For Improv Everywhere’s latest mission 23 actors and 2 dogs infiltrated a public space and went on “mute” at coordinated intervals. The mission took place near the northern entrance to Prospect Park in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Mute Button was produced by Improv Everywhere as part of the Guggenheim Museum exhibition stillspotting nyc.
A mysterious street artist named TrustoCorp has placed street signs around Brooklyn, with messages ranging from silly to sophomoric. TrustoCorp also took his or her show on the road recently, posting signs around Los Angeles and Miami. A gallery of the signs can be viewed on TrustoCorp’s flickr page.
For Improv Everywhere’s latest mission, over 2,000 people walked “invisible dogs” down the streets of Brooklyn on a Sunday afternoon. The leashes were on loan from the current owner of 51 Bergen Street, the factory space where the invisible dog toy was invented in the 1970s. Participants of all ages spread out from Red Hook to Brooklyn Heights, very seriously walking their very silly dogs.
The Putting Lot is the awesome new putt putt course built in an abandoned lot in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their site explains:
Each hole is designed by a different team of artists and architects around themes of urban sustainability. Playing a round at the lot is an interactive experience, requiring golfers to step inside the artist’s visions and the ideas that have inspired them. Through the transformation of the lot, the construction of the holes, and a series of events held in the public area, we hope to provide a forum for discussing urban sustainability in a new context.
Ghost Hole, pictured above, is a hole created by artist Ben Roosevelt. Ben describes the hole:
To make my part of the course, the exact area of the vacant lot in Brooklyn where my hole would be built was photographed prior to any cleaning or building. Then the photographs were used to make an outdoor, high-traffic decal for the actual playing surface of the hole. A player could look down and see what was in the exact spot before building: trash, debris, rocks, etc.
This project happened six years ago, but this video just popped up on the net last month. In August of 2003 the Madagascar Institute had a massive “condiment war” in DUMBO Brooklyn.
There were supposed to be four armies: Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Greenpoint-based art collective WAMP, and “the bloodthirsty public, banded together in an Irregular Militia.” (Several civilians also posed as pacifists, meditating in the Lotus position even as they were pelted.) The teams were demarked by the color of their armbands (civies in yellow) and stationed in opposite corners, but as soon as the schnitzel hit the fan, all was chaos.
Noise makers and blow horns filled the air, as did a dizzying plethora of condiments. Suddenly I felt like I was in Saving Private Ryan. Men and women in plastic coveralls ran around spraying each other, or throwing chunks of hot dog, dough, pretty much anything edible. A woman wheeled an ice cream cart into the center of the staging area and pulled a hose out of it, spraying everyone around her. Another combatant hid her condiments in a baby carriage disguised as an elephant. Someone with a Super Soaker pumped vinegar into my eye.
From the rooftop of an adjacent 10-story building, people threw balloons full of god-knows-what onto the street below. At one point I looked up to see an operative rappelling off the side of the building. The figure stopped halfway down to drop a cluster of condiment bombs. All the while I ran around squeezing my wimpy squirt bottle of ketchup, feeding off the thrill of soiling total strangers while trying not to slip on a lava bed of spent ammo
Katie Sokoler and Matt Adams decorated the streets of Brooklyn with some awesome “thought bubbles” and then waited for the perfect moment to capture photos of people walking under them.