My street work consists mostly of isometric rectangles and squares.  I selectively place graphics around New York to highlight the unexpected contours and elegant geometry of the city itself.  All execution of a piece is done on site with little to no planning.

 

For however briefly, I am trying to offer people a chance to step unto a different New York than they are used to seeing, and in turn, momentarily escape from routine schedules and lives.  We all need the opportunity to see the city more playfully, as a world dominated by the interplay of very basic color and shape.  I try to create a new space within the existing space of our everyday world for people to enter freely, and unexpectedly “disconnect” form their reality.

 

I’m not trying to push a certain highbrow logic or philosophy or purposefully communicate through the esoteric medium of art.  I work instinctively, trying to follow my gut about the sensation of color and space, and have fun doing it.

 

People need to understand that how it is isn’t how it has to be.  My work is created in the reaction to what we readily encounter in our lives, sidewalks and doorways, buildings and bricks.  I’m just connecting the dots differently to make my own picture.  Others need to see that they can create too, connecting their own dots, in their own places.

 

— Aakash Nihalani 

“Calligraffiti is a combination of calligraphy and graffiti...The fairly new art of Graffiti and its somewhat rigid rules prompt us to look further back into the history of writing. This is exactly what Niels Shoe Meulman has been doing since his teens, and at the beginning of this century he started combining the two. Thus resulting in Calligraffiti: traditional handwriting with a metropolitan attitude...” —Calligraffiti

(if you can read Dutch, there's a mini-site with behind the scenes details about the Mercedes-Benz + Calligraffiti collaboration)

Los Angeles and Uruguay based The Bamboo Institute has a proposal to regrow deforested areas using bamboo. The bamboo is in turn used as building material for new eco oriented towns and infrastructure.

Just opened in the West Village, New York:  Bansky's animatronics installation "The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill"  Moving away from this stencil and street art approach, this new work is receiving rave reviews for it's commentary on our relationship with animals. 

Currently in New York at the Morgan Library, 

10 finalists from all over the world competing to be the new bike rack for New York City.

Spending time in Berlin, this killer app is part travel guide, diary, map, and reviews app.  I great Google Maps app (finally) plus iPhone, Facebook, etc.  I just need to make sure I leave the hotel instead of "Mapping" my tour from the computer all day.  

Here's my Berlin tour: http://berlin.unlike.net/tours/152834

Streetsy is a daily street art site.  With the rise of Banksy and others, this is a great resource of street art from around the globe.  From the site: "Street art is art created in public places, often without permission. Street art is made in a number of mediums, including stencils, stickers, posters, paint, and sculpture. In mathematical, political, criminal, and philosophical terms, streetart is a subset of graffiti."

Kenji Kamiyama, Japanese anime director, writer, and artist.  He was worked on The Last Vampire, and directed the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime television series.  The Ghost in the Shell Series are important because the move away from the testosterone filled plots of other Japanese anime to deal with issues such as the machine-man-spirit conflict, urban cities, and religion.  

  

Artist Gary Hill.  

 

One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide."Gary Hill's work is especially significant due to his incorporation of text into video art, evident in works such as Incidence of Catastrophe 1977-78. Hill began working with video, text and sound in 1973. He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s. His reading of the writings ofMaurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other' stemming from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Such reading informs Hill's visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. For example in Cabin Fever he uses the binary opposition of light and darkness to convey the notion of an interaction between a self and an ‘other’. Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer."