Alex Reid

New York artists Jason Eppink and Posterchild prompted their local government to fix a leaky pipe by building a small bridge over the sidewalk sludge.

Astoria Scum River Bridge project page

(Note that the media attention came after the agreement to fix it)

Los Angeles artist Joel Kyack is helping drivers stuck in grid lock with some entertainment.

An idea conceived with Providence-based artist and bike mechanic Peter Fuller, Kyack will be driving his nondescript white pickup truck along different freeways throughout LA during evening rush hours once a week all this summer and when stuck, he will entertain neighbouring drivers with a puppet show from the back of his “mobile theater”. He will also have a soundtrack to the puppet show which he will be broadcasting to the nearby car stereos.

The artist “aims to briefly halt the progression of chaos by temporarily drawing the audience out of the commute experience and placing them within an intimate space of engagement and performance that highlights their own individual presence within the broader structure of the traffic jam.”

If you are going to be in LA any time this summer, check out his project’s twitter feed which gives daily updates as to where he will be. And then hope that you get stuck in a traffic jam.

Here’s a Hollywood agency movie spoof made by the guys who should know how it all works; talent agency WME. Apparently the video was only intended to be internal, a joke amongst agents, but it made its way online.

Last night I couldn’t insert an image into a blog post on alexreid.ca. Clicking the ‘image’ icon next to the ‘Upload/Insert’ text, above the toolbar and the blog post space, would lead me to a frameset page and while my image got uploaded, nothing happened to the image. Also, I couldn’t add more categories.

After searching the Internet for a discussion on what was happening, I found it was the WordPress plugin Headspace 2 that was conflicting with the new upgrade to WP 3.

There are other plugins too causing this conflict error. Click here for the growing list of known issues and bug fixes.

I hope this helps someone else.

Eric Fischer created two series of major world city maps showing where people take photos, using geocoding information from Flickr and Picasa. In his first series hosted on Flickr, titled The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, he used geo tagged photos over a nine day period in late May 2010 to show a heatmap of where most photos were snapped.

A week later, he created a second series over a five day period in early June 2010, titled Locals and Tourists giving the city maps more depth by comparing “tourists” to “locals”.

He explained:

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

Purple would obviously be the merging of both tourists and locals.

Of course, these only count those photos that were geo-tagged and posted on Picasa and Flickr publicly. But the series gives you a great idea of where to go on vacation, where the locals go and if you’re thinking of opening a camera supply store, where to setup shop.

For me, this is a big help as I have a planned trip to San Francisco in a couple months and it’s also quite inspiring; data visualization made art!