“panoptICONS addresses the fact that you are constantly being watched by surveillance cameras in city centres. The surveillance camera seems to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this, camera birds – city birds with cameras instead of heads – were placed throughout the city centre of Utrecht where they feed on our presence. In addition, a camera bird in captivity was displayed to show the feeding process and to make the everyday breach of our privacy more personal and tangible.”

And they are right! Especially here in London, where almost every street corner, junction and house entrance is observed 24/7 by CCTV, such protest interventions are needed. Great idea, nice outworking! Dutch-speakers could find more info about the concept on panopticons.nl.

Via nerdcore.de.

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: CCTV, evolution, installation, intervention, observation, public space, Utrecht

Recently I visited the Design Museum in London and stumble over an very interesting book, which unfortunately was totally new for me. “Murals: Practiques, Murals, Contemporanies” (2010) by the Joan Miró Foundation shows different aspects of the very interesting urban art form of mural painting!

On about 140 colored pages, the book begin with the traditional work of different protagonists as the Soninke women of Mauritania and continues with the work of artists who generally intervene in public places, including Lothar Gotz (Germany), Scope One (Singapore), UTR Crew (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Brian Rea (USA), Nuria & Eltono (Spain and France) and others.

I took only a short view into the book, but I’m sure I will buy it when I’m back in Berlin, although it’s relative expensive. The reason for that is, that the book not only presents the finished artworks, but shows the artists in action and give interesting info about the people behind that huge and impressive mural artworks!

Is there someone out there, who already bought the book and could tell me whether it’s as good as I think?

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: book, documentary, El Tono, mural, Nuria, photos

Each of the 25 participating urban artists (“the UK’s top artists of the current UK and European art scene”, as Hooked wrote) designed one of the fantastic Boy Soldier fibreglass sculptures by Schoony and created in that way some really good and especially unusual urban artworks.

For those who had no time yet to visit the art show, I took some photos…

Urban Art Sculptures: Boy Soldiers

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: contemporary, exhibition, gallery, London, sculptures, urban art

Massive Paint Attack Video

Today the official documentary video, named “Painting Reality”, was published by IEPE & the anonymous crew! It shows the whole procedure of spilling paint on the junction, which only took a few seconds.

As I said in the former post about that intervention: “It’s a quite nice idea and a great realization, ’cause the whole painting was done by the public.” Nice work, folks!

By the way, don’t worry about the advert preceding the video, it’s not mine!

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: Berlin, film, guerilla, ink, paintings, public space, street

How to write Graffiti?

Google Adwords Keyword-Tool

First of all, I will describe the importance of this article by showing you some web-statistics. Nowadays, asking google or other established authorities to determine the broad consent about a specific topic is a common practice. When you type “graffitti” into the Flickr-search you’ll find 122,597 photos, for “grafity” 5,550 and for “graffity” 27,101. When you do the same on google, there are 7,470,000 results for “graffitti”, 1,420,000 for “grafity” and 6.140.000 for “graffity”. So you see, it seems to be common to write it in the wrong way.

The solution to this misspelling problem is rather simple: Ask Wikipedia or the Oxford Dictionary!

“Graffiti (singular: graffito; the plural is used as a mass noun) is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property. Graffiti is any type of public markings that may appear in the forms of simple written words to elaborate wall paintings.”
(wikipedia.org)

“plural noun (singular graffito /-təʊ/) [treated as singular or plural]
writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place:
the station was covered in graffiti”
(oxforddictionaries.com)

As you can see, the only right and correct way is “graffiti”. So please correct your articles, photo-descriptions or what ever. I can’t understand for what reason so many people misspell their favourite hobby…Maybe some of you could explain why!?

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: graffiti, graffito, how-to, style, writing

Some of RDW’s latest stencil artworks are currently part of “Buenos Aires Calling”, the Argentinian street art show at Pure Evil Gallery and could be seen there until September 12th!

“Run Don’t Walk is a street art collective born shortly after Argentina collapsed in December 2001. This crisis brought some positive changes – Buenos Aires was suddenly covered in stencils.

RDW was one of the first crews to get involved in this new stencil craze. They adorn the streets with a wide range of stencils, some are lighthearted images of elephants, pandas and gorillas whilst others are more satirical, like the design of a gun toting policeman on a skateboard.
(Graffitimundo)

I’ll try to meet them again for some more nice shots of real street art in the city of London…

RDW stencil art in London

This post was written by Brenna on urbanartcore.eu.
Post tags: action, Argentina, London, photos, RDW, stencil, street art