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DIA free weekend for Ann Arbor residents April 20-21, 2013

The Detroit Institute of Arts is offering free admission to Ann Arbor residents for the weekend of April 20 and 21, 2013 as part of their Inside|Out program. Details from the DIA web site:

“Community weekends” are another new component of this year’s program. Residents of participating communities will enjoy a designated Saturday and Sunday to visit the museum free and see the actual art work installed in their cities’ works. Visitors will receive a 10 percent discount in Café DIA and the museum shop, $1 off Detroit Film Theatre (DFT) tickets and free admission to showings of the DFT 101 film series. 

The DIA has installed outdoor art in various locations around downtown Ann Arbor, a project which was first planned in 2011 (Ann Arbor Chronicle story).

Quantified Self show at the Gallery Project

From the news release:

The Gallery Project presents Quantified Self, a multimedia exhibit in which 34 local, regional, and national artists examine how individuals collect and often project information about themselves and others in the digital world. Artists examine the quantified self from two unique perspectives: one, how information about individuals is collected, stored, processed, and used by these individuals and communicated to others; and two how entities collect information about individuals and groups for commercial and other purposes. Examples are self-projections in cyber space, self-monitoring of health and other behaviors, obsessive collecting of self-defining artifacts, and visualizing personal and group data.

Image: Cece -- You're It by Peter Adamczyk.

The gallery opened today, August 30, 2012; the reception is on the evening of August 31, 2012, and I'll probably miss it. Artists that I recognized included Edward Tufte who had three very lovely prints from one of his books on display, and Mark EJ Newman who had some remarkably presented cartograms. 

Visit them at 215 S. Fourth Ave in downtown Ann Arbor, across from Eastern Accents (and thus handy to visit after A2B3).

On public art in public places in Ann Arbor's City Hall

Tonight's Ann Arbor City Council meeting discussed at great length the expenditure of some sizable sum of money for art that would be installed in the secured lobby of the Justice Center part of City Hall, where would you have to go through a security check to visit it.

What I have noticed from visits to City Hall is that the art that's there is quite accessible is a tile mural that you can not only see without going through a checkpoint, but is even so ready to hand that you can touch it.

A proposal was put forth to not spend the money on art and to renovate some bathrooms in the building instead. This left a missed opportunity to instead ready-made art as part of that installation. (photo: wikimedia commons, from the original photo by Alfred Stieglitz).

QR codes made from sugar cubes at the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire

The NQRT project had its first sighting in the wild at the 2011 Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire. Ryan Burns organized a group of passers by to our booth to assemble a pound of sugar cubes into a scannable QR code, and Jamie Lausch and I took over mid-way and explained what we had done and helped people make "cootie catchers" with the "Save the date" message for the October 2011 event.

Left to right: cootie catcher, not-quite-cubical sugar cubes, white glue, Ryan Burns, assembled code, Edward Vielmetti, the second pound of sugar cubes, thermos, a2geeks sticker. Not pictured: Jamie Lausch. Photo via Ryan Burns.

Here's the finished product, in a form that your decode should be able to decode.

The cootie catcher turned out to be one of the fun parts of this, and provided a challenge. I wasn't able to find any design help for "anamorphic cootie catcher", the image-warping challenge of making the code distorted enough so that when you photographed its corners on the cootie catcher that the perspective was right to see it properly.

Interested in more details? Follow the code, or follow @NQRT on Twitter where news will accumulate, or contact me if this sparks creative fun ideas.