The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots.

As with many of Kusama’s installations, the work is disarmingly simple in its elemental composition; however, it brilliantly exploits the framework of its presentation. The white room is gradually obliterated over the course of the exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as the dots accumulate as a result of thousands and thousands of collaborators.

Interactivity became an important component of Kusama’s work in the mid to late 1960s, when her solo public performances expanded into participatory happenings. A product of the postwar Avant-garde, which almost immediately crossed over into popular culture, or at least underground counter culture, happenings developed as unconventional performance events increasingly relying on audience reaction and direct participation. Kusama’s happenings, known as ‘body festivals’ — or ‘orgies’, as they were often sensationally reported in the mainstream press — typically provided platforms for spontaneous and improvisatory behaviour within conceptual and aesthetic frameworks determined by the artist. Often involving public nudity — the artist hoped to contrast the beauty of the youthful human body with the violence of the US–Vietnam War — they challenged prevailing moral frameworks.

Installation view of The obliteration room 2011 as part of ‘Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2011 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. / Photograph: Mark Sherwood

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Theatre for One is project conceived by Christine Jones , a freelance set designer.

Theatre for One is a portable performing arts space for one performer and one audience member, that turns public events into private acts.

You can check a video here.

Limelight: Saturday Night is a project created by Sans façon taken place in 2010 in six cities across the UK and America, where a selection of sidewalks has been turned into a impromptu stages by turning streetlights into theatre spotlights. The result is an astonishing mix of reactions.

The simple intervention replaces two streetlights with theatre spotlights and instantly transfoms the street into a stage and passers-by into performers, somewhere between spectacle and surveillance. This intentionally subtle alteration to street lighting suggests on one hand the latent potential of public realm as places of interaction and celebration and on the other hand offers an alternative approach to city’s lighting as more than securitarian.

The Balloon Hat Experience brings a smile to your face, artists Addi Somekh and Charlie Eckert take the simple art of balloon twisting and take it to new level, with a world full negativity and bad news, they travel around the world with the humble intention of making people smile and laugh. Enjoy.

Awesome video.

Yolanda Domínguez is a Spanish artist who works from what is disquieting, handling situations that are sensitive and disturbing for the spectator. Her aim is to generate social criticism and a reaction.

“Poses” is a direct criticism of the absurd and artificial world of glamour and of fashion that magazines present. Specifically, the highly-distorted image of women that they transmit through models that do not represent real women and that avoid all those who are not within their restricted parameters.

These images are virtually the only feminine reference in the mass media and they have a great influence in both men and women when building our roles in terms of behavior and ways of thinking.

Using these impossible stances of the fashion publishing houses as a symbol of how grotesque and unreal this industry is, a group of real women transfer these poses to daily scenes: the queue of a museum, the supermarket or the bus stop, sparking off the reaction of the spectators (on the other hand, regular consumers of these images).

The aim: to make it clear how ridiculous, and at times harmful, it can be to follow these models that the world of glamour impose on us.

Artist Kyle McDonald has created software which photographs people using public computers as part of his project ‘People Staring At Computers.’

McDonald’s ‘photographic intervention’ took place after he installed the software on public computers around New York – including the Apple store – over three days. Taking a photo every minute, the application collected over a thousand photos of people at the targeted computers. Before posting the results on the project’s Tumblr page, the artist displayed the shots back to the unsuspecting photo-subjects using another custom-built application.
McDonald explains:

I decided to exhibit them in the same places they were originally captured. So I wrote another app that could be remotely triggered after being installed on all the computers in one location. When the app starts up, it takes a picture and slowly fades in that photo. A moment later, it starts cycling through older photos.

Most people instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face, so the exhibition was relegated to the unused machines.

McDonald set up shop in a New York City Apple Store to snag all these pictures.

via PSFK

Orange tree, 2003-2010

lacquered aluminum

7 meters height

Location/ Bronx Museum for the Arts, NY.

Photo: Ed Emrich

Via Alexandre Arrechea

Brooklyn-based artist Mac Premo has archived much of his life through collected objects. He is about to move to a smaller studio, which means he needs to say goodbye to a lot of his stuff. He will do so by using them as the raw material for one enormous collage, created inside a 30-yard dumpster. And before he is starting to work on that giant piece, he is going to photograph around 400 of these objects and display them, accompanied by a brief history of each item over at thedumpsterproject.com.

Via: Swissmiss

Be Your Own Souvenir, a project  by Barcelona based blablabLAB.

This past January, the installation connected passersby with the arts and technology, allowing people to become active collaborators with blablabLAB . Each visitor assumed the dual role of producer and consumer, with the help of customized software . The system invited each guest (acting  as a human statue) to be filmed in front of three kinect sensors for a full 360-degree scan. Real-time 3-D data was used to duplicate the best image of a subject, then code was applied to turn the data points into a volumetric 3-D model. Moments later, the RapMan 3.1 3D printer ejected a figurine-sized version of the participant. blablabLAB describes the project’s aim:

The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.

Via: PSFK