Guerrilla Gardening

Cycling and gardening are two of our favourite things. Why not combine both with a bit of nocturnal worm turning to boot? Guerrilla Gardening has been growing (pardon the pun) in popularity over the last ten years. This London outfit has taken the obsession to the next level and are doing some fantastic things. Strap on your Ninja mask and use all your green thumb stealth to transform your neighbourhood.

Werribee wanderings..

Right now Werribee has more to offer than its usual slightly pungent aroma.

The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award is on at Werribee Park until May 27th. Launched in 2000, this is Australia’s richest prize for sculptors and features an eclectic bunch of site-specific and monolithic explorations.

While in Werribee go check out the wild animals. No, not the ones speeding down the Princes Fwy in their hotted up WRX’s. The real wild animals of Werribee Open Range Zoo. The recently opened Kubu River Hippo ‘experience’ is well worth checking out. The zoo has had several upgrades over the years by various LA's. If you don’t go for the animals, go for the great design.

Teaching AutoCAD to sing...

Ray Bennett, an architect at McCarthy Hammers Architects in Dallas, went to architecture school on a music scholarship. And though he was aware of similarities between the two arts, that was the most direct link they had in his mind until he was inspired by a Rem Koolhaas lecture on the topic.

"The lecture was on a Thursday night," he said. "By that Monday, I had the program completed. It didn't take me very long to do, but it took 20 years to come up with the idea."

"The idea" was that he could run the numerical values that his Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) system assigned to songs through AutoCAD, and see what the songs look like when rendered. The program he wrote to do the conversion, which he calls Alchemist, won a 2002 AutoDesk iDesign award.

"I've got time in the X value, pitch in the Z value, and then pan, where the instrument actually sits in the orchestra, in the Y value," he said.
He can play keyboards; he can design buildings; and now he's linked the two. But Bennett is still looking for new challenges: "I'm teaching myself to play guitar," he said. "It's not going very well at the moment."

Olafur Eliasson

The cubic structural evolution project 2004

2 March to 13 May 2007 Ground Level, NGV International Admission free

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin. Concerned with the way we see the world, his photographs, sculptures and installations explore relationships between perception and reality, nature and technology, the individual and the environment. Inspired by the landscapes of his ancestral homeland Iceland, many of his installations incorporate natural phenomena such as ice, mist and light, often reconstructed artificially within a gallery environment.

The cubic structural evolution project 2004 is a spectacular installation that invites visitors to participate in the construction of a cityscape using thousands of pieces of Lego. For Eliasson, audience collaboration is of central importance. As he has stated, ‘I see that the person, when engaging in a project of mine, influences the meanings generated.’

Olafur Eliasson represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and received widespread attention for his installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern, London in 2003-04. on loan from the Queensland Art Gallery.

Pecha Kucha Night Melbourne Volume 02
Tuesday 20th February, 2007
Bar opens @ 6pm, Presentations start @ 8pm
The Blue Diamond Social Salon & Cabaret, Level 15, 123 Queen Street

The Creative Prison

“Creative cities where people feel engaged and involved are economically and socially more successful. Why should prisons be any different? Creative Prision is a positive attempt to look at things in a diferent way.”

The Creative Prison places the design of prison buildings in the hands of the staff and inmates themselves. Developed by architect Will Alsop, artists Shona Illingworth and Jon Ford, and led by the radical arts organisation Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), the collaboration examines how the design of prions informs their effectiveness and challenges attitudes to current prisoner rehabilitation. The project involved a unique collaboration with prison staff and with inmates serving life sentences at HMP Gartree, Leicestershire.

Air Trees!

"The proposal for the Eco-boulevard of Vallecas can be defined as an operation of urban recycling that consists of the following actuations: the installation of three social revitalizing air trees placed along the existing urbanization, the densification of trees within their existing concourse, and the reduction and asymmetric disposition of the traffic routes, and superficial interventions within the existing urbanization that achieve reconfiguration of the executed urban development."

Where Money's No Object, Space is No Problem

The Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle
by Weiss/Manfredi Architects

"Their final breakthrough in conceptualizing the park came while hashing out the design problems at a favorite New York bar, the Odeon. "This took a couple margaritas, actually," Manfredi laughed."