This sculpture of a white bear by Joshua Allen Harris captures lost energy from a New York subway grate, alternating between roadkill and resurrection.

Using this technique, one could craft some blow up buffoonery to make a statement during the US electoral race. Does anyone out there have any ideas for inflatable political fun?

Via Bunch of Monkeys.

Forgive my brevity, but another great book has hit the shelves of fine bookstores everywhere. Street Art and the War on Terror: How the World's Best Graffiti Artists Said No to the Iraq War by Eleanor Mathieson and Xavier Tapies, is full of amazing images and graphics from around the world, all of them offering commentary and confrontation to perhaps the most unpopular war ever launched.

From Revolution Books:

This fantastic book documents with dozens and dozens of color photos the explosion artistic expression of global opposition to the Bush regime’s “war on terror”.

Perhaps if they send us a copy I'll be able to offer more of a description and review...

Japan always finds a way to make me laugh. Just when I thought human tetris was the most hilarious thing to come out of the country in years, the Japanese government had to go and one up their industrious game show producers.

Behold Doraemon, a popular cartoon robot cat Japan has just appointed as global ambassador to animation. He's happy, blue, and loves red bean pancakes—what other qualifications does one need?

From the CBC:

The appointment is part of Japan's recent effort to harness the power of pop culture in diplomacy. Japan created an International Manga Award last year under comic book enthusiast and former foreign minister Taro Aso, who likened it to a "Nobel Prize" for an artist working abroad.

Doraemon will join Astro Boy, the Japanese ambassador for overseas safety, in the quickly expanding costume room of Japan's foreign service.

Studio XX is accepting submissions for its residency and co-production programs. Project selection is made and announced at the end of April each year. Residencies are open to Quebecois and Canadian women. They are intended to offer an environment where artists can conceptualize and develop contemporary networked practices.

Residencies are eight weeks in length and include a $750 artist's fee, 45 hours of technical support ($1125 value), access to the Studio's equipment ($3335 rental value), the possibility to participate in certain group workshops ($200-300 value), and distinct working space for the artist and her instructor.

For more information about Residencies and co-production visit the Studio XX website.

The 8th Biennale of Champ Libre will take place in the Quartier International de Montreal (QIM) from September 24–28, 2008. The theme for the biennale event is Forêt/Forest.

Artists, curators, architects, and lecturers are reminded that the deadline to present an artistic project to Champ Libre for this event is the 10th of March 2008.

Individuals or organizations working in fields related to art, architecture, new technologies or the public space are invited to submit applications for a partnership project with Champ Libre by March 10, 2008.

For more information and the subscription form, visit the Champ Libre website.

Democracy Now reported this morning that the peace symbol turns 50 today. Fifty years ago a British textiles designer created the symbol out of the letters "N" and "D" to stand for nuclear disarmament. The symbol was used in the anti-nuclear campaigns in the UK and quickly spread global, becoming the internationally recognized symbol for peace.

Some folks have created a website, Happybirthdaypeace.com dedicated to the symbol's birthday, with oodles of info and media, including various versions of the design from all over the world.

Peace.

Nearly two years after this incredible, indispensable, 230 page book was released in paperback I have finally got my muckraking hands on it. Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic's The Design of Dissent is a phenomenal repository of political poster art (and more) that I've now realized is an essential addition to any shelf, coffee table, library, or revolutionary basement on the planet.

The book is visually stunning - a keen eye for layout, mixed with a healthy dose of breathing space and exceptional curatorial decision-making make for 200+ pages of explosive and provocative political art.

Divided into sections that range from "Ex-Yugoslavia" to "Food" to "U.S. Presidential Election" this offering from Rockport Publishers is one of the best books illustrating the collusion/confusion of politics and art that I have seen.

The images are part historical testament, part marginalized voice, and part pop culture intervention. Together they make up a book that is an essential for anyone interested in political art, dissent, democracy, and the spirit of creative visual production to pry open the closed spaces of culture and community.

The school of visual arts in NY has also created a site highlighting some 100 of the political posters curated by Glasher, you can view it here.

Maps are about order – ordering things and ideas into patterns that help us make sense of the worlds we live in. They are tools for helping us organize material reality, and they are tools for helping us organize the imagination. After all, Columbus' crude maps with their irregular lumps of landmass scratched on pieces of parchment did as much for moving his ships about as they did in organizing imaginations around ideas of colonization.

These are the premises for An Atlas of Radical Cartography (ARC): the ability of mapmaking to organize relationships of power, and our ability to challenge who has traditionally had access to these necessarily political cartographic resources.

This new publication from The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays. We find a variety of discussions going on in the maps – about the politics and corruption of NYC's waste system, about squatter settlements in Kolkata, about American intelligence rendition flights, about the growing border infrastructures surrounding “fortress EU”, about the flow of ideas that has brought us to this place in history where we are struggling for our lives against a neoliberal organization of ideas and materials that threatens the very existence of democratic societies.

Jai Sen's map & essay about a neighbourhood of unauthorized settlements in Kolkata reveals some of the real politik power of what might seem to be a simple drawing...

The Grassi Museum in Leipzig is hosting the International Sticker Awards through February 17. This exhibition shows some of the latest political, ironic, abstract, and artistic social commentaries directly stuck on parts of the urban environment.

According to Matthias Mueller, Matthias Marx and Andreas Ullrich, three young artists who supervised the show, "Stickers transform the road into a democratic adventure playground." They are a cheap and simple medium with which one can interact, react, interfere, resignify, and contribute to public space. Due to stickers' ephemeral nature, The Sticker Awards were created as an annual competition to promote and document the development of this art form. For more info, visit the Grassi Museums website (German only), or check out rebelart.net for photos and insight to other political art happenings in Germany and beyond.

Also of interest:
Green guerrilla advocacy: these come from trees

I'm sure many of you have been lusting over the gadgets you got—or didn't get—over the holidays. But did you know that the latest object of your technolust will likely leech toxic chemicals once you've parted ways? Or that fresh water streams may have been poisoned during the production of its parts?

The Greener Gadgets Conference will convene in New York City on February 1 to discuss the greening of technology. They have launched a design competition challenging established designers and students alike to "come up with new and innovative solutions to address the issues of energy, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, new materials, product lifecycle, and social development."

The entry deadline is January 27, and finalists will be showcased at the conference. Submission guidelines can be found at the website of their partner Core77.