So here’s the skimmy. The World’s Largest DIY Event needs some DIY assistance to help spread the word. NYC is made up of five boroughs, each of which are cities in their own right. We have a lot of territory to cover! You help us with a couple minutes of your time, by going to the places you already go and dropping off some postcards and putting up some posters, and we’ll reward you with two adult single-day passes, a $50 value. Want more tickets? Just tell us what you’re willing to do, what neighborhoods and sites you’ll cover, and we’ll work something out!
It’s easy. We will send you a packet of 25 flyers and 200 postcards and you go to all the places you already go (maybe a few more) and pin or tape a flyer on a bulletin board or in a window and a small stack of postcards on the front counter. Of course you will need to ask permission first! Then in a few of the places snap a picture for us and when your done send us a few so we can see the great work you have done.
When your done let us know and we will send you two Adult tickets to World Maker Faire. You won’t have to wait in line for your tickets, save a little cash and you will have helped us spread the word about this great event within your community.
Here are some great places to consider:
Bookstores
Colleges
Coffee shops
Cafes
Toy Stores
Hobby Shops
Craft Stores
Restaurants
Scrap Stores
Community Centers
Hacker Spaces
Tech Shops
After School Programs
Garden Centers
Thrift/Vintage Stores
1)To join, email us your name, address and phone as well as the area you’ll be covering to: streetteam@makerfaire.com
2) We’re looking specifically to cover the following neighborhoods. Have another place in mind? Email us!
Neighborhoods to cover:
Park Slope
Gowanus
Sunset Park
Ditmas Park
Kensington
Williamsburg
Bushwick
Greenpoint
NYU
Parsons/New School
Hunter
SVA
Columbia
Pratt
East Village/Lower East Side
Long Island City
Sunnyside/Jackson Heights
Astoria
Ft. Greene
Navy Yard
Jersey City
Hoboken
While you’re out:
1) Snap and send us 3 pictures of locations you have placed World Maker Faire flyers and/or postcards. We’ll post ‘em up here!
2) Please don’t post flyers/postcards at any location w/o asking permission or if not permissible
3) Please don’t post flyers/postcards all in one place. We are trusting that you will be a good World Maker Faire street team member and will spread these materials out throughout your community
Flux Factory is a not-for-profit arts organization supporting innovation in things. Until November of 2008 we were located on 43rd Street near Northern Boulevard, in an industrial wasteland – surrounded by warehouses and bordered by the edge of the Sunnyside Yards. After our eviction by the MTA to pursue development on the East Side Access project, we spent some time in limbo before eventually relocating to the Dutch Kills sub-neighborhood of LIC, on 29 Street just north of Queens Plaza. Both of our facilities were located in LIC, yet the two are worlds apart in terms of operation and our interaction with the surrounding community. We’re learning there’s still lots to learn from LIC!
Inviting artist Julia Vallera and her Color Wheelz project to Long Island City is part of that learning process, an investment back into our community and an exploration of identity of the surrounding neighborhood at large. LIC is a very large neighborhood! Like the Queens borough, LIC is extremely diverse and is not typified by any one singular identity, ethnic group, language or architecture.
The John F. Murray Playground presented itself as an ideal location for this exploration and understanding because of its location and relationship to other spaces: it is equidistant between the Pulaski and Queensboro bridges – structures that lead to other boroughs and worlds unto their own; it is sandwiched between an Avenue and a Road, and between two Streets that are somehow numerically 10 streets apart, typical of the street-ordering system of this borough; on one side of the park one is greeted with incredible skyline-views of Manhattan, on the other the irony of the tallest building in NYC outside of Manhattan all by its lonesome surrounded by much lower mixed-use neighborhoods.
The Playground itself also includes a little bit of everything: a dog run, handball and basketball courts, public art (Bigger Bird), game tables, sitting areas, a ballfield and playgrounds for children of all ages. It is my hope that the Color Wheelz van will allow all who interact with it to explore and express their relationship to this playground, to the surrounding neighborhood, to our wonderful city within a city!
The mailer doesn’t specify but the Color Wheelz collabo is curated by moi! I met Julia Vallera about 3-4 months back and thought her project would be a great way to “craft” Long Island City, and for its inhabitants – of which I am one – to better understand our dynamic city-town.
