land, an national nonprofit working to conserve public greenspace. The latter's website offers a list of participating cities, sometimes with corresponding maps denoting where the proposed park is to appear on Friday. They also provided instructions for obtaining permission and getting started with your own Park(ing) Day Park. I'd suggest visiting both websites for the full gamut of information surrounding what to do if you'd like to park come Friday. They've even made a How-To Manual. How can you say no? The whole effort is volunteer, which is pretty remarkable considering the scope and ambition of the concept. And in case you're having trouble picturing the thing, here is a visual:



and another:



Get out there! If Kenosha, WI can manage to be a part of this, I think you probably can too.