Turning trash into artistry is an alchemy long overdue for a species who according to the U.N. throws out over a billion tonnes of solid waste every year. The artists in Convergence which opened October 16 at Lumenhouse in Brooklyn, New York, want to draw our attention not only to our excesses, but to the confounding and enchanting ways waste can be diverted from oceans and landfills and resurrected as cultural beauty.
Curator Mariko Tanaka says the idea for Convergence came from her work with Project Vortex, a group committed to repurposing plastics on their way to and already accumulating in the world’s oceans. Their modus operandi of reuse and recycle is through art and design. All of the artists in Convergence belong to Project Vortext (PV) which boasts artist-members from around the world.
November’s cover (image below) of Wired magazine features a close-up of two large breasts with the cover story title “100% Natural.” The main article (read the article’s comments at your own intelligence-sucking peril) is a great piece written by Sharon Begley about new advances in tissue engineering that promise to, among other things, offer survivors of breast cancer options after a mastectomy. The provocative cover certainly screams out from store windows and magazine stands, and as one magazine cover blog so unsurprisingly noted: the picture will likely result in increased pick-up from young men. Duh.
Greenpeace UK is hosting a competition to redesign British Petroleum’s logo. Entries are due by June 28th; the winning design will be used as part of their international campaign against the oil company.
A few years ago, BP rebranded themselves as ‘beyond petroleum’. And yet BP is pursuing ‘unconventional oil’ – the Canadian tar sands and deepwater drilling, despite the massive environmental damage that’s being caused by their business.
That’s why we want you to rebrand them. Your brief is to create a logo for BP which shows that the company is not ‘beyond petroleum’ – they’re up to their necks in tar sands and deepwater drilling. – Greenpeace UK
The image above shows 2 logo designs already submitted. You can check out the rest on Greenpeace UK’s flickr stream. For more information and downloadable BP logos in “easy-to-edit formats,” visit the org’s “behind the logo” page.
(Thanks to Treehugger for the original announcement about this competition.)
The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.
Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.
But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.
Art confounds so many of the problematics that come with the politics of power and poverty. Take the Hastings Folk Garden, for example. You can’t find it through the Cultural Olympiad. There are no Tourism BC pamphlets that tell you how to get there. You find it by walking around in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side (DTES). In its own very quiet way, it defies the Olympic corporatization of public space and corresponding rendering of this beset community only in terms of a problem to be fixed.
The Downtown East Side is a neighbourhood that was not invited to the Olympic buffet — at least its residents weren’t. As the poorest community in Canada, the Olympic games are largely an unaffordable party that views their neighbourhood as a potential “public relations embarrassment” rather than vibrant albeit troubled home.
What was once an empty lot among the ruin of storefronts along the East Hastings corridor (a few steps from Insite, North America’s only safe injection site), is now a community garden owned by the Portland Hotel Society. And for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the garden has been filled with art to create a little urban oasis with found objects and recycled materials.
The garden was created over the last 300 days largely by DTES resident Jim — who was unavailable to be interviewed on the day that I visited. I spoke briefly with Dominique, one of the artists who helped to make the art garden happen.
The $7 billion spectacle of the 2010 Winter Olympic games will attract a million or so visitors to Vancouver. Official hosts VANOC and the IOC want very much to shape the experiences of these vistors to fit the Olympic mould.
Alas, their efforts suggest a limited and limiting narrative: the silencing of all public criticism and dissent (the infamous “muzzle” clause in Cultural Olympiad performer contracts); a whitewashing of indigenous political and social realities; a faux social housing bureau to field questions from international reporters about homelessness; the ramped up merriment and festivities in the Downtown peninsula where Olympic revelry exhausts itself each night in a patriotic hurrah! of music and drink until 3 am.
The Guardian has selected political artist Michael Rakowitz as their artist of the week. Although this American of Iraqi-Jewish heritage has drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Arab newspapers and eBay, Guardian arts writer Skye Sherwin is drawn to Rakowitz’s constructive solutions to public problems, such as ParaSITE, his custom built homeless shelters.
Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather’s import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz’s projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.
Rakowitz’s latest exhibition, The Worst Condition Is to Pass Under a Sword Which Is Not One’s Own, is at Tate Modern until May 3.
Political game designers Molleindustria have produced a beautifully disturbing video game that reflects the soul-sucking monotony of corporate cubicle life.
In their own words, Every Day The Same Dream “is a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor. The idea was to charge the cyclic nature of most video games with some kind of meaning (i.e. the ‘play again’ is not a game over). Yes, there is an end state, you can ‘beat’ the game.”
To complete this sad story the player must stray from their well-worn routine. Becoming inevitably numb to the world around you will bring you closer to the end — both figuratively and literally.
The monochrome game features a delightfully dark and eerie soundtrack and was made in less than a week as an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project. You can play it online, or download it for either Mac or PC.
For those of us who still have holiday gifts to purchase — and let’s face it slackers, that’s most of us — here’s our last minute gift guide for your politically inclined, arts-loving friends and family. Of course, some gifts here are also well-suited for those people us pinko commie types have yet to brainwash with our liberal, freedom-hating propaganda. You never know, you may even catch Glenn Beck questioning his convictions after watching the right documentary.
Where appropriate, separate affiliate links are provided for our Canadian and American readers.
Tired of selecting from global capitalism’s factory produced, sweatshop tainted, ecologically nightmarish mass produced junk? If you haven’t sworn off shopping altogether, join the art and craft revolution, the new economy of buying directly from independent creators online.
A bevy of websites have sprung up that help buyers connect with artists directly who want to sell their work – glass sculpture, jewelry, wood furniture, paintings, prints, photography, metal work, textiles.
And if you’re a creator, check these websites out for marketplaces for your work. All of them offer opportunities for anyone to sell.
BoundlessGallery.com is one such marketplace, serving up fascinating and affordable ceramics, jewelry, prints, metal sculpture, woodwork and fiber art directly from artists from around the world (altho’ with a dominance of N American contributors). The site is one of the easiest to search and so finding things of interest is a pleasure.
Imagekind.com offers up prints of artist work – not just the same impressionists and surrealists whose work clogs up print shops everywhere, but original work not filtered and preselected through problematic historical privileging or exclusive art markets. Create an account , upload a file and start selling your work if you want. Or tell your favourite artist friend to get their work up on the site.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
Greenpeace UK is hosting a competition to redesign British Petroleum’s logo. Entries are due by June 28th; the winning design will be used as part of their international campaign against the oil company.
![Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010](/wp-content/uploads/v2010map.png "Vancouver [de]tour guide 2010")
