Urban Art Core

Amazing 90 Meters Tetris Game!

Brenna Urban — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:19:24 +0000

The MIT’s Green Building recently hosted the world’s largest Tetris game! The 90 meters tall academic and research building was designed by noted architect I. M. Pei, whose window facade suited perfectly for a 17×9 pixel Tetris screen…

Tetris on the MIT Green Building

As The Tech pointed out in a corresponding article, the mysteriously appearing Tetris hack, which was described as The holy grail of hacks was the culmination of over four and a half years of work by an undisclosed number of hackers! The group of hackers used the already installed LED arrays to light up the windows with a variety of colors for the super-sized video game, allowing not just students to play a fully functional game of Tetris on the Green Building!

In my eyes, transforming buildings into massive arcade games is a great way of showing expertise! Those who wanna see more, should check out the 15 meters Space Invader game, Filthy Luker installed in Manchester not long ago.

Via popupcity.net.

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.

Nawer vs. Temporary Space Design

Brenna Urban — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:49 +0000

During the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland, popular urban artist Nawer (remember his great collaboration with Graphic Surgery?) teamed up again with the motion graphic artists of Temporary Space Design and created a pretty great multimedia installation!

Like other projects they did together, this installation explores space in two dimensional graphics. The attempt to breathe life into an image and bring a sense of motion and dynamic to a static form is in my opinion a really interesting approach, allowing to create impressing results as you can see in the video documenting also parts of the progress.

As his own style evolves, the aim of Nawer, who is architect, designer, street artist and graduate of the Architecture and Urbanism program in Krakow, is to always strive forward in an effort to connect painting with architecture. And that’s what makes him and his great abstract graffiti works that interesting…

Via behance.net.

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.

The Unusual Story of Alex Diamond

Brenna Urban — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:29:17 +0000

Famed Alex Diamond is well-known but still a nobody. The artist’s artworks are popular but there’s no corresponding face, neither a determined gender. Short, Alex Diamond is a ghost without identity…

The Alex Diamond Mining Company was not just the name of the Alex Diamond exhibition in Hamburg back in 2011, it also is the latest chapter in the unusual story of Alex Diamond, an artistic project that has been evading the definition of a fixed personality behind the pictures since its beginnings in 2004. And it is the title of Alex Diamond’s latest book, documenting on around 90 colored, German and English labeled pages the diversity of created artworks, reaching from woodcuts and prints to installations, mixed media projects and photography!

Since 2004, the persona Alex Diamond keeps surprising us with unusual actions, performances, and artworks that unite various artistic techniques and innovatively exploits the means of design they offer. Alex Diamond’s extensive oeuvre includes photographic series, collages, and woodcuts, but also the genres of installation and painting. (Judith Waldmann)

After I good the Being Alex Diamond book a few years ago, I was keen to get the new one and luckily received it recently. For that reason I can now give you some insights into The Alex Diamond Mining Company and the unusual story of Alex Diamond… and make sure to get yours, I love it!

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.

Tags in a Mirror – Nug in Berlin

Brenna Urban — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:37:46 +0000

Last Saturday, famed Swedish graffiti performance artist Magnus Gustafsson aka Nug opened his Human Behaviour exhibition at Skalitzers Gallery in Berlin! Showing some crazy artworks of his Fine Lines series, Nug’s was it to explore the role of tagging within contemporary art…

…and again he used a slightly different way in communicating his opinion and impression: Entering the exhibition’s second show room, visitors came in touch with kind of a nice tags in a mirror installation. Presenting two spray-painted lines (one painted with a cheap, one with an expensive can), following no recognizable patterns, the mirrors invited every viewer to play around, creating different impressions by changing angles and distances and combining lines on different mirrors virtually to an entire new image.

I know, it’s hard to comprehend this, so probably the photos I took during the opening ceremony can help you understand. Here you go:

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.

German City Starts Preserving Street Art!

Brenna Urban — Sun, 13 May 2012 08:12:54 +0000

Should graffiti be preserved? In the case of Blek le Rat’s Madonna masterpiece in Leipzig, the city says yes and what begun back in the early 1990s as a true love story, has now become an original precedent!

Several years ago, Blek le Rat – who nowadays is regarded as a stencil art pioneer – spray-painted a Woman with Child on an apartment building in Leipzig. He dedicated the Madonna to Sybille, the woman he was in love with. Today, they are already married for 20 years and the stencil art piece is still there and it will stay there for at least the next decades!

The reason for that development is that the piece is now on Saxony’s state list of historical monuments! It’s a German precedent – whereas Great Britain (with Banksy) and Switzerland (with Harald Naegeli) already started preserving street art, in Germany nobody would have ever thought to classify certain street artworks as culturally valuable…

Typically, only bygone eras are represented on such lists, and it can take a long time for a monument to be chosen. But Le Rat’s Madonna was granted protected status in just three months. It’s not enough for a work to be recognized as high-quality art, it also should be representative of the time period it comes from. (dw.de)

In my eyes, this is a great story and although preserving street art works against the temporary character of street art, this Leipzig precedent could open more possibilities for artists to become more accepted in common opinion. It’s a perfect chance – we just need to use it!

Via Mazi Kretzschmar, thx!

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.

Revok Interview

Brenna Urban — Sat, 12 May 2012 13:16:31 +0000

Los Angeles graffiti writer Revok of The Seventh Letter is a living US-American graffiti legend. Last year, he showed his Triumph and Tragedy series at Vicious Gallery in Hamburg and now, he is back with a great collaboration between the world’s first social merchandising company The Hundreds and The Seventh Letter…

Police, they don’t care about graffiti.

Talking about some private details of Revok’s life, his career being a graffiti writer and his thoughts about the police, this pretty interview looks like a nice prelude for an even more extensive one coming soon. I’m looking forward to it!

Via senseslost.com.

This post was written by Brenna Urban on Urban Art Core.