mail art memory map

Beautiful mail art by Bifidus Jones – Childhood Farm via MinXus-Lynxus.

the forest of signs

found here: The Forest of Signs (Budding Artists – Detail) 2008.

The Forest of Signs (Apple Record) 2008 

The Forest of Signs (Brake) 2008 

 

color pencils

“Colour Pencils” by Jonna Pohjalainen on environmentalart.net via Handmade Charlotte.

This cheers me up immensely.

book paradise

The Art of Reading by Kay Kremerskothen

vineyard by Ruben.d

“Massimo Bartolini’s impressive green outdoor library titled Bookyard was constructed by the artist in the idyllic vineyard of St. Peter’s Abbey in the Belgian town of Ghent. It is part of the  Track art festival, and visitors are invited to take a book along in exchange for a small donation.” The first image and quote were taken from here : The Art of Reading by Kay Kremerskothen. More pictures here: Bookyard 

Shame about the fact that rain and snow usually do not go well together with books. This would be my idea of paradise, a library in the middle of an orchard.

merrymaking as political protest

In 1775 Austrian Emperor Joseph II dedicated a large piece of  land  for the use of  “all the people for their amusement and merry-making”. The park with baroque garden design is called Augarten and I live round the corner, and so it is close physically and close to my heart too. Over the years there have been various attempts to build on parts of the land, which have been for the most part thwarted. But since a few years, the City Authorities in liaison with private investors have been planning to build a large concert hall on one end of the land. Protesters have been squatting on and off for three years now. Political protest has become more playful and performance orientated in the last decade or so, for example in the form of flashmobs. But only in Vienna I guess, protesters would come up with the idea to do it in such style and in baroque style too. After some of the trees were cut down last year to prepare the ground for the building work the activists staged a funeral procession around Vienna. On May 1st, Labour Day, they arranged for a colourful protest procession in full regalia. You’ve got to love the dresses! Makes me think of the work of artist Yinka Shhonibare.

Also, they do the prettiest leaflets! I fear it will all be to no avail.

you are loved

for Mother’s day tomorrow

I’ll keep you in my focus 183/365 by ches jack via  ffffound.

garden

I discovered this multidirectional poem by Amelia Walker – it can be read left to right or down the columns on the first issue of verbeatehim. It is called “garden”.

Through her website I found out that she also does poetry and performance workshops with children and it seems she has great ideas. I wonder how the poetry pets work. Here is also a neat little warm up exercise for writing poetry with children:

typographic trees

tony green – accumulations & rosemary and other tony green work in this set from jim leftwich’s photostream

On a larger scale is the work of Gordon Young and why not associates – a series of typographic tree sculptures situated throughout the library building in Crawley.

See and read more on CR Blog:  A Library Full of Dead Trees and here at whynotassociates.com.

design for education

Heleen De Goey and Dan Grossman from Project H Design designed a  “learning landscape” based on a grid of tires to be constructed as a playground and framework for math learning at the Kutamba school in Uganda which was built in January 2009. “The grid of tires allows for both a playspace, outdoor classroom, and a flexible system for math games which can be adapted, scaled, and added to over time.” You can find more photos on their Flickr Photostream.

They also developed learning games to teach basic addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication: 

Four games have been designed so far: “Match Me,” “Math Musical Chairs,” “Which One Is Missing?,” and “Around The World.” These games were tested at a “playdate” with designers and   children ages 6-11.in New York and Providence.

What a great idea to design life sized three dimensional learning tools. And I like the idea of designers and researchers developing learning games. A lot of research and thinking goes into the development of digital learning games. Would it not be a good idea if game designers and education researchers were also co-developing other kinds of games?

via beautiful/decay

participation and creativity

David Gauntlett’s Lecture on ‘Participation and Creativity’ given on the 12th of November, the birthday of the world wide web.

Part two is supposed to be out by the 28th of November.