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This month:
Going Places (Doing Stuff) III
Flux Thursday
#24hCycle
Color Wheelz
Room I + Room II
2009 SP Weather Reports
Going Places (Doing Stuff) III
You get on a bus, you don’t know where you’re going, and then something happens!
You’ve probably heard about our amazing bus tours. If you haven’t, click here to learn more! We have four more tours coming up this summer:
August 7 Josh Bernstein, Moses Gates, Matt Levy & Moira Williams: Wild Tilly’s Circus Story
August 14 David Horvitz: 500 Golden Buddhas and the Speed of Water
August 21 Marie Lorenz: Ghost Ships of the Kills
August 28 Margaret Coleman: Demonstrations of Aptitude
Going Places (Doing Stuff) III is made possible in part through support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Carnegie Corporation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Flux Thursday!
Join us on August 12 for this month’s Flux Thursday, our monthly potluck and salon. Dinner starts at 8 pm, with presentations to follow. Resident artist Sarah Tosques will present work from Iceland and New York, and Man Bartlett will be talking about his recent and upcoming performance art. We’ll be there – will you?
What do the news and laundry have in common? Probably nothing! But we’ll be tasked to see how the two play together… over the course of 24 hours in August.
#24hCycle is envisioned as an absurdist summer party, a communal laundry washing experience, and a reading/discussion of the most up to the second news. It’s an excuse to do laundry. An opportunity to become sickly saturated in the news. Laundry will be aired and hung to dry, accumulating in the gallery space around us. Arguments will be lost and won. Our comforts may be met with discomforts, and vice versa. Our private articles of clothing will be made public, and public news articles will be made personal.
You may also bring clothing that you’d like to get rid of; the artist will be donating it to a local organization in need. Some refreshments/libations will be provided, but you’re encouraged to BYO: laundry, laptop, beverages.
For those who cannot be there in person, a live feed will be streamed, and developing interactions will be encouraged online at manbartlett.com/24hCycle.
Flux Factory artist-in-residence Man Bartlett creates performance-based works that take one task to the extreme for an extended period of time, while encouraging dynamic physical and virtual participation. These performances have taken place in diverse locations, such as a Best Buy, Winkleman Gallery, a former factory building in New Jersey, PPOW Gallery, and the Whitney Museum.
Color Wheelz
Saturday, August 14, 11am – 5pm
Flux Factory, in collaboration with artist Julia Vallera (MFA Parsons), would like to present Long Island City with Julia’s Color Wheelz project. Color Wheelz is designed to transform a 1997 Ford van into a traveling, participatory installation. This van travels through the five boroughs of NYC filled with playful activities, which facilitate exploration into how color relates to community. Visitors at each destination adapt the inside and outside of the van using an array of color-related items. These items include glowing neon wire, cling paper, velcro shapes, magnets and fabric.
The Color Wheelz van will be parked at the John F. Murray Playground on 21 Street between 45 Ave and 45 Road (map) on Saturday August 14th from 11am to 5pm – JOIN US as we visually craft Long Island City!
Room I + Room II
August 27 – September 6
Opening and performances Friday, August 27, 6-9 pm
Flux artists-in-residence Astrid Bussink, Kate Shaw, and Sarah Tosques are collaborating for an end-of-residency exhibition, showing new works including videos, performances, installation, photos and painting.
Room I
Still from The Art of Crocheting, by Astrid Bussink and Sarah Tosques
Astrid Bussink, a Dutch artist and documentary filmmaker, and Sarah Tosques, a visual artist and educator from Montreal, have collaborated to create a video installation and performance called “The Art of Crocheting.” A decade apart in age, they examine shared concerns as artists and individuals, personal pursuits, dreams and their effects. Astrid Bussink will also be presenting part of an on-going project called Constructions of Happiness.
Room II
Kate Shaw is an Australian painter that cheats on the medium with collage. A new series of her layered, brightly colored, marbled landscape paintings will be premiered at Flux Factory! The exhibition contains paintings, artist’s books, and video inspired by a recent road trip through the southwest and looking at how different cultures intervene with and interpret nature. Other work takes inspiration from an man-made mountain built from adobe (hay and mud) illustrating bible stories, rock shops in Utah, and mountains named after Biblical subjects.
