ThreeDeeWinter2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
John Payne's Dino Kinetics
The Thompson Elk
Monday, March 14, 2011
New, free iPhone app maps public art around Portland
Not that I have an iphone, or ever will, but...
So pause a moment, pop out your iPhone and download a new, free app -- Public Art PDX.
It maps 429 pieces of public art around Portland, from the imposing Portlandia statue to an electronic reader board silently displaying poems to passersby on Southwest 10th Avenue.
Click on the app to see where you are and a map of what's around you. Each listing comes with the name of the artist, the artwork's history and very often a photo and detailed description.
"I've always been a big fan of public art in Portland, and even I didn't realize how many pieces there are," said Matt Blair, a 36-year-old freelance software developer who crafted the app as a "gift" to his adopted city.
The app will be a neat complement to a public art brochure that's already popular with tourists and residents, according to Megan Conway, communications vice president for Travel Portland, which markets Portland to tourists.
"We definitely see this as something visitors will use," she said.
To make his app, Blair compiled listings of the city's public art from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, which maintains both the public art collection and information about all the art.
Portland has abundant public art because of a 1980 "Percent for Art" ordinance, which initially required that publicly funded, capital construction set aside 1 percent of the project's cost for art. That total has since increased to 2 percent, according to Jeff Hawthorne, the arts and culture council's director of community affairs.
The council had already been working to put information about Portland's public art online through the nonprofit organization's website, according to Hawthorne. It made the data available to Blair in keeping with Portland's "open data" initiative, which seeks to give software developers access public information in hopes they will make it more accessible to the public.
But simply making the data available doesn't necessarily make it easy to use. To craft his app, Blair spent weeks converting RACC's data into a useful format and ensuring that it's presented in compliance with legal licenses that govern each piece of art.
"It's been a substantial amount of the project," he said, "to make sure people got the credit they deserve and to make sure the information was presented accurately and with integrity to the original artist."
Portland hopes a community of developers like Blair will take a leadership role in the city's open data initiative, according to, Rick Nixon, project manager for Portland's Civic Apps program.
Public entities aren't in the business of creating apps, he said, and shouldn't be. But he said they can provide the data that make these apps possible.
"The momentum that we build really needs to be owned by interested community members," he said.
Portland's Civic Apps attracted only modest interest initially, in part because it can be difficult to transfer city data into a format everyday people would find useful.
But Blair, who won a city-sponsored Civic Apps award last year for an app listing Portland's "heritage trees," said it's worth the effort.
"You can take the data out of the desktop and put it out in the real world, so people can discover things about their environment," he said.
For the moment, the app is only available for the iPhone and other Apple devices. But Blair said he compiled the data in a manner that makes it easy for someone to transfer the information to an app for another device -- running Google's Android operating system, for example.
"That's not something I will personally develop," Blair said, but "I'm very much open to having someone else build off this."
Scores of apps have emerged to give mobile phone users an augmented view of their reality. The most prominent may be "Google Goggles," which performs a Web search for information about anything a mobile phone user photographs.
Other apps using Portland data map the city's food carts, track transit arrival times, and facilitate citizen reports of potholes, graffiti and other issues that need the city's attention.
Slightly more than 600 people downloaded Blair's trees app. He expects a considerably wider audience for his public art app, both among tourists and residents who want to see more of the world around them.
And Blair said he intends to build out the app with additional data from TriMet and Metro to provide detail about more artwork around the city.
"I would expect there will be hundreds more (pieces) added in the coming months," he said.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Public Art Installation: Night Sky Walkway
First Thursday: Jeffry Mitchell (Pulliam Gallery)
Jeffry Mitchell’s show pot & snowflake is currently on display at Pulliam Gallery. The pieces are largely made up of glazed pots and paper cutouts pressed between panes of glass.
The pots have distortions in their forming, some more exaggerated than others. Holes and cuts are punctured into the material. Animal, floral and geometrical designs are etched into the exterior. Each pot is glazed and the drippings are not corrected, allowing them to coexist with the ever so slightly malformed pot.
The glass panels containing the large rectangular snowflake paper cuts are duct taped together. Viewed alone, a piece can seem to be at undergraduate level crafting skills. The consistency between the many works helps to negotiate this observation. While mostly two dimensional due to the flat surfaces, the attachment of different glass planes together raises this as a sculptural piece. A level of interaction is presumably present as well. The planes seem fully movable, like a doors connected to each other, each able to swing in any direction off the next.
