Filed under: my work | Tags: artivistic, message from below, montreal, unoccupied spaces
Last weekend Chris Kennedy and I presented A Message from Below in Montreal for UnOccupied Spaces, a project put on by Artivistic. It was an experimental walk, a conversation with objects rather than words, and an attempt to access the space above us from street level. Our collaboration fused my mobile mountain (Lamre) of extendable poles with Chris’ research about the appetite of mother earth (Despacho ceremonies). See more images here.
Filed under: my work, parking public | Tags: caroline woolard, natalie jeremijenko, noparking day, porous pavement, public seat, urban ecology, urban garden, xdesign clinic
Slowly, the new seats arrive. For Conflux, they are mysterious. For a noPARK with the xDesign Clinic run by Natalie Jeremijenko, one moved from Roebling in Williamsburg to the East Village.
I also did a project for CitySol with plastic bags supporting my body’s weight.
Filed under: my work | Tags: dripping bulb, light tangible, material properties
Filed under: my work | Tags: body placement, stop sign posts, tools for action, urban climbing, urban ecology
Climbing my way towards levitation. Why do cars get all the headroom?
Street trees drop their leaves and bare the winter, forever waiting at the curb in picket fenced dreams.
Filed under: my work | Tags: catching cloud, caught cloud, fishing in sky, video
Filed under: my work | Tags: antigravity, public space, tools for action, wing
…………….Flying lessons…… Gravitation is a phenomenon through which all objects attract each other. Flight is the process by which an object achieves sustained movement through the air by aerodynamically generating lift, aerostatically using buoyancy, or in movement beyond earth’s atmosphere, in the case of spaceflight……………………… 
The quest for the horizon is a bed, an unreachable, horizontal dreamland of vacation islands where water and sky touch freely. Only sailors and sunset interrupt this line of blue against blue with myth and poetry. The vertical reach of cities, like the upright character of waking life, slaps neighborhoods awake in construction’s eternal quest for clouds: vacancies appear only upwards, above and on top. Lonely horizons are levitating bodies in beds, beds filled mostly by ones not twos. City buildings stand in crowds barred by streets, with so many not-slanted, flat roofs collecting and evaporating because where would the water go? The anonymous intimacy of subway mornings with sleeping fists gathered, gripping, piled on totem-pole-of-hands railings. I want to make eye contact.
Filed under: my work | Tags: antigravity, collage, flying, ilkscreen, swimming
Block Magazine discovered “What those Weird Blue Seats Are” on 2/13/07
read it at: http://www.blockmagazine.com/block_stock_barrel.php
http://www.brooklynpapers.com/html/issues/_vol29/29_48/29_48benches.html See it on page 13of the December 9th issue: “Here’s the deal with Billyburg benches.” “I don’t think she has to worry,” said police officer Rodney Larges. “I just used it to tie my shoe.”
NY1 News interviewed me on December 11th “Benches Let Walkers Take A Break In Williamsburg” http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=64979&search_result=1&stid=1
Filed under: my work | Tags: between buildings, communication, personal architecture, tin can telephone
Before the Hewitt building on East 7th St and 3rd Ave is demolished, the 130-foot tin can telephone (connecting the Hewitt to the Foundation building) had to be de-installed. The clear line of monofilament became a visible orange ribbon, drawing a 130-foot line across the intersection as the tin can was reeled into the Foundation building and traffic flowed below. Balloons carried the orange line out of the Hewitt building forever as it was drawn back inside the Foundation building.
Filed under: my work | Tags: magazine, press, public seat, time out new york
http://www.timeoutny.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/580/out_there/taking_it_to_the_seats.xml
Filed under: my work | Tags: between buildings, communication, personal architecture, tin can telephone
I made a tin can telephone (spanning 130 feet across the intersection of 3rd Ave and East 7th Street) to connect the Foundation Building with the soon-to-be-demolished Hewitt Building of Cooper Union. Until the Hewitt turns to rubble on November 7th, the conversation between studios and disciplines in the two buildings will be vital.
Nicole Krauss writes about telephones beautifully in The History of Love: A Novel (2005) on page 111:
“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme….
There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for string.
The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.
Filed under: my work | Tags: antigravity, backpack, incognito, public space, tools for action, ubway swing
see it on YouTube
Here is my swing for the subway, disguised as a bag. With 1000 mesh “L-train grey” cordura, webbing, sliders, hooks, velcro, and snaps, I constructed a bag using industrial sewing machines. The bag transforms from a backpack, handbag, or book bag of 11×4x12 to a swing of 11×24x2 with adjustable (25″ to 50″max) straps that hook around the handrail of the subway.
see these seats in Williamsburg…
- South 5th and Bedford (SE side)
- Grand and Bedford (SE side)
- Grand and Bedford (W side)
- Metropolitan and Bedford (SE side)
- North 3rd/4th and Bedford (SE sdie)
- North 4th/5th and Bedford (E side)
- North 6th and Berry (NE side)
- North 7th and Driggs (NW side)
- North 7th and Roebling (NW side)
- Metropolitan and Roebling (SW and SE sides)
Have a Seat: Caroline Woolard’s Project at ConFlux: the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets. In Brooklyn, NY from September 14-17, 2006.
