I am running a Kickstarter Campaign for the Bright Bike DIY Kits. Even though all the promotion I have done is email this list a little over two months ago, response to the Bright Bike DIY Kits has been larger than anticipated. So much larger than anticipated that I cannot keep up with demand: my assistants and I are making these things by hand. I am actually worried that a big blog might pick it up, as I will not be able to handle the flood. I have to scale the project up, or it is going to eat up all my time (or die.) I am running a Kickstareter.com campaign to raise $2000 to fabricate a jig to cut the kits, buy a whole bunch of vinyl in bulk, and hire an assistant to fabricate the kits.

Please contribute to the campaign to make the Bright Bike kits a stable project. You will get cool stuff in return — Kits! And other special things.

My new favorite blog, from my long time favorite education collaborator. At Design Educator xtine burrough takes on design and education, with a focus on the role of art in design education, and vice versa. written by an artist teaching design. Full of great things to think about as an artist teaching design, and as a student learning design or art or art & design.

I asked xtine to write a post about bad email addresses. These are only slightly modified versions of some of my students current email addresses. I have modified them enough to preserve their anonymity, but preserve their character:

xxxrlf2k1xxx@aol.com

bellabambola967@aol.com

catseyez1984@aol.com

not coincidentally, the best ones are all aol.com accounts…

The New York Times covers the New Amsterdam Bike Slam. We won hardcore. We proposed angle in parking, charging for street parking (!), bike ferries, multimodal transport, passive visibility through retroreflective coatings, secure centralized bike storage, a bike school bus (where a leader comes by and picks up all the kids on bikes and bikes to school in a posse), but best of all, we proposed a bike freeway:

But Team Amsterdam had more tricks up its sleeves. How about bicycle freeways? asked Carmen Trudell, a New York architect and City University professor. Imagine a bicycle speedway running under the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, a rain-free place for athletic cyclists out on training rides or those who just are not going to go at a “Dutch pace.”

Our presentation was awesome, and we are going to work on turning it into a paper or video in the next month or so. Too many good ideas. Too many good collaborators. Shout outs to great collaborators Claire Weisz, Carmen Trudell, Shachi Pandey, Wendy Schipper, and Stefan Verduin.

I can’t wait for my dutch bike!

More from our presentation:

Direct access to the FDR Bikeway from the Manhattan Bridge

New York City has the most expensive parking lot parking, and the cheapest street parking: free!

Think about those 150 sq feet of pavement transported to underneath an appartment building. If the building is four stories high:that is two studio apartments we’re talking about. That’s $3000-$5000 per month! And the city gives it away for free.

We need to take it back for the 99% of city dwellers who don’t park a car on city streets, with angle in parking, a bike lane on every street far away from doors (my assistant was doored today even!), a special spot for short truck deliveries, and a spot at the end of each block for 10 minute parking so people don’t just leave their cars in the middle of the street to pick up take out or dry cleaning.

And of course, bike parking at the end of each block

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Concept by BrightNYC team from the New Amsterdam Bike Slam (Michael Mandiberg, Shachi Pandey, Wendy Schipper, Carmen Trudell, Stefan Verduin, and Claire Weisz). All renderings by Carmen Trudell.

I gave a lecture on August 8th at Dorkbot PDX entitled FAIL, WIN!, FTW?. It is a summary of my recent work experimenting with open licensing on physical objects. I explore what has worked, and what hasn’t, and some of the lessons I have learned.

Marisa Olson also spoke; her lecture is here

Watch the whole thing. Or at least the first 12 minutes. Its worth it. Fascinating. It is so familiar that I feel like I was shown this in grade school… alongside Powers of Ten.

Some things have changed since Ulrich Franzen made it: waterfronts are now viewed as more precious potential parks than he views the street. Putting a two mile long building on any waterfront would not work these days. Also, his vision of shared cars is starting to come true, with shared rentable cars now available in most cities, and bicycle share programs across Europe and heading stateside. I wondered if today’s political and economic culture could handle he importance and respond to the difficulty of such massive change; a review of Boston’s tragically executed and financially draining Big Dig would be a good case study in what can go wrong. All that said, I felt there were two things missing: Subways and Bicycles.

