International Design Competition, Think Outside the Parking Box

C A L L – F O R – E N T R I E S
designboom international graphic design competition.
Participation is open to applicants from every country in the world,
to professionals, students, and design-enthusiasts.
Free registration required.

In search of cutting edge design to challenge conventional urban parking to be tougher and stylish.

Qashqai is a resilient urban vehicle with distinct style. It is capable to take on whatever the city throws at it – Qashqai is ‘Urbanproof’. We are looking for ideas around Nissan’s tough and stylish Qashqai. Designs may challenge any element of urban parking (underground, exterior, interior, multi-layer, ground level, shape, colors, material, smell, sound, ramps, signage, limits, etc.). Urban parking is in need of a renovation. Ideas must challenge current perceptions of urban parking and offer a tougher, sleeker, or even playful rendering of it.

The urban parking challenge is open to innovative designers with a bold and daring vision. Design is an innovative field with an ever-growing number of mediums to create this parking renovation: graphic, video, urban, industrial, lighting, motion and more.
Ideas may be delivered as videos, objects or illustrations.

More at designboom

Trace at Artspace. Post colonial cluster fcuk.

29 August – 03 October 2009
TRACE: Displaced (Post-Colonial-Cluster-Fuck)
TRACE COLLECTIVE: PHIL BABOT, LEE HASSALL, EDDIE LADD, TONY SCHWENSEN, ANDRÉ STITT

Located in a domestic terraced house in Cardiff, TRACE has presented live works and resulting ‘trace’ installations by a wide range of major international practitioners for almost a decade. According to TRACE: ‘the seemingly left-over or discarded matter from performance activity is offered up for contemplation and reflection in relation to contemporary artists’ exploration and research. In bringing together these discrete elements one becomes aware of a certain unity of practice; a living archive centred on process, events and experiences — traces that embody that fragile quality where the object itself is imbued with the performance that created it.’ With this in mind, the collective also creates regular exhibitions of its archive-based documentations, residues and partial objects created through the process of performance art.

For TRACE: Displaced at Artspace, the TRACE Collective will build a suspended floor structure — a scaled replication of the floor area of TRACE in Cardiff. During each day of the initial, public live aspect of the project, the artists will engage in an ongoing dialogue with the installation, navigating its physicality and making interventions upon its structure. Collective activity will include the dismantling of a number of classic Australian-built Torana cars combined with accumulative documentary videos of live work created in and around Sydney during the TRACE residency at Artspace. References to locations and conditions in and around Old South Wales are displaced and relocated to New South Wales, with the intent of creating multi-layered investigations which reference departure and arrival though post-colonial-scouring-cluster-fuck.

More from Artspace

GeekMyRide

Open-Source Automotive Hacking

GeekMyRide is a collaborative effort to develop and use open-source software and cutting edge computer hardware to take automotive computer technology to the next level. Our goals include understanding, reverse-engineering, documenting and modifying existing automotive hardware & software, along with the development and installation of new technology.

More from GeekMyRide

bleeding billboard

I found this disturbing. Anyone who has lost someone to a road traffic accident can only hope that the shock tactics employed in this billboard work!

It’s quite literally a bleeding billboard developed by the NZ government to raise driver awareness.

Source: http://quietglover.com/post/2009/06/30/Billboard-en-sang

Covering the Mirrors, roadside memorials project

Covering the Mirrors documents a resistance, a reversal; where each ‘roadside memorial’ undermines the (non-) nature of the motorway space.

The proliferation of non-space seems perversely natural; airports, freeways, shopping centres, stations and hubs appear at each turn and beyond every turn off. These vast areas designed for functionality, supposed progress, in fact programmatically efface ‘the local’ with its community interests and historical presence; this leaves empty meaningless space in abundance.

Contrary to intent the ‘universal network’ actually isolates the individual by atomizing the community. It does this through an expanding ‘grid’ of interstitial non-spaces that affects all aspects of daily life – from our environment through to our emotions. No longer are these in-between zones mere links; they are fast-forming generic centres, places in and of themselves – that control and re-order the social experience.

Yet the presence of roadside memorials somehow resists this deterritorialization. As the visual markers carry with them a sacred significance and a small piece of history, which once situated in monotonous space they activate a subversion of the spatial homogenization. Suddenly these non-spaces are filled with meaning. These shrines with their folk rituals and cult following hint at a growing social dissent – as an emergent material culture they tap into an underlying collective impulse to reclaim lost space.

Taking the roadside memorial as his starting point, Neuman uses a variety of lens-based media, and techniques that span from appropriation to documentary to the staged, to critically respond to physical and cultural changes in the Australian landscape.

