The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore CartographyA new book features work by the fabulous kanarinka and the Institute for Infinitely Small Things.
• ( egoistic ) • activistic • architectural • audible • cinematic • conceptual • graphic • strategic • surface • urban • wireless
Keyword: surface + urban
Pavements in some areas of Copenhagen have recently been marked with mysterious cartoon-like labels.
The street artist behind the labels turn out the be the City of Copenhagen, and the aim is to make the streets safer for school kids.
By following the labels, kids are able to find the safest route between destinations in school districts.
The system is personified by a cartoon character named 'Max'. Footprints are used to visualize a route and when there is a crossing or turn to make, Max will show up and point in the direction.
Related: Hans Christian Andersen footstep hack
• www.kk.dk (The City of Copenhagen - in Danish)
Keyword: activistic + surface + urban
The SMS slingshot is a device designed to create digital augmented realities in urban space.
The device is shaped as a wooden slingshot with a build-in mobile phone display, a keypad and a laser. Users can type a text message and shoot it straight at a large facade. A projector pointed at the facade will show the message as a colour splash with the message written within.
The project is designed by VR/URBAN, a group of digital intervention-activists based in Berlin. They will demonstrate the device at various media-festival in the next couple of months. Check their website for dates and technical specs.
Related:
The Image Fulgurator + SMS Guerrilla Projector + Facade Printer + Graffiti Analysis
• www.vrurban.org/smslingshot.html + a demonstration on YouTube
Keyword: activistic + urban
Copenhagen Poverty Walks is a new alternative walking tour giving locals as well as visitors a unique opportunity to experience the city from the perspective of homeless people.
The tours are guided by homeless themselves and during the walk, participants will hear about the guide's personal street experiences and universe.
Poverty Walks is organized by the NGO project Udenfor (Outdoor). You can read more about the walks on Copenhagen's official tourist website Visit Copenhagen.
Related: The Other Tour
Keyword: urban
Just came across a video at PopTech with Kacie Kinzer presenting her fascinating project TweenBots.
TweenBots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of the people they meet. The bots themselves are relatively 'dumb', but equipped with cuteness, they manage to get strangers to interact and collaborate.
Keyword: urban
A piece by Nicolas Roope (of Hulger, Poke and much more) in which he plays with the boundaries between a virtual visit to Chicago in Google Streetview and a real visit to Chicago in person.
Apparently it worked like this: Nicolas first went to selected places in Google Streetview, grabbed some of the Street View images and photoshopped himself into them. Subsequently, he went in person to the same places in Chicago, placed a print of the photoshopped Street View images at the scene they were originally taken. Then, he documented it by taking a photo of the image and put it on the web along with a a small text and a link to the Street View location.
Keyword: urban
City Eyes is a project from 2008 by DUS Architects that addresses the border between the private and public domain.
Through a series of events in Amsterdam, the architects played with the characteristics of the window as a screen between interior and exterior.
See for instance the performative project "breakfast" (image) which connects a living room with the street outside.
Keyword: audible + strategic + urban
Copenhagen Podride is a series of podcasts created for passengers on the Copenhagen subway, the S-Trains.
The podcasts contain stories about the urban and sociological development along the S-train lines. Stories are divided into chapters that match the S-stations, thus making it possible for passengers to get a location-specific story as they ride by.
The podcasts are only available in Danish but hopefully they will be produced in English as well as the content seem well suited for tourists and other visitors interested in alternatives to the traditional city tours.
Copenhagen Podride is provided by DSB: S-Train and Copenhagen X. The service is free of charge and available for download on the web, or on your mobile phone via SMS.
Keyword: activistic + conceptual + urban
A blue line painted on the ground currently runs through Copenhagen's city center.
The line represents the capital's new waterfront if all the inland ice of Greenland were to melt, prompting water levels to rise by seven meters.
The line is a part of an art project called 'Water Knows No Walls' by the artists Haubitz + Zoche. The project takes part in the exhibition Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change, which is one of many events taking place in Copenhagen these days as the city gets ready to host the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference.
If you want to know the potential consequences of rising sea levels in other parts of the world, you can use a map provided by Geology.com.
Keyword: urban + wireless
Selfpromotion: Here follows a description of a project I recently designed for a cultural festival in Spain.
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Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.
The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid.
Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches.
Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around.