Rules of Nature in public space

Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection Rules of Nature was launched recently on Auckland's Dominion Road. The work is in the manner of Chinese ink and wash painting, presented as a video projection with software that allows it to respond to the movement of viewers on the street. Commissioned by the Auckland City Council and the Albert-Eden Local Board, the projection runs each night after dark at the New Zealand Chinese Bookshop, 672 Dominion Road, Mt Eden.
Images: stills from Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature (2015).

Seung Yul Oh's new public artwork

Seung Yul Oh's OnDo, a temporary public sculpture at Ballantyne's Park on Auckland's Dominion Road, which is known for its Asian restaurants. You can read a review of the piece here.

A coastal walk of art

Len Lye's Wind Wand is a striking and much-loved feature of New Plymouth's coastal walkway, which also includes John Reynolds' Big Wave Territory. This work celebrates Taranaki's rich cultural landscape, directing passers by to various local and regional destinations - the Mountain, Paritutu Rock and Sugar Loaf Island, SPOT X and The Forgotten World Highway. Using Transit New Zealand's road design format and materials, the high reflection sign also provides cultural points of departure, including artistic legacies, such as the writing of celebrated author Ronald Hugh Morrieson and Len Lye's kinetic sculpture.

Images: Len Lye's Wind Wand and John Reynolds, Big Wave Territory, Coastal Walkway, New Plymouth

Lozano-Hemmers installation celebrating free speech runs into NYPD censorship

Rafael Lozano-Hemer is turning the Park Avenue tunnel in New York into a reverberating sound and light installation celebrating free speech. Visitors will find a silver intercom to speak into and their comments will pulse through the tunnel in waves of sound and light. However, the NYPD has voiced concerns about content and has asked the artist to install a time delay so comments can be regulated. Lozano-Hemmer has refused to play ball saying "This is the place for people to express their views...I've never in my life censored a work, and I won't do it."
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's voice tunnel, Park Avenue tunnel NYC, 3-18 August 2013

Sydney's symbolic gift to Christchurch sits in storage while site negotiations continue

Eight years after Neil Dawson's Fanfare (dubbed the disco ball) was suspended from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to celebrate the arrival of the 2005 New Year, it will be reinstalled in Christchurch - that is when the location has been agreed upon. SCAPE Biennale director Deborah McCormick, says it should be sited beside a freeway at the Northern entrance to the city as it requires an expansive space and would create a striking welcome to the city. Dawson also favours the freeway site where he hopes it will "become a celebration and an icon of the dynamic, cultural city we are building," but the Christchurch City Council says other sites should be investigated, including the city centre and the airport.

Fanfare was gifted to Christchurch by the city of Sydney in 2007, but has remained in storage as the search for a site began. "The Council had no idea this gift would be so symbolic," said Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore. "It feels appropriate that this centerpiece of our celebrations should return to New Zealand to help inspire the people of Christchurch as they rebuild."  
Image: Neil Daswon's Fanfare (2004), Sydney Harbour Bridge. Photo: Russell Hoore

Paola Pivi at the High Line

Paola Pivi's Untitled (Zebra) is the latest billboard project at New York's High Line. Pivi's work is the seventh installment on the 25-by-75-foot billboard, which has previously featured works by John Baldessari, Anne Collier, David Shrigley, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, Elad Lassry and Thomas Bayle. Read more...
Image: Paola Pivi, Untitled (Zebras), High Line Billboard to 2 January 2013

Rob Garrett to curate NARRACJE Festival of art in public space

Rob Garrett will curate the 5th edition of NARRACJE Festival - Installations and Interventions in Public Space, which takes place in Gadansk, Poland in November 2013. Read more...

Image: Auckland-based, independent curator Rob Garrett

Christo's colossal sculpture for the desert sands of Al Gharbia near Abu Dhabi

Christo is creating for Abu Dhabi a colossal 150-metre-high, flat-topped pyramid that would overshadow the Great Pyramid of Giza. The work will be made out 410,000 multi-coloured oil barrels inspired by the yellow and red sands of Al Gharbia, which he views as a "spectacularly beautiful desert location" for the work. Read more...

Image: model of Christo's Mastaba planned for a desert location near Abu Dhabi

Bristol launches an international award for playful art in public space

"We need to see more playfulness in our cities and public spaces," says Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller in support of a new award launched in Bristol for an artist "who can devise an artwork that embraces openness, playfulness and technology to engage and surprise audiences." The £30,000 International Playable City Award, which is an initiative of the cross-artform venue and producer Watershed,  has been co-funded by a cluster of creative and technology companies to champion Bristol as a hub for cutting-edge creativity.
Image: Jeremy Deller on his inflatable Stonehenge work Sacrilege 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer lights up Philadelphia's night sky with an interactive artwork

Open Air is new interactive light experience created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer "to open up a new public space for Philadelphians to express themselves in." Using a free mobile app developed by Lozano-Hemmer's studio, participants are invited to record and submit messages of up to 30 seconds in shout-outs, poems, songs, rants dedications and proposals. In response 24 powerful robotic searchlights stationed along a half-mile section of Benjamin Franklin Parkway create a dynamic light formation in the sky. The lights respond in brightness and position to the GPS location of participants and the frequency and amplitude of their voice recordings. All participants receive a personalised webpage created automatically with their message and images of the light sculpture that their voice created.
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmers' Open Air, staged with the Association for Art in Philadelphia

Nathan Coley's A Place beyond Belief reaches Kosovo

Nathan Coley's A Place beyond Belief opened this month in Pristina. Mounted on 7-metre-high scaffolding with the text picked out in light bulbs, the sculpture sits in patch of scrubland between a library and a half-built, half-ruined orthodox church which is a reminder of Slobodan Milosevic's oppressive regime. The idea to locate the work in Kosovo's capital came from Petrit Selimi, the country's minister for foreign affairs. He says: "Sited by the church that Milsovic started to build, it stands as testimony not to religious belief, but the misuse of religious belief. It is also next to the library: between a beacon of hope and a beacon of destruction." Read more...

