Using Performance Art to Alert Drivers to Look Out for Pedestrians
A series of three street performances taking place this Thursday and Friday carries a simple message - remember to see and stop for pedestrians.
Ron Krielen is a social designer and a taxi driver. He spent five years driving a taxi for elderly and disabled people. En route, he would get to know them and their individual situation. He realized that this kind of personal contact gave him a better insight into possible solutions than many of the healthcare providers who were actually assigned to each case.
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 White Bikes are the best known acts of creative activism by the Dutch group Provo. The political wing of the Provos won a seat on the city council of Amsterdam, and developed the "White Plans".
Baadal Nanjundaswamy, a Bangalore based artist who works at an advertising agency uses his art to embarrass the civic authorities into fixing the potholes that litter the roads of Bangalore.
"Mimes gesture as they stand in a crosswalk in Caracas, Venezuela, Friday Oct. 7, 2011. The mayor of the city's eastern district of Sucre has launched a unique program aimed to encourage civility among reckless drivers and careless pedestrians, putting 120 mimes at intersections to politely and silently scold violators"
The Miss Rockaway Armada is both a collection of
individuals and an idea. At its most basic, the idea is this: we’re
going to float down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New
Orleans on rafts that we built ourselves. The crew can be called many
things: artists, musicians, builders, travelers, organizers, dreamers.
Ask one of the people who help build and move these crafts for the
In 2017, the political party Ahora Buenos Aires (Now Buenos Aires) was running in the legislative election for the first time. It is not easy being a small left-wing party in the City of Buenos Aires, therefore imagination is an essential part of a campaign if you want to get the attention of the media and voters.
Spearheaded by Latitude Artist Community, Project Easy Access Lexington (PEAL) organized team 'Bricksquad' to help make the sidewalks and streets of downtown Lexington, KY more wheelchair accessible. Armed with only a canvas bag of few bricks, sand, and some tools the teams would make their way through the sidewalks restoring bricks as needed. The damage to the sidewalks was such that the gesture was symbolic more than effectual initially.
Creative Time, Social Practice Archive: In 2000 Heavy Trash, an anonymous arts organization of designers, architects, and urban planners, implemented its Aqua Line project throughout various parts of Los Angeles. The project involved the installation of false "Future Station Location" signs in the downtown area, notifying passersby of the impending construction of a subway that would connect the downtown to the Westside.
It took 17 high schoolers, eight mentors from Kansas City and a 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia to create the first ever social media powered car.
The concept was to bring MINDDRIVE to life with tweets, posts, shares and likes which were monitored by an Arduino device. This open-source, single-board microcontroller triggered the vehicle’s motor based on the number of tweets and posts about the project.
On March 24, 1992, a fake inter-office memorandum from the then Mayor of the City of New York, David Dinkins, was leaked to the press. A handwritten Post-it note was attached which read "Thought you might be interested in seeing what the Mayor's up to! 'Mayor to Sell the Brooklyn Bridge!' Think this will fly?? I love New York!!!"
A technological feat has emerged amid the Chilean protests. A video of protestors bringing down a police drone has gone viral on social media sites. These protestors didn't use any physical or gun force to bring the drone down. Instead, they used another form of technology: lasers. A lot of bright green laser beams were pointed in unison at the drone, which can be seen moving erratically, before quickly falling down to Earth.
The streets of Santiago are once again alive with the spirit of revolution. For weeks now, working-class Chileans have occupied national monuments and blocked major intersections in protest of widespread inequality. They desire full reform — a request so long in the making that it is practically tradition. The country’s floundering political elite offer half measures while dispatching riot police and the military.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
On July 2nd, 2013, after attending the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales departed Russia from Vnukovo Airport in Moscow aboard his presidential plane. However, a "leak" suggested that Edward Snowden was aboard, which led Spain, France, and Portugal to close their airspace to the aircraft, to then be grounded in Austria.
For the past few years, I've been creating what I call "art of social conscience:" tv spots, viral emails, paintings and posters, but none of it has engaged viewers as much as this series of "historical" markers, each one a small story containing a discrete point of view.
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
The Survivaball made its first appearance in 2006, when "Halliburton representatives" attended a conference on catastrophic climate change and demonstrated the functionality of the large inflatable suits ("a gated community for one"), which keep corporate managers safe from global warming. Not long afterward, in Berlin, the Yes Men learned they also work as disruptive, arrest-resistant tools.
Armed with a can of washable spray paint, an artist in Greater Manchester, England, has embarked on a worthy crusade: to rid the region of potholes… by drawing penises on them.
The anonymous artist, who goes by the name “Wanksy,” told the Manchester Evening News that he decided to draw attention to the “appalling” pothole-ridden streets after some of his cyclist friends were badly injured on the roads.
A Colombian college student created this idea to improve Bogotas citizens experience when using the public transportation. According to one scientific study, the worst problem Bogota citizens had to deal within the public space was public transportation; this problem represented the principal cause of high percentages of stress and anger among citizens.
Bus Regulation: The Musical (2019 – 2023) is a Trilogy of roller-skating Musicals inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ performed in three of the UK’s biggest post-industrial city-regions – Greater Manchester, Strathclyde and Merseyside – in collaboration wi
The smuggling of illicit cargo and people has played a significant role in shaping the culture as well as the economy of the southernmost american city of Key West since its foundation in 1821.