There is a cohesion to what seems to be a carefully perfected aesthetic throughout the installation. The artist has produced many pieces in the same style. The malformations and seemingly unprofessional crafting skills are purposeful.
Jeremy Wenrich
Friday, March 11, 2011
Trophiphying my Trophy
The second and third items that I added to make it more trophy-esque was a base and a little plaque. I chose to paint the base white and added a darker pink and yellow to the layered edges. I also added layered paper for the plaque to make it as clean as possible. Both items are attached with glue, and the colors where chosen to complement the flowers.
And this is it with all of its upgrades!
Final First Thursday
For my final First Thursday I decided that I was going to go along the lines of our public art project with these wonder functional bike racks that are placed throughout the Pearl district in NW Portland.
These adorable little bike lockup area/posts are little replicas of the Freemont Bridge. The base of the structure has blue in reference to the Willamette below while the rest is constructed in grey steel (I’m guessing) that even includes little cars, trucks, and semi’s driving on the bridge.
I had never thought of these pieces as art until we went on our public art “field trip” and we where pointed out those tacky looking orange bike post/path markers. I truley love how these reference a local structure while making it so useful.
-Amy Grider
Thursday, March 10, 2011
First Thursday
- Katie Clemens
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
First Thursday - BASALT: A sight specific work by Eric Franklin
I was exploring campus and stumbled upon the new exhibit at the Autzen Gallery. I thought it was empty or under construction before I noticed the giant glass sculpture taking up the majority of the space. The freestanding transparent glass installation consisted of table-like shapes that had an alternating rhythm with scale and created variety with the form that seemed to progress to the largest point in the center. It's largest feature seemed to be placed in the center, adding to it's dominance and creating a sense of radial balance. The repetitive simplicity of smooth, clear glass was interrupted with the downward direction of the eye getting drawn in by the light-catching bulbs present in the slender, delicate pillars that hold up this elegant structure. I would recommend that everyone check it out. It's just down the hallway from class.
Michelle Caldwell
Monday, March 7, 2011
The is just a draft, some of the grids got a bit messy.
Description | Quantity | Unit Price | Cost |
Grass | 18,650 | $ 0.55 | $ 10,257.50 |
shovels | 4 | $ 15.00 | $ 60.00 |
Gardening Gloves and Tools etc. | misc | $ 1,000.00 | $ 1,000.00 |
Mower | 1 | $ 500.00 | $ 500.00 |
Rakes | 4 | $ 15.00 | $ 60.00 |
Yard Debris bucket For misc. | 5 | $ 2.54 | $ 12.70 |
Mulch | 5 | $ 20.00 | $ 100.00 |
Rectangular Planters | 18 | $ 110.00 | $ 1,980.00 |
Circular Planters | 3 | $ 97.00 | $ 291.00 |
Big Cart use for hauling from the street | 1 | $ 256.00 | $ 256.00 |
plants | misc | $ 7,496.00 | $ 7,496.00 |
water Tank | 1 | $ 589.95 | $ 589.95 |
Soil For Square planter | 1656 sq ft | $ 150.00 | $ 360.00 |
Soil For Round Planter | 706.5 sq ft | $ 180.00 | $ 180.00 |
Table | 1 | $ 599.99 | $ 599.99 |
Benches | 21 | $151.55 | $ 3,182.55 |
Pavers | 1500 | $0.74 | $ 1,110.00 |
Green House | 1 | $3873.00 | $ 3,873.00 |
Tables for the Green House | 5 | $70.00 | $ 70.00 |
Sand for the Pavers | 5 | $24.00 | $ 120.00 |
Gardening tools | 1 | $1000.00 | $ 1,000.00 |
Spiral Ladders | 1 | $1195.00 | $ 1,195.00 |
Workers Cost (During Construction) | 3 workers 15 /hour 40 hours per week | $21,600.00 | $ 21,600.00 |
Workers Cost (For the rest of the year; 9 months) | 1 | $21,600.00 | $ 21,600.00 |
Wheelbarrow | 2 | $179.00 | $ 358.00 |
Delivery Fees | 12 | $769.99 | $ 769.99 |
Artist Fee | 1 | $50,000.00 | $ 50,000.00 |
Hose | 4 | $44.93 | $ 44.93 |
Fertilizer for the First Year | 1 | $499.99 | $ 499.99 |
Safety Railings | 190 | $136.70 | $ 25,973.00 |
| | Total | $ 155,139.60 |