loud paper

art and fly

San Francisco-based artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen are working on a new collaborative project and they are soliciting volunteer photographers. The pair recently created their Market Street series, which was installed on kiosks along the SF thoroughfare. The pieces tracked Bay Area infrastructure data, such as trees, bike racks, commuters, in gouache and ink.

The current project focuses on transportation patterns at six specific airports around the country. The resulting prints will be part of an exhibition at Electric Works in San Francisco this winter.

If you are traveling to Miami, Chicago: O'Hare, Oakland, New York: JFK, or LAX airports this summer, they would love you to snap a photo of a parking garage or parking garage signage from each of these airports.

Pretty simple and, given the richness of the prints in their last project, it will surely pay off in good art.

Amanda writes:

We don't need a GOOD photo, we just need some basic information about parking garage colors in these airports (which is surprisingly difficult to obtain online or through airport public relations departments). It would involve only one simple photo of a parking garage color, whatever is most convenient for the traveler. Of course, if you are up for the challenge, the more information we can get the better. The photos can be digital, print, or even cell phone.

To volunteer, contact Amanda via her website.

traveling for tiny (or it's a small world, afterall)

In the early days of this blog I was obsessed with miniatures. One of my first posts linked to the tiny ceramic apartment buildings offered by the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. Well, now after two twelve hour flights; a week-long press junket in Israel (a boondoggle, says a friend); and a visit to the opening of Calatrava's lovely, but not without a slew of issues, bridge in Jerusalem (pics); I have my very own wee White City replica. A model of the Bauhaus apartment building on Yehuda Halevi St. 58, scaled 1:270.

In 2003 UNESCO declared that the city of Tel Aviv a World Cultural Heritage site, owing to over 4,000 Bauhaus buildings which are spread over the city. Tel Aviv is a super-cosmopolitan and is quickly gentrifying. The same apartment buildings that spent the better part of the last century crumbling into themselves are now hot commodities. Changed development regulations encourages preservation by allowing additions and expansions. It is a weird trade-off and results are certainly mixed: some apartment buildings are beautifully restored, some still moldering, and others, with two or three new floor of construction resemble Bauhaus wedding cakes. Can I get a huppa?

For more of a taste of the variety Tel Aviv architecture, check out Open House Tel Aviv, architect Alon Bin Nun modeled the weekend event on the New York City shindig.

Doing the funky chicken:
On another note, can someone explain the chickens at PF1 (Public Farm 1)? Does poultry and dancing really mix anywhere except at weddings?

back to...

Happy New Year. I'm back from Dublin and my jet lag/lingering hangover has cleared. For those of you who follow Gaelic football, you’ll be excited to know that the undefeated Crossmaglen Rangers filled Delta flight 160. Since I was unfamiliar with the sport, the player seated next to me said it was like soccer, but you can use your hands. Maybe like rugby? They were on their way to Orlando to celebrate at Disneyworld.

Speaking of theme parks, I was surprised how Dublin (endlessly pedestrian and cleaned up due to techboom money) was not a prepackaged luck-of-the-Irish E-ticket ride. Sure there were gift shops with woolly sweaters, tour buses, and a Molly Malone statue, but the city seemed to be used by its resident “Dubs.” I wandered as much of the city as I could possibly traverse on foot.

The area around the Grand Canal, the district that’s seen the bulk of rapid development, especially struck me: lots of not bad modern lofts and office buildings. U2 is planning a tower and Libeskind is signed up for a performing arts center. The checkerboard hotel by Portuguese architect Aires Mateus & Associados (project architect McCauley Daye O'Connell) wasn’t open, but looked pretty cool. The strangest thing about this area is how placeless the architecture felt. Modern buildings that could be anywhere: San Jose, South of Market, or Chelsea. My favorite moments were where the new construction bumped up against the old making strange juxtapositions between crumbling warehouses and cheery glass facades.

The city’s rich literary past is inescapable. Statues and historical plaques of Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Stoker, and Beckett are everywhere. It seems that Beckett has followed me back to New York. Still delirious from my travels, I caught a collection of four of his short plays staring Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop. Existential and spare, the pieces are accompanied by a Philip Glass score and a set designed by Russian architect Alexander Brodsky (of Brodsky and Utkin) Thirteen tons of sand fill a stage framed by mini-blinds and fluorescent tube lights. It sure isn’t a Celtic green, but strangely, my ears picked up an Irish lilt in the meditations on the human condition.

Dublin snapshots here.