VERGE FESTIVAL 2011 - DEFECTIVE COLLECTIVE'S 99 STRINGS

Yakult For The City

Yakult for the City was a project combining grass roots activism with architectural intervention in Sydney, executed by myself (Jason Dibbs) and Harry Catterns during an intensive program of Unsolicited Architecture facilitated by Amsterdam-based architect and academic Rory Hyde at the University of Sydney.

The Life You Can Save

http://www.thelifeyoucansave.com/home

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - FEAR CONTROLLER

Whilst photographing sculptural interventions littered along Liverpool Street in the Spanish Quarter I found another interested individual doing the same. I told him of my project, of the varied interventions I'd located across Sydney, and their locations. He revealed he was a business analyst and that his interest in these subversive sculptural objects stemmed from an analogy he'd drawn between them and the business reporting and auditing systems he specialised in at work. He saw them both as operating in the background, discreetly providing feedback under the noses of the unsuspecting.

The 'Fear Controller' covered in street grime and tomato ketchup, signals sub-cultural discontent with consumer trends, technological obsession, and monopolistic media practices. An example of the latent becoming manifest.

 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - STREET GALLERY

The Spanish Quarter in Sydney has been transformed into an open-air, public gallery space. The works on display are subtle and subversive, mounted on plinths formed by columns supporting the monorail track on Liverpool Street, often overlooked or ignored by passer's by. Finely detailed castings of remote controls, mobile phones and soft drink cans bearing messages overtly critical of a media and consumer based society. Is this the break down of communication? Is technology in a state of malfunction? Do these works mark the glitches in the system? Are they the imperfect 'seconds' cast from the production line?  As with most urban interventions the artists remain anonymous...

                                                  Liverpool Street Sydney

                                                                                                                                       

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - THE WOOLLAHRA MADONNA

This stencil on Queen Street is invested with the hopes of local residents for the salvation of a nearby post office. Stencil's are often political, seeking to critique the powers that be through the appropriation of familiar tropes and imagery.

The closure of local post offices is a present threat in many villages and suburbs across Sydney and is evidence of the now steady decline of the high street in favour of homogenised shopping centers and plazas, a trend that tragically misappropriates resources resulting in increased negative environmental impact, the centralisation of wealth, and the decay of the individual character and rich tapestry of urban and suburban streetscapes.

                                                             The Woollahra Madonna

Woollahra Village - Save the Post Office

Residents Rally Over Post Office Closures - Sydney Morning Herald

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - CONSPICUOUS CONCEALMENT PART 2

An elaborately knitted installation on Darling Street, Balmain. Does anyone know of any more of these works in Sydney?

 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - CONSPICUOUS CONCEALMENT

The knitting graffiti phenomenon achieved international notoriety in the latter-half of the noughties, spear-headed by an aptly-named art group from Houston, Texas known simply as 'Knitta'. By 2009 the movement had well and truly arrived in Sydney and knitted urban interventions began attracting the attention of tabloids, broadsheets, blogs and councils alike. A relic of this (not-too-distant) bygone era may be found, though faded by the sun and worn at the seams, on Crown Street in Darlinghurst. For want of a better description it is a painstakingly stitched Tree Blanket in various shades of wool, conspicuously concealing the fork of a street-side tree. An intervention of this order achieves so much with so little. It speaks of feminist theory, of the resurrection and reinterpretation of traditional handcrafts, of grassroots movements, and of globalisation and the exploitation of the Internet as a means of spreading what may have started as a small-scale artistic prank in Houston, to Sydney and Copenhagen and beyond. It conspicuously sheds light on all that it conceals, transforming a generic, though nonetheless delightful tree into a beacon for philosophical, artistic and social discourse.

                                                        Tree Blanket on Crown Street

      
                                   Conspicuously concealing a fork in the tree

The following links explore the emergence of knitting graffiti as an artistic movement:

Knitta at Wikipedia         

Urban Knitting: the world's most inoffensive graffiti

Sydney Morning Herald: Graffiti artist spins a new kind of yarn

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - APPROPRIATION AND SUBVERSION

Urban interventions often alter our experience of an environment on an unconscious level or in a fashion that is indiscernible or indescribable. The blue cast of a crushed soft drink can bearing illegible branding attached to a brick ledge on Oxford Street, Sydney is one such example. 

Subtle and unassuming, it is positioned shin-high by an automated teller machine on the high street, creating new meanings through the appropriation of a common everyday form and material subversion. As with the majority of urban interventions the artist and their intentions remain anonymous, thus engendering an otherwise banal environment with myriad opportunities for personal experience and interpretation. It poses a question, yet refrains from ever explicitly spelling out what that question is. 

URBAN INTERVENTIONS - COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

This exquisitely crafted masonry mobile phone lies camouflaged on the sidewalk of City Rd. Darlington. Chances are you've walked passed it countless times and not noticed it; perhaps this is part of the anonymous author's intentions... to concretise the breakdown of communication? To surrealistically explore the separation of word and image? Or is it the physical manifestation of a messy break-up played out over the phone?

Conjecture aside, this intervention enhances an otherwise derelict urban environment through sophisticated subtlety and jestful provocation, but blink and you will miss it.