graffyard makes past graffiti made visible after it has been cleaned up.
It’s a nice example of encoding the visual history of the city onto itself. One can imagine a future where city walls have a secondary digital presence and all advertising, graffiti and signage takes place via a persistent visual augmented reality system. The city becomes a contiguous blank canvas, a physical platform encoded with embed tags for the reality we want to see. Maybe.

In the vein of recent art exhibitions I did not see one of my favorite artists Jan Dibbets, the conceptual photographer that held a large influence on me during my last two years in architecture school had a recent exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery. His obsession with the horizon is still unwavering, and collision of perspective and flatness still hold strong,

I couldn’t love something like this more. Clever hidden in plain sight street art that creates a small moment of delight for the few people that catch a glimpse at the right time.

via Wooster Collective

Gagosian London is having had an exhibition of art inspired by J.G. Ballard, titled Crash.
Sadly I missed it.

History of the Sky captures the fluid atmospheric phenomena above the San Francisco Exploratorium in timelapse format. Each frame is a single day, shots taken every 10 seconds.

Stunning.

Watch in HD on the youtube

Photographer and Mathematician Nikki Graziano photographs math found in nature

Artist Jörg M. Colberg creates images that are compressed with a customized jpeg compression scheme.

ajpegis a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.

Seriously awesome work by James Hopkins. Be sure to checkout the Balanced Works on his website.

I don’t remember seeing this in particular at the Swiss EXPO.02 but a number of artists working together under the name Waterproof “imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.”

The series of images over at Pruned show an imaginative take on how the Swiss might deal with their new situation.

via Pruned

Floral Fauna: Bird Edition by Josh Brill. Prints of 15 different birds in editions of 50. Absolutely beautiful.

I like 8/2 and 10/3

via todayandtomorrow

Aluminium foil on trees by Francisco Infante-Arana

In a similar vein, Jan Imberi

via Today and Tomorrow

On the Grid is a project documenting the space created by the vast nationwide network of powerlines and the land underneath them. Undeveloped except for the powerlines them selves they carve through the landscape, connected the most rural with the most urban. The shared space, buzzing with the hum of excess electricity, is at times a pristine and beautiful meadow surrounded by forest and others, the uninhabitable tract amongst suburban banality, beautiful in its own right.

On the Grid, a project by Adam Ryder and Brian Rosa, explores the landscape immediately surrounding high-tension electric transmission lines in Rhode Island. Starting near the Ocean State Power facility in Burnllville, Ryder and Rosa spent several days walking along various sites of this arterial infrastructure. Sites were chosen though surveying publicly available aerial photographs and land use maps, and all photos were geotagged with handheld GPS units. In combining the rigid technical process of digital mapping with the subjective practice of landscape photography, this project explores the state as a collection of differentiated spaces that, though seemingly isolated, are networked.

The resulting photographs showcase the topographical diversity surrounding these structures, whose own narrow terrain remains virtually unchanged throughout their straight, incisive paths. The path of the power lines functions as a rural to urban transect, cutting through farmland and commercial parks, cul-de-sacs and strip malls, used car lots and interstate highways.

As human intervention in the natural landscape sprawls to the most remote areas of the state, our lived space becomes increasingly regulated and our encounters with equivocal territories are especially rare. In more urbanized areas, we lose our relation to places which seem to exist unto themselves, where one can feel alone and unhindered. The ambiguity of the land occupied by high-tension power offers the possibility of experience outside of regulation. Despite being part of an infrastructure that is highly regulated and bureaucratized, the physical space inhabited by these power lines remains easily accessible though its sheer ubiquity. Thus, paradoxically, the realm of power lines seems to exist not only outside of regulation, but also outside of the normative properties of the native landscape. Whereas an area half of a mile away from a high tension line may be densely wooded, the space occupied by the wires will be clear-cut, devoid of trees and exhibiting, at most, low shrubbery and grass. The uniformity of this narrow swath as it cuts through the landscape reveals as much about its own spatial utility as it does of the landscape it bifurcates across the state (and beyond). It is this topographical sameness that makes the power lines amazing sites of contrast against both development and the natural landscape.

On the Grid invites reflection on the blurred relationship between networked technology, the built environment and nature through these buzzing monoliths.

- Website Text (An image on the original website)

They did a nice interview on the NPR show Living on Earth (mp3 link).
Quoting here,

Yeah absolutely, it’s a really unique tract of land that doesn’t have any development on it except for itself. So, it’s kind of, in a way its really pristine and untouched and…virginal, its kind of, kind of like, romantic and magical in that way.

-Adam Ryder

and

What’s really – I think actually awesome, is the best word I can use to say it – what’s really awesome about seeing this parade of power lines through the landscape, especially in rural areas is that we’re kind of seeing these, these tendrils connecting humanity as one large organism and it’s a cool way of looking at us, you know what I mean?

-Adam Ryder

Locate powerline grid infrastructure near you via this previous post

Sand Ocean Sky Available 7 Days Free of Charge – Steve Lambert

Paint Spill, 2009

Do Not Touch (counterbalanced shelves) fallen down. A can of floor paint used to counter balance one of the shelves burst open and spilt its content on the gallery floor that had recently been painted with the same paint.

Do Not Touch, 2008

Tara Donovan creates large installations with common manufactured materials

Wonderful and large scale, this installation / photograph is the creation of a super flattened space. Seems to be in the tradition of John Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes and Jan Dibbets’s Perspective Corrections.

via today and tomorrow

Storm King Wavefield by Maya Lin
Opening at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY, in May 2009

The Wavefield is comprised of seven rows of undulating, rolling waves of earth and grass. The waves range in height from ten to fifteen feet, with a trough-to-trough distance of approximately forty feet. The work at Storm King is the largest site-specific art installation that Lin has created, and it marks a culmination in her series dedicated to the exploration of water-wave formations. Because it is executed in the same scale as an actual set of waves, the viewer’s experience is similar to that of being at sea, where one loses visual contact with adjacent waves. Compound curves allow for a complex and subtle reading of the space in the form of an environment that pulls the viewer into its interior and creates a sense of total immersion.

Maya Lin (warning, typically annoying architect flash site)

eyescapes by Rankin