Hommage to Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana – NY, ursprünglich hochgeladen von Graham Hutchinson

 

love in lisbon by marcia devesa

 

robert indiana – love, red outside, blue inside, in Chatsworth by niinka

 

LOVE, in Madrid by mitue

 

The Opposite of Love, in Philadelphia Munguent

 

There is a current exhibition about Robert Indiana at the Museum in Wiesbaden, Germany. However, I love to see how people interact with art and go to Flickr: So many of my favourite things. Best word. Sixties pop art. Street Sculptures. Gardens. Over 1600 images tagged Robert Indiana.

Come rain, come snow, summer and winter, in the day and in the night, in the country and in the city, all over the world – LOVE prevails! :-)

neo

 

neo, uploaded by sigrid

I have finally uploaded some photos to flickr, which I have taken with my new digital camera in the course of the last few months. I had been reluctant to switch to digital, as I love my old mirror reflex Canon, but this summer I went ahead and bought a cheap no name digital camera. It took me much longer to get used to it than I ever anticipated and I still have my problems with it. But the strange thing is, that with this change came many other changes, among them new subjects, a new photographic style and new social practices around photos.

For most of my life my most favoured photo subjects were people and for years I used to take portraits of friends and their children and have two or three sets of prints made, so I could give them away as presents. I bought the digital camera with blogging in mind, which would make it easy to post and share images, and this also to some extent changed the choice of subjects: I am not satisfied with the quality of digital images I made of people so far. Because of the time delay it seems impossible to catch the right fraction of a moment when I feel the composition and expression are just right. Also it is hard to see details on the LCD screen and judge the contrast of light and shade, especially in broad daylight. And in any case for privacy reasons I would not want to post images of people in my blog. So my focus has shifted to inanimate objects and to a different way of composing pictures.

street signs art

A great website celebrating street art is woostercollective.com. Here I found the images of Andrea Acosta’s street art project B-Side in Worpswede, Germany. She used the grey space on the backside of street signs as work surface covering them with shadow images of things, plants and leaves, patterns of nature.

She writes: … what to do with this realization, of how to make this space ‘alive’ but yet undisturbed. … how to point at something without intruding it? … when there is so many information already why does it make sense to add more?

… In a delicate but subversive way I use this forgotten space to question and subvert the functionality and language of signs in public space; through small subtle interventions I try to silently make visible this spaces, delicately inhabiting them and thus leading to a new direction in the streets.

… I guess its very true that the space is overcrowded, but when a poetic gap is opened, you can see something in a different way. As artists I think we have the power to interrupt the everyday, the people, the flow of something, to make something else visible; a brief moment of understanding that perhaps turns into a story, a comment, a conversation, perhaps only you change but certainly at the end energy is moving.

alphabet

Most young people today would not be able to identify the names of all the plants in this plant alphabet. They would have less difficulty recognizing the brand names in an alphabet comprised of logos.

By Stay Free!

Brave Plants

Neda Bei has been taking pictures and cataloguing flowers and other plants in the urban enivronment of Vienna since the summer of 2005, and you can see the results on Rosa Mundi. Among them are images of brave plants fighting their way through brick, stone and tar.

Biotop

In yesterday’s Standard, the Austrian newspaper, I found this image, Garten 1997, by Lois and Franziska Weinberger. The image shows a pile of old Standard papers, sprouting vegetation. Funny how, as soon as one starts a blog, patterns emerge – see my earlier post about floating books. I would love to own one of their paintings featured here.

Favourite Word

from here

Garden of Dreams

Photograph Götz Hagmüller, 1998

This is a picture my father took of the old gate to Kaiser Mahal, the Garden of Dreams, in Kathmandu, which has been his most recent conservation project. Th wrought and cast iron gate spells out the word G A R D E N on one side and D R E A M S on the other. It is a very unusal garden, essentially an Edwardian garden with a slight Nepali touch right in the heart of Kathmandu.