He never addresses subways: do we keep them, do we make more, are they better or worse than busses (electric or otherwise)? Which really is a question of fixed route transportation: you can put a bus in anywhere you want when you need it, but you can’t just add or take away a subway. There are vast swaths of Brooklyn and Queens that are underserved by Subways because in the first half of the 20th Century, either no one lived there because they were factories and are now living lofts, or (I would guess) the people that lived their lacked the political or economic power to bring the subway closer to them.

The other absence is any discussion of the bicycle. And while the bicycle is not the cure-all, for every transportation woe, having spent time in cities like Amsterdam, Portland, and even Shanghai & Beijing, it is clearly a hugely important part of removing strain on existing private and public infrastructure.

Just for comparison look at Shenzhen. Located just north of China’s border with Hong Kong, Shenzhen was designated China’s first Special Economic Zone roughly 30 years ago. At the time, it was rice patties. Now it is a city with the same population as New York City. It is the location one of the countries two stock exchanges, has remarkable skyscrapers, but has almost no urban planning to speak of. Much of the development has been dictated by the swaths of land set aside for corporate factories made possible by huge foreign investment. A subway was opened sometime in the last ten years, and it is in the process of being expanded. But it is one line. Running east to west. And only covers a small percentage of the width of the city. Running above this subway from the water to the city center is the main thoroughfare. When I visited we drove in my host’s car through this mostly-stoplight-free congested two lane road at a mere 25 MPH; all because of congestion, a disproportionate number of accidents by new drivers, and a lack of any other east west transportation mode. In Shenzhen new wealth lead to massive purchase of cars by first time drivers as a proud sign of their rise into economic power. At the time I was there, Shenzheners were purchasing 200,000 new cars per year. All this in a city of roughly 10 million. It corresponds with a Los Angeles like breakdown of the transportation system.

Inversely, the much much older Shanghai and Beijing have established subway systems, and a long standing bicycle culture. Despite being much larger cities traffic moves much faster, even though more people moving from one place to another. The citizens of Shenzhen do not commute far, as much of Shenzhen is made up of large and small factories that usually contain their own workers housing, which ranges from formal dormitory style high rises, to informal ramshackle wooden bunk beds in unlit rooms divided by curtains.

All this always interests me, but I am especially interested in these questions right now, as I am about to participate in the New Amsterdam Bike Slam a Transportation Alternatives co-sponsored bike related three think-tank as poetry-slam. I’ll be on one team, and some of the participants are listed here.

And while the focus of this session is on bikes in the harbor area (something dear to my heart as I commute to teach at the College of Staten Island/CUNY by bike and ferry), seeing (or maybe re-seeing) Franzen’s film has spurred my thinking in a different direction.

(via Urban Omnibus)

In early September I will be participating in New Amsterdam Bike Slam, Transportation Alternative’s co-sponsored bike think-tank as poetry-slam. As the description says:

Over three challenging rounds, each team will defend its proposals in front of a panel of expert judges and a live audience. At the end of the evening, the judges will declare a winner, with the most innovative and practical plan for making New York, and New Yorkers, more bicycle-friendly.

I’m brainstorming already, and I welcome suggestions about how to improve biking in downtown and the NY Harbor area. This is, of course, something near and dear to my heart as I commute by bike to CSI via the SI Ferry.

This is the first experiment with making a laptop stand.  Cardboard mockups, Foamcore  refined design, then final one cut out of wood (bubinga).  It was really interesting to see how much my sense of process had changed since using the laser cutter.  I wanted to just draw out the shape, and let the laser cut it all, but of course we (my dad and i – he did most of the cutting work on this one) had to work step by step angle by angle, cut by cut. I forgot how to work that way, but over the last few weeks, i’ve remembered it.

I really wanted to make a round one with steam bent wood, but we never got around to it.

Liz Danzico (of Bobulate and SVA) asked me to finish this sentence in front of a camera: “So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ___________ ”

I think the most important piece of advice is to bring your camera everywhere you go. If you think your camera is too big, get a smaller one. I have a big DSLR that almost never gets used for anything other than documentation, but I always have my little point and shoot with me.

Just this weekend I was at a wedding. I didn’t bring the camera because… well, I’ve shot my fair share of weddings. But I cursed myself for not bringing it, not because I wanted to photograph the proceedings, but because there were some remarkable architectural details in the …mansion… that it was held in. The floors were all end grain pine. End grain is very hard, and if you cut and lay out pieces like a loaf of bread, you get beautiful patterns as the little bits of sapwood form quilt-like repeated triangles that wax and wane with the portion of the sapwood in the original board.

