No, Auntie’s Em’s house from The Wizard of Oz didn’t get caught up in a twister and smash into MUMOK (Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art); the above piece, titled “House Attack,” is the work of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm. The suburban house was placed on top of the building to commemorate a Wurm exhibition that opened in 2006.
It’s worth noting that MUMOK is no stranger to urban pranking. Last September, the museum’s pavilion was the site of Improv Everywhere’s Vienna Mp3 Experiment.
via psfk
Artists from the Gaffa Gallery installed a series of falling giant Tetris pieces in an alleyway in Sydney. They write:
There are grand implications of error here that lead to questions, such as who exactly has been playing Giant Tetris? What were they trying to do? Could I have done better? Is the city grid similar to a computer game or different? What brain-space am I in when I’m playing games on my computer? Is it more or less alert than when I’m waiting in line for a sandwich? The work seeks to challenge conceptions of the North end of Sydney’s CBD as an orderly, socially cold grid and beckons viewers to assess their own level of interaction, play and hacking within the city
Artist Pablo Valbuena recently projected a very clever video on the surface of the Hauge’s city hall as part of the TodaysArt Festival.
via Unusual Life:
Tired of seeing the abandoned eyesore on a daily basis, artist Jennifer Marsh decided to cover this old gas station in 5,000 square feet of fabric.
With the help of professional and amateur artists from 15 countries and more than 2,500 grade-school students in 29 states, Marsh covered the 50-year-old former Citgo station — pumps, light stands, signs and all — with more than 3,000 fiber panels that are crocheted, knitted, quilted or stitched together.
What the gas station looked like before the project.
Video of the installation:
More photos and behind the scenes info are on the artist’s website.
Double-Taker (Snout) is a project created by Golan Levin for the Robot 250 Festival in Pittsburgh. He writes:
The project consists of an eight-foot (2.5m) long industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity. Sited on a low roof above a museum entrance, and governed by a real-time machine vision algorithm, Double-Taker (Snout) orients itself towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. The goal of this kinetic system is to perform convincing “double-takes” at its visitors, in which the sculpture appears to be continually surprised by the presence of its own viewers — communicating, without words, that there is something uniquely surprising about each of us. Double-Taker (Snout) is currently active at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, where it will be on display through early August.
Check out this flickr set for behind-the-scenes photos of this project’s creation.