Have a Seat is Caroline Woolard’s gesture towards reclaiming public space. It is a platform for a new vantage point on the street. As seating bolted to no parking signs in New York, Have a Seat offers rest and contemplation in transitional spaces. Installed for ConFlux in Brooklyn from September 14-17, these temporary seats are the culmination of three years of prototypes in New York and Rhode Island.
In the city, the street should be a destination in itself. Many people use the street to get from one place to another, but it is an invaluable arena for immediate interaction. Instead of walking to a park or other zone calculated for relaxation, Have a Seat serves those people who want to pause amidst action for a direct perspective on the momentum of the city. The seat is a signal at the scale of the human body in a city of buildings that consume space and light at the expense of pedestrians who are swept forward by wind tunnels in the shadow of skyscrapers. Unlike monuments that overpower people in scale and pretension, these wooden chairs wait to be used by a single body on the street.
Have a Seat makes everyday environments strange, pushing for a moment to reevaluate the monotony of consistent routine. Robert Musil writes, in The Man Without Qualities:
“Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented “lifeward,” and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. This is true even of the simple act of walking: one lifts one’s center of gravity, pushes it forward, and lets it drop again- and the slightest change, the merest hint of shrinking from this letting-oneself0drop-into-the-future, or even of stopping to wonder at it- and one can no longer stand upright! Stopping to think is dangerous.”
This project celebrates individuals actively shaping shared space and the interactions in it. It encourages pedestrians to stop and think. Although disembodied conversations (Blackberry, cell phone, etc) and narrative accompaniment (iPods) inevitably insulate individuals from this reality, I hope that a symbol of rest amidst action allows some people to create immediate connection with the street.
Filed under: my work | Tags: balloon, haircut, halifax, released to the sky, sable island
One braid was found on by a lone surveyor on Sable Island, 180 miles (290km) from where I released my hair in Halifax.
“Hi there my name is Susan Hamilton and i live in Dartmouth nova Scotia and i found your ribbon on the shore lines of sable Island i was there doing research for BIO(Bedford Instatute of oceanography and i was suprised to see a balloon so i checked it out and thought i would e-mail you and let you know someone has found it ….good luck “
Sable Island cannot be visited and is notorious for shipwrecks and wild horses. This mythical place is a protected island with 250 days of fog, white sand, and 150-400 wild horses. It is visited only by scientists and a preservation society and lifesaving establishment founded in 1801 to “reduce the suffering and loss of life and cargo that resulted from the frequent shipwrecks” and perhaps limit plundering. There have been over 350 recorded shipwrecks since 1583. Today, giant weather balloons are used daily to alert ships at sea like a lighthouse.
This post is related to: Five years of hair released to the sky three days before August.
Filed under: my work | Tags: baloon, haircut, photobooth, released to the sky
see my post called “Released to the sky” to see where it went
It’s on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLGIV_8o0y0
Filed under: my work | Tags: business card, material propertie, metal type
My metal type on the platen press at NSCAD.
Printed card coming soon…
Filed under: my work | Tags: balloon, haircut, halifax, released to the sky, sable island
Experiments with the laser cutter and cardboard from 2005.
The container quotes DeChirco…
Filed under: my work | Tags: boundary, face, glass, horizon, tool for experience
The edges define my body and the two blues I swim between.
Filed under: my work | Tags: furniture, hinge chair, personal architecture, space between
The hinge chair makes the interaction obvious: the mutual decision for private or public space. 2003
“In their youth, life lay ahead of them like an inexhaustible morning, full of possibilities and emptiness on all sides, but already by noon something is suddenly there that may claim to be their own life yet whose appearing is as surprising, all in all, as if a person had suddenly materialized with whom one had been corresponding for some twenty years without meeting and whom one had imagined quite differently. What is even more peculiar is that most people do not even notice it; they adopt the man who has come to them, whose life has merged with their own, whose experiences now seem to be the expression of their own qualities, and whose fate is their own reward or misfortune. Something has done to them what flypaper does to a fly, catching it now by a tiny hair, now hampering a movement, gradually enveloping it until it is covered by a thick coating that only remotely suggests its original shape.
Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities
In the Spring of 2006, I collected the salt of my tears.
Cedar at Lite Brite Neon blew the container I designed.
Filed under: my work
Five years of hair released to the sky three days before August and please tell me how you found it: ParBalloon@yahoo.com.
VIDEO COMING SOON!
My public seats will be installed for Conflux, Septmeber 14 to 17, near McCaig-Welles Gallery in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, NY).
http://www.confluxfestival.org/
The seats are still in use after going up for ProvFlux, June 1 to 4, in Providence, RI.
http://www.pipsworks.com/provflux2006/provflux2006.html