Sounds beautiful, right? Too bad I didn’t take a picture, and instead have to describe it imperfectly.

I think this advice holds true for any visual maker, artist, designer, architect, gardener.

Black Market Type and Print Shop

July 9 – August 14, 2009
Opening July 9, 6-8pm

This installation is guest curated by Joseph del Pesco. He has created font alphabets based on the handwriting of famous contemporary artists, which are available for use by visitors.

Image is from Black Market Type and Print Shop Installation

The Black Market Type & Print Shop starts with a collection of 30+ type-fonts extracted from the artwork of an international array of artists. Scanned and converted into working computer fonts, these letterforms are available for use by visitors to the exhibition via a free print shop.To take advantage of the free printing services visitors are obliged to use the types in at least part of their design. Through this process the visual language of contemporary art is subtly distributed beyond the gallery through street-level ephemera such as rock-show flyers and for-sale notices. Other material produced in previous iterations of the exhibition include personal letters, out-of-order signs, and ‘free kittens to a good home’ posters.

Utilizing the Black Market Type, a group of 15 artists have been invited to make a text-only poster, to be posted in the public area surrounding the gallery. These include a small line of text at the bottom that quietly points back to the gallery. In the gallery these posters serve to incite the imagination of the visitor, offering possible formats and outcomes for their own ideas to take shape in the print shop.

Artist types included in the project: John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mel Bochner, R. Crumb, John Cage, Henry Darger, Julie Doucet, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Dzama, Tracey Emin, Howard Finster, General Idea, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chris Johanson, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Margaret Kilgallen, Duane Michals, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Gary Panter, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, William Pope.L, Richard Prince, Ad Reinhardt, Dieter Roth, David Shrigley

And the artists making posters using the type:

Mike Arcega – SF
Anne Walsh – Berkeley
Gareth Spor – SF
Aurelien Froment – Paris/Dublin
Stanislao Di Giugno – Rome
Chris Sollars – SF
Dan Seiple – Berlin
Germaine Koh – Vancouver
Arnold Kemp – NY/SF
Jan Estep – Minneapolis
Marisa Olson – NY
Michael Mandiberg – NY
Amanda Ross Ho – LA
Matt Keegan – NY/SF
Lee Walton – North Carolina

Richard L. Nelson Gallery: Black Market Type and Print Shop.

“Black Market Type and Print Shop”
06.09.09

Author: Micah Malone

05.07.09-06.27.09 Feldman Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art

Creating fonts can be a touchy subject, raising issues of intellectual property—touchier still when the fonts in question sample hand-drawn lettering from well-known works of art. However, for the exhibition “Black Market Type and Print Shop,” font generation becomes a clever game of connoisseurship. Curator Joseph del Pesco appropriated mostly handwritten texts from single pieces of art (or series of works) as source material for his exhibited typefaces, without seeking permission from the sampled artists.

Ironically, John Baldessari’s Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966–68, was originally meant to look impersonal, and yet the font generated from his work is more identifiable than anything else on view. Recognizing Baldessari’s presence yields one of the most delightful moments in the exhibition. By extracting only the handwritten text from artworks, thus ignoring original semantic content and rhetorical nuances, del Pesco frees the text from its context, though it remains bound by the artists’ authorial presence. Fetishizing well-known lettering has vast implications, including the potential for mischievous profits; yet here, it mostly just generates delicious fun, allowing viewers to match each artist with his or her font.

In a separate gallery—the so-called Print Shop—a computer awaits, loaded with the fonts in Adobe Illustrator. Visitors can design and print posters with their favorite “black market” font and are encouraged to add their creation to a forest of prints accumulating on a bulletin board in the same room. Amusing as it is to simply click the font menu and choose between Margaret Kilgallen, Duane Michaels, R. Crumb, and twenty-seven others, the results illustrate the font variety without ever spawning an inventiveness that surpasses novelty. This remains true in the first gallery, where, alongside del Pesco’s typefaces, text-only posters created from these fonts by participating “international artists” lack anything more than droll punning—making the implications of the exhibition’s font usage frustratingly safe.

“black market type and print shop” – artforum.com / archive.