Portfolio Launch: 2009 SP Weather Reports
Sunday, August 22, 4pm
The artist-run SP Weather Station, currently based on the roof of Flux Factory, invites you to a release party for its 2009 Weather Report portfolios. Each portfolio in the edition of 30 contains 12 works produced by 12 different artists who were invited to respond to any aspect of one month of SP Weather Station data in any format they desired. Works from the portfolio, including audio, books, drawings, and prints, will be on display in the gallery; the portfolio will also be for sale.
Participating artists include: (January) Mike Estabrook and Vandana Jain; (February) Susan Goethel Campbell; (March) Emily Larned; (April) Luke Strosnider; (May) Andrea Polli; (June) Mark Nystrom; (July) Patricia Zarate; (August) Jane D. Marsching; (September) Stephanie Rothenberg; (October) Graham Parker; (November) Isaac Gertman; (December) Birgit Rathsmann.
SP Weather Station is an interdisciplinary project that collects weather data, hosts a guest lecture series, and organizes weather-related publications, events, and exhibitions.
Ahhhh how things have a way of coming back around on themselves, and how art has a way of blurring the boundaries of itself, life, and entertainment.
Socrates Sculpture Park opened up their 2010 summer film series, Outdoor Cinema, last week with a screening of the “road movie on a river”, Flood Tide directed by Todd Chandler. The movie was a “remix” in the director’s own words, since it was specially adapted to feature a live score by Dark Dark Dark:
Genius! At times their score was seamless, to the point where I was watching a film and the music started to effect me in such a way that I had to remind myself that it was live, and I had to glance over at Dark Dark Dark on the adjacent stage to confirm that indeed they were playing the music I was hearing. And as always, set against the backdrop of Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side of Manhattan makes any trip to Outdoor Cinema a blast!
And then this really wonderful moment occurred where one of Swoon’s Switchback Sea boats, floating down the Hudson, was projected onto the blow-up screen and reminded me of 2008 September 7th when I took a similar shot of another boat from that same armada floating down the East River, passing via the same park I was now sitting in – watching a filmic representation of that similar moment! Funny how life does that to you, eh?
I’m not generally a braggard but I am pretty damned happy with myself that I got to see the premier NYC performance by South Africa’s own Die Antwoord. What’s that stand for? The Answer. The answer to what? Whatever man… fuck it!
A ninja, a hooded-masked DJ and a butterfly with the weirdest haircut ever. If that’s their “answer” then you should be even more confused now! And they put on a SICK and RAWKUS show, totally high-octane from start to finish. It’s unfortunate how many people left the room after their first full song, their Enter the Ninja anthem whose catchy chorus combined with wtf-visuals made them an instant YouTube phenom some months back, whose viral numbers now stand at over 2.1 million views. And I’m personally responsible for watching that video on about 3,000 computers. But like I say some people left, maybe they simply couldn’t handle Zef Side. I mean shit got rowdy:
First off there’s the all-day Intel & Vice collabo Creators Project. And by all-day I mean 2pm-2am!
Film screenings, graffiti walls, DIY satellites, Spike Jonze, eyewriters and installations galore, this is the event to be at today… alllllll day! Did I mention that Die Antwoord are playing!? If you don’t know who I’m talking about then check out this ZEF SIDE post I threw up back in February about 4 minutes before they went viral. I mean they went viral to the point where when I saw people the next day or week, we would both start singing that butterfly-samurai chorus, and know what the hell each other were talking about! Meanwhile, anyone around me or us had no clue. So this is a big exciting moment for me to finally get to see The Answer… to what? Fuck it man!
If that’s not your thing but gelatinous molds are, you’re in luck!
Sponsored by some great organizations including MAKE, CRAFT and core77 – don’t forget Jell-O itself! – this annual event is taking place at the superbly awesome Gowanus Studio Space from 6-10pm and will feature a juried panel deciding the most hot-shit jell-o molds based on criteria not purely aesthetic but also structural/sculptural ingenuity and culinary “appeal” – how subjective! Electro-DJs and jell-o shots are also expected.
And if that’s not enough there’s a HAM radio party taking place from 8pm-1am at the new NYC Resistor space:
I haven’t been to the new space yet, and I’m really itching to pay a visit – Die Antwoord go on stage at 10:30pm so I’m trying to think if I can actually leave the Creators Project before 6, see the Jell-O event, bike back to Union Square to see Die Antwoord, then leave for the HAM radio party. … ? ! … !?@)$)O$J#!!! Just another day in the life of…
