In the 1970s, Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, transformed six blocks of the main downtown shopping street into a pedestrian zone in 1972, despite fierce objections from the merchants. He quickly accomplished this change in just three days by installing paving, lighting, planters, and furniture. The once-resistant merchants were impressed by the increase in their business and soon demanded an expansion of the traffic-free district.
The 9,000 bottles of water on display at an art gallery in Beijing last month appeared identical to those of Nongfu Spring, one of China’s most popular spring water brands, with one jarring difference. Inside each bottle was brown, murky groundwater collected from a Chinese village.
With a grand total of 0 permanent residents and an average winter temperature of --56.2°F, Antarctica is a bit more than your average “no man’s land.” This didn’t deter artist duo Lucy + Jorge Orta, however, who took an expedition to the territory in 2007 on commission from The End of the World Biennale. Nine years later, the duo’s cumulative work created during the program is finally on display in NYC at Jane Lombard Gallery.
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has extracted 30 blocks of glacial ice from the waters surrounding Greenland and placed them in public spaces across London, where they will be left to melt.
Called Ice Watch, the temporary installation is meant to serve as a visual reminder of the impact of climate change on the environment.
“A Foreigner Makes Beijing’s Smog into Rings” has become a tittle used by a multitude of popular public accounts on Wechat, the most commonly used chatting app in China, which makes more and more Chinese netizens know the story of Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist and “social designer”, who has been making effort to combine the energy saving technology with visually enjoyable art.
Oh, to be a crow.
Maligned as scavengers that torment their dead brethren. Portrayed as aerial killers in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic, “The Birds.”
In France, though, the wily crow is getting a makeover. Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in the Loire region about four hours from Paris, has trained six crows to pick up cigarette butts and bits of trash and dump them in a box.
Mon Dieu! Are the pigeons of Paris next?
East West Market in Vancouver, British Columbia have made it clear that they are very concerned about the effect that single use plastic items have on the environment.
Two children stand back-to-back, but they are facing two very different Chicagos. One child blows bubbles in a park under blue skies. The other wears a gas mask against a backdrop of scrap metal and billowing smokestacks.
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
TED TALK:
I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet.
Five leaders of British political parties called for dramatic action to confront climate change in a televised debate on Thursday, just two weeks before the country’s general election.
A melting ice sculpture stole the show.
Zhang Huan is a very talented performance artist in China. In the famous work "Twelve Square Meters", he was covered with fish oil and honey sitting in a dirty public toilet in Beijing's East Village for an hour, not only making swarms of flies greedily surround him, but also People feel extremely uncomfortable and even nauseous.
The new wave of hip-hop has arisen a woke generation. From it, Xiuhtezcatl — seventeen-year-old Indigenous rapper and activist — has emerged, stirring the comatose with his music.
From performing at the Standing Rock encampment with Immortal Technique and Nahko to leading the Youth v. Gov. lawsuit against the Federal Government, Xiuhtezcatl’s actions show his music is more than words.
"FTSE" is Birmingham-born producer and rapper Sam Manville. As an anti-captialist, he though it would be funny to take the name of the British stock market index (Financial Times and Stock Exchange), but he also jokes the acronym stands for "Fuck The System, Ennit.”
On June 26, contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang released the daytime firework display ‘When the Sky Blooms with Sakura’ at Yotsukura Beach in Iwaki City, as commissioned by Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Tuesday, August 3, 2010: Several Greenpeace activists are in police custody after three of them rapelled off the Calgary Tower to hang a banner attacking the relationship between the oilsands industry and government.
In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently.
At Rio+20 we present a bread tank with a garden inside to underline the realistic possibility of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty by redirecting military spending.
Luzinterruptus turns their art activism towards the overabundance of dog doo littering the city’s streets.
The studio inflated 500 poop-scoopin' plastic bags and placed a lightbulb inside each one.
Installation lasted nine hours.
Located throughout McAllen are over 200 irrigation pipes, which come in all shapes and sizes, and are part of the city’s rich agricultural history. To this day, some of those concrete pillars continue to regulate flow of irrigation-water to help maintain farmlands.