Host:
Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
From – Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:00pm til  Saturday, July 25, 2009
Location:  Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery
Street:  419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney, NSW (426/428/445 bus)
Phone:  0401152434
Web: http://www.myspace.com/dontlookgallery
Email:  dontlookgallery@gmail.com

Mu-Meson July Highlights

Saturday 18th July
Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick Comedic Missives from The American Underground
Danny Plotnick roared into the underground film world in the 1980s.  Fueled by his love of punk and alternative culture and infected with d.i.y. spirit, he started making films that captured a similarly snarly attitude. The films on tonight’s program include Swingers’ Serenade, a titillating tale of suburban sexual malaise; I, Socky, a rogue sock monkey hits the town on a big day out; Steel Belted Romeos, a turbo-charged tale of California road rage; Skate Witches, a glimpse into the world of a 1980s female skateboard gang; Flip About Flip, a tribute to comic genius Flip Wilson. Mu-Meson Archives (Sydney) Doors 7.30 for 8pm start $10

Sunday 19th July
Miss Deaths Knitting Group
Do you want to learn how to knit, crochet or any other craft? Or you just want to come along for a social? For the new ladies who are coming for the first time bring a friend. Boys are welcome as long as they do a craft or something useful.  Mu-Meson Archives (Sydney) 4pm with a plate…

For More extensive and detailed information please visit Mu-Meson Archives web site
http://www.mumeson.org

Mu-Meson Archives at Crn Parramatta Rd & Trafalgar St Annandale, Sydney (Australia) at the end of King Furniture building up the steel staircase. Phone +61 2 9517-2010

Callout for Street Artists – Melbourne

CityLink in partnership with Moonee Valley City Council is inviting proposals from experienced stencil/street artists to create a painted artwork on the internal tunnel walls of a major infrastructure crossing over Moonee Ponds Creek that responds to and reflects the Moonee Ponds Creek natural environment and urban setting.

For information regarding the project please download a brief from http://www.citylink.com.au/1399.jsp

All email inquiries: liz.mcgrath@transurban.com

ECOS Magazine # 148

Old buildings take the green lead

Improving the energy efficiency of Australia’s existing commercial buildings is one of the fastest, most effective ways to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, reports the April-May edition of ECOS magazine.

The everyday electrical services of both residential and commercial buildings – such as lighting, air-conditioning, lifts and hot water – account for close to one-quarter of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Projects encouraging the industry to upgrade existing buildings in preference to constructing ‘green’ buildings from scratch – thus avoiding massive hidden ‘embodied’ emissions from construction, materials, and waste – are springing up in the nation’s capitals, involving government agencies and key players such as the Green Building Council of Australia.

Next-gen cars: they’re almost here

After our decades-long love affair with petrol and diesel-powered vehicles, the era of greener cars and trucks is almost here, thanks to escalating environmental concerns, the recent oil-price spike and the global financial crisis.

Around 15 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions are generated from transport, although a 20 per cent decline in new car sales over the past year and a growing buyer preference for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles are motivating car-makers to develop products that reduce our reliance on oil.

ECOS reports that electric cars in particular are becoming more attractive as consumers realise that fully charged batteries have more than enough ‘range’ to cover the 120km daily distance travelled by the average driver.

And watch out for the ‘air car’ – compact compressed-air-driven commuter vehicles that can seat four and travel as far as 300km on one tank of compressed air.

Sea-level rise: the view from ground zero

According to the World Bank, tens of millions of people in 84 developing countries, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Jamaica and the Maldives, will likely be displaced by rising sea levels over this century.

In our region, a rise of one metre would effectively put the small Pacific Island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu at or below sea level, a prospect that raises issues not just for the people of these islands, but for their larger and wealthier neighbours, Australia and New Zealand.

ECOS talks to scientists and aid agencies about their respective concerns: Is the increased flooding experienced by Pacific Islands due to sea level rise? How can Australia best help? And what are the options for these seafaring nations if sea levels do rise?

Further Information:
ECOS 148 online
http://www.ecosmagazine.com/

Australian petrol price finder

This one is generated off the pages of Cars Guide. Simply choose a fuel type to find cheap prices by suburb or postcode.

Pretty nifty and seems to work offering up-to-date prices and location maps.

Try petrol price finder

How would you run a whole country without Oil?

Shai Agassi at TED2009

At TED2009, Shai Agassi, Better Place founder and CEO, shares the company’s plans and says it’s electric cars or bust if we really want to eliminate tailpipe emissions.

It sounds far out, but Shai offers some great alternatives and presents solutions.

Ted 2009 Video