Image: Nathan Coley's A Place Beyond Belief in Pristina, Kosovo 

Christopher Columbus statue gets an art makeover

Tatsu Nishi's new Public Art Fund-commissioned work puts viewers in a room with Christopher Columbus. Nishi has placed a spacious, furnished living room 60 feet above NY's Columbus Circle, atop a pedestal of metal scaffolding. Visitors climb six flights of stairs to to reach the room, which measures 30 x 17 feet with a 16-foot ceiling height. In the centre of the room is the 13-foot-tall marble statue of Christopher Columbus, made by Gaetano Russo, that has stood over the plaza for 120 years.
Image: Tatsu Nishi's Discovering Columbus, Columbus Circle, New York

Yayoi Kusama to stage a 120-foot version of Yellow Trees near the High Line

Yayoi Kusama is set to create a 120-foot version of her Yellow Trees in New York's meatpacking district. The artwork, which doubles as netting for a condo construction site, will be visible from New York's High Line, making it the latest in a number of artworks that galleries, developers and artists have staged in sight of the elevated park, hoping to cash in on the crowds that use it every day.
Image: A rendering of Yayoi Kusama's Yellow Trees, commissioned by DDG partners

Common Ground: where an an artist's personal vision intersects with civic function

The New York Public Art Fund has launched its summer exhibition programme starting with Common Ground a group exhibition featuring sculpture, installation and performance. Curated by Nicholas Baume, the exhibition looks at how different works of art approach the idea of public sculpture and civic engagement. Read more...
Image: Paul McCarthy's inflatable ketchup bottle in Common Ground, a Public Art Fund exhibition curated by Nicholas Baume

Larry Gagosian and Miucca Prada team up to fundraise for restoration of De Maria's Lightning Field

Commissioned by the Dia Foundation and completed in 1977, Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field in the remote desert of western New Mexico is showing signs of age and is in need of restoration. $400,000 required to complete the work and Larry Gagosian (who represents De Maria) and Miucca Prada, the fashion designer and collector have teamed up to lead the restoration fundraising effort. "It's like a 21st-century Mount Rushmore", Gagosian said. "Mt Rushmore is like some kind of church but The Lightening Field is more ecumenical, more global." Restoration work is expected to get underway early next year and be completed by June.
Image: Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field

Anthony McCall's spinning column of steam to rise 2km above the Mersey waterfront

Commissioned by the Arts Council for the Cultural Olympiad, an arts and culture project running alongside the London 2012 Olympic Games, Anthony McCall's Column has finally been given a green light. The spinning pillar of steam will rise 2km into the air above the Wirral waterfront on Mersey. As it will be on the flight path to John Lennon airport, the plans had to be given the go ahead by the civil aviation authority. Column is one of 12 artworks across the UK commissioned to celebrate the Games of the XXX Olympiad.
Image: rendering of Anthony McCall's Column

Kapoor downplays controversy surrounding his tower at the Olympic Park

Anish Kapoor is downplaying the controversy surrounding the tower sculpture for the London Olympics, which he created with structural designer Cecil Balmond, saying he has researched initial negative reactions of Parisians to the iconic Eiffel Tower, recalling the horror of observers such as author Victor Hugo. Read more...
Image: Balmond and Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit (detail), Olympic Park, London

Kapoor collaborator Cecil Balmond on London's Olympic tower

Artistic collaborations often sail on an uneven keel; the best known member of the crew tends to get all the limelight while the rest are left toiling in obscurity. Anish Kapoor's tower sculpture for the London Olympics is a case in point - the role of the structural designer has received little coverage. However, ARTINFO talked to Cecil Balmond recently about his part in the project. Read more...
Image: Balmond and Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit, Olympic Park, London

Rachel Shearer's sound installation at the Wynyard Quarter

Located at the Wynyard Crossing, Flooded Mirror is a sound installation by Auckland-based artist Rachel Shearer that "tells an abstract sound story of the interconnections between sea, geology and humans." Shearer has developed sounds inspired by mineral structure as a metaphor for those processes that affect land formation, geological strata, culture and communities. She says "it is like an aural map of energy flow narrating ancient general histories and specific recent histories."

The sound operates on a six hour ten minute loop in time with the ebb and flow of the tide. Within the loop there are sections of sound that build, peak and recede delivering an ongoing undulating wave of sound.

Image: Rachel Shearer's sound installation The Flooded Mirror (2011). Photograph by Terry Urbahn

Sounds of the Sea at Auckland's new Wynyard Quarter

The suite of artworks installed at Auckland's Wynyard Quarter includes Sounds of the Sea by Company, an art and design duo (Finland/Korea) that has been operating in various fields of art and design since 2000.

Sounds of Sea is based on the ventilation funnels and speaking tubes used on ships with the components designed for sitting, listening and speaking. The commissioners say "the sculptures act as a reminder of the history of the warterfront and its on-going role as an active shipping harbour, transforming the wharf into and old shipping deck."

Images: Company's Sounds of Sea (2011), stainless steel & powder-coating, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland