Dan Witz recently put up some new work on his site. The new series In Plain View builds off of last year’s Ugly New Buildings series. The above photo features a fake metal grate installed on a random door somewhere in Raleigh, NC.
Archive for the 'buildings' Category
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Difusor is a group of Barcelona-based “artivists” who stage guerilla projects in the public space. They recently improved an old decaying bunker from the Spanish Civil War by covering it with pink camouflage. (The bunker was already covered with graffiti, as seen here.)
They write:
Difusor has been trying to improve public space in the Barcelona area, developing different kinds of projects. Recently we (re)visited an abandoned Spanish civil war republican bunker. Our merge between war and absurdity.
Here’s an awesome project from 2006 we just stumbled upon, An Ordinary Building.
On the night of September the 20th 2006 a sign appeared on a building in the center of Viterbo, an ancient city in central Italy, not far from Rome. Apparently put by the City Council it has already caused quite a stir. The sign is in fact an art piece by controversial artist duo Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG). Looking as official as any other street sign, it reads:
Hundreds of unaware passersby have been staring at the sign: “It’s brilliant!” comments an elderly woman “But I have no idea how to interpret it.” While an outraged citizen living nearby comments, “This is just unacceptable, look around, there are buildings much worse than this one, especially in the suburbs.”
When asked to give an explanation of the sign, Franco Mattes, currently in New York, declared «It means what it says».
The artists behind this project Eva and Franco Mattes are hosting a conference in Barcelona next month that will feature talks from Improv Everywhere, Blu, Swoon, and Survival Research Laboratories, among others.
Artist Jorge Mañes turned a parking deck into a tennis court as part of a project for the Royal College of Art in London.
“Park, Set and Match” is Jorge’s misreading of London’s supermarket parking systems, transforming them into his own tennis tournament. These huge spaces, legally private property, are monitored by CCTV cameras and security guards, and offered for free to the clients to make shopping easier. To get into the game you need only buy some water and fruit. This will allow you to legally occupy the parking space for 2 hours. You can then set up your tennis match, which will be “televised” by the CCTV cameras, a public source recording allowing players to obtain a copy of their match through the Creative Commons Act.
(thanks Jake!)
GuerilLA, the Improv Everywhere-offshoot in Los Angeles, recently put up their newest mission, Aerial Philanthropy. The group threw dollar bill airplanes off of a parking deck in Los Angeles by the ArcLight Theatre. You’ll notice Skylar Stone randomly happened to catch one of the bills.
Similar cool stuff:
Abbie Hoffman’s Wall Street Prank
Improv Everywhere’s Dollar Dudes
Street artist Above recently painted a little mural on the wall of a Washington Mutual (soon to be converted to a Chase Bank now that it’s been sold off.) Here’s another recent WaMu prank.
Artist Pablo Valbuena recently projected a very clever video on the surface of the Hauge’s city hall as part of the TodaysArt Festival.
Last month Yahoo! asked me to direct a prank video for their new Start Wearing Purple site. We created a seemingly spontaneous sing-a-long in a Manhattan elevator. As the elevator went down from the 6th floor, a new performer got on at each stop and started singing the same song. We decked out the elevator with hidden cameras and got some great reactions from unsuspecting riders. You can see videos of the other marks as well as behind-the-scenes footage on the Yahoo! site.
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