Vacuum

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.

Kids Read Comics, Chelsea District Library, June 18-19, 2011

Here's the poster for the Kids Read Comics event in Chelsea Michigan, June 18-19, 2011. More information, and printable posters for you to put up yourself in full-color glory, at kidsreadcomics.org . Organized by Edith Burney, this event is brought to you by the Chelsea District Library and is promised to take over all of historic downtown Chelsea with activities for kids and teens. 

As the event gets closer, follow @krcomics on Twitter for details.

art on a shovel: looking forward to February

February is thirteen months long in Michigan. - A Primer, Bob Hicok, The New Yorker

Looking forward to February, a civic project: a Marcel Duchamp readymade project, a retrospective civic installation of his work Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915). See Shearer, 1997 for more.

The installation would provide a convenient hook for each of these readymade pieces. Care must be taken to ensure that the works of art be completely decorative and not functional.

More: Tout-Fait, the first interactive, multi-media journal focusing on the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp.

More: Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity, an introduction by Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Matthew Tiews in Modernism/Modernity, v11n1, 2004.

More: in An apprehensive aesthetic: the legacy of modernist culture By Andrew McNamara, p. 118.