Collaborative Anarchaeologies of the City
Streets2
Originally uploaded by Alice Angus
Unfolding out of the process of lattice: thinking about pavements, streets, flows and movements, shifting meanings from day to night, safe and unsafe, accessible and closed, belonging and alienation. Who do you see in the street?
I like to describe myself as a “creative explorer” =] and all i ever want to do is chase my artistic dreams and ermm then take over the world with them! yay!. Now for some pix =]
Old stuff visit: www.redbubble.com/people/sleepygreentofu
Popperbox stuff visit: http://www.popperbox.com/
born in april 79 to an angel and the son of a salesman always seeing dead people, Brass is a combination of pen and paper. a marking for the uncanny, with a reputable smile. making room for tomorrow and narrowly escaping many a plane crash. spending the past decade redefining his styles, t.williams has manipulated his flow in many forms, looked at paint and usually left it where it sat. scribed page after page of code and with various printers, crack photoshop programs and binding machines, produced several home made DIY books on verse. the experimental left, along with good firend C.K played home to the brainstorm, free to air, world of “macho distorto” a two piece ensemble of glue and water. bricks and sledgehammers. light bulbs and unpaid electricity bills. from this the production list grew and a number of different projects paved the way for hours of seemingly pointless fun. to this day its still the most honest work.
Also known musically for appearing alongside sydney veteran SERECK of DEF WISH CAST and fellow mate SINUS of band 1,2 SEPPUKU, in the highly flammable hardcore hip hop act CELSIUS. to tackling the live elements of UPSHOT alongside progressive lyricist QURO. The music, the art, the words, the start… all outward and now a youth ambassador [?] slowly turning the gears to create, invent and summon forces that be to build the everlasting school of craziness. working deep in the heart or bowels of sydneys west…? he has helped to produce different music and creative programs with young people to address and express their talents and issues. he has also been a key developer in the western sydney youth festival known as the “Burbs”. this event is based in blacktown and focuses on engaging young people to help develop the every essential part of what it means to run a festival, allowing them the opportunity to gain on the job experience in event coordination and management. this initiative is backed by blacktown city council and many creative energetic individuals who work daily towards creating a better tomorrow for people to be a part of. brass redefined is what dreams may come…
*for further rambling go to..
http://www.myspace.com/brasshiphop orhttp://utherpe_pl.livejournal.com
Some photos on day 4, from another pair of capable hands =)
Maria and I created our own Journey to the West, embracing the metaphor of low hanging fruit.
Some connections made with Tina’s collaborative abstract art project.
Fitting material for building creative cities.
Something all creative cities need – a bit of fun!
I came home and downloaded the contents my camera, comforted in the fact that I left it in capable hands.
Hello!
My contributions to last Sunday’s world building exercise centered around concepts of self-censoring and rejuvenating spaces for free expression – blank walls and screens where everyone’s encouraged to scrawl, write or txt themselves to the world.
So it’s no big surprise that I’m a fan of initiatives like Graffiti Archaeology -
“Graffiti is the chameleon skin of the urban landscape…
Graffiti Archaeology (grafarc.org) captures this process of constant change and makes it visible. Grafarc.org is an interactive, timelapse collage of photographs of certain walls, taken over a span of months or years. The photos are precisely superimposed, so that by moving through the layers, you experience a compressed version of time passing, as old tags are submerged beneath new ones. You can see how one writer’s style changes over the years, or explore the dialogue between writers as they paint over each other’s work. The project also functions as a living archive, since most of the pieces on the site no longer exist in the real world.”
And here’s their Flickr.
Interrogating Public Space is an ongoing series of interviews by Creative Time Curator Nato Thompson with artists, theorists, policy makers, and community organizers about the issues surrounding public space. These questions serve to complicate and broaden the notion of what constitutes a public practice and what mechanisms are available to increase social justice. As the study of space has grown to include multiple discourses, this investigation anticipates finding connecting issues that bring together disparate forms of analysis—from public housing to theme parks to public art to community organizing to interventions.
In 2006 I met a remarkable 90-year-old woman in Hong Kong. She was a Chinese herbalist who once worked in the Kowloon Walled City — the infamous, anomalous zone of Hong Kong where no government actually ruled, with all the possibility and danger this might imply in such a context, and where life was a series of alleyways and tunnels that burrowed into an almost solid mass of interconnected buildings. I wrote about it here.
I interviewed her for a new media oral history project that approached this area of Hong Kong in terms of people’s memories and feelings of space, place and movement. What are our histories of coming to a place that becomes home? What do we bring with us, and what do we leave behind? What moods does our home have? This old woman had remarkable stories. Of being a field doctor during the Second World War, and seeing rivers of blood in the wake of battles between the Kuomingtang and Japanese armies. Of arriving in Hong Kong, and carving out spaces in the Walled City for her extended family to live. Of having patients who still saw her, decades after she cared for them as kids growing up in the Walled City.
After recently sending her a belated birthday card, this week I found out that she died last year. I’m still working on my project. I think she has finished hers. I guess this is a reminder to keep our links alive, in all the ways that this could mean.
In the last couple of weeks one of the dominant themes in my conversations have been around communications networks and access to them. From internet connections, to public transport, to the history of the river and its shaping by industry; communications, and the lack of access to them have been a key aspect in discussions and critiques of “creative city” and our parts in it. I had a birds eye view of some of these structures when I flew over Sydney this morning…
