Stop, Collaborate and Blossom?

Just a quick peek at some street-art interventions by American artist Mark Jenkins: plain ol' urban street signs turned into flowers. Yes, sometimes it's just that simple.

On the more conceptual side, Jenkins was also responsible for "The Last Graffiti Artist" which builds a little murder mystery into the the act of painting a gorgeous street mural.

Excision - The Anti-Photographic Art of Richard Galpin

Just made an amazing find via Life Without Buildings: artist Richard Galpin destroys photographs in a way that is not only beautiful, but also shockingly revealing about both the geometric chaos of the urban scene and the inextricable two-dimensionality of the photographic medium.


Galpin takes a scalpel to a large-scale photograph of a (typically) urban scene, excising clutter and exposing the fundamental geometric configurations that lie in the abstracted plane. In essence, he takes a two-dimensional representation of an urban space and somehow makes it even more two-dimensional, reducing it to an assemblage of shapes without even the impression of dimension, other than that which is to be suggested by the angular configurations that function in the same spatial/representational manner as an M.C. Escher rendering.

Click here for a time-lapse video (no sound, BYOSoundtrack) of his painstaking working method.

So, a question: in "tidying up" the landscapes in this manner, or distilling them down to component patterns, Galpin simultaneously makes them more orderly but also more disorienting. What might that suggest for our relationship to order, or simplicity, versus depth and detail when it comes to the urban landscape?

(Image: "Cluster XXX Angelosopolis" via http://www.richardgalpin.co.uk/)

I'm Reading....

Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City by Maoz Azaryahu (2007, Syracuse University Press). I can't really tell you why... yet. I'll tell you how it is as I go, however.

What are you reading?

Buildings as Distorted Mirror...

... of their own assembly.

(Twisted, Machiavellian laugh inserted here.)



Image "Cranes Deconstructed" by Ned Lyttleton, via, BlogTO.

Nina Simone + the Spatialization of Words

Too. Cool.

Feeling Good, Nina Simone
Uploaded by mrfnk

From Daily Motion by Way of Black*Eiffel

As usual, behind and thieving...

LOTS going on, so this blog has been malnourished.

A little aesthetic inspiration has come my way from Wordle, via BLDGBLOG. Here, for your (possible) aesthetic enjoyment, is a Wordle word cloud rendering of this very blog...


I've not had much experience with tagging, tag clouds, etc., but a tool this gorgeous offers a fascinating re-visioning of intellectual obsession. Funny thing though: while "city" is, aptly, the most prominent word in my writing and thus, by extension, the largest in the cloud, I've been hunting but still don't see "exorbitant" here anywhere....

As an aside, I'm also playing around with running specific chapters of the dissertation through the Wordle machine... looking forward to seeing how the clusters line up...

Update: Tokyo... and Jenga Towers?

From the good news column: I recently learned that my proposal to the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference was successful. I now have until late May to figure out how to fund a trip to Tokyo (!) and to complete my paper on new narratives of gentrification in three recent city films... more "in this space" on that front in coming months....

Also, here's a quick optical riddle: Can anyone else look at this building and not see a giant game of Jenga?


Perhaps that is what the architects of this São Paulo office tower intends when they claim that "the terraces that strongly characterize the towers are nothing beyond a simple game of displacements..."? In any event, an interesting instance of the gaming of the urban landscape... hopefully one that captures a sense of new experimentation with form but leaves off the structural integrity aspect of a Jenga game...

(article and image of Top Towers via WorldArchitectureNews.com.)