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For her latest work, artist Jessica Stockholder zoomed out, way out, to envision a three-dimensional painting covering an entire intersection in downtown Chicago. The installation, dubbed "Color Jam," was commissioned by the Chicago Loop Alliance, who let the artist run loose with her idea of saturating sidewalks, crosswalks, and even building facades in bold washes of green, blue and red. From......read more
With conservative skeptics in Congress thwarting national action on climate change, states and cities are making moves to address the issue. The latest government to step up is the City of Chicago, whose Climate Action Plan acknowledges the reality of rising global temperatures — and readies the city for a warmer future. In the first of a series of NYT articles on......read more
With First Lady Michelle Obama in Chicago to address the city's food desert problem, a report [PDF] released this week shows that the amount of people without easy access to fresh, healthy food is down 40 percent over the last five years. Still, an estimated 384,000 Chicagoans -- mostly African-Americans, 124,000 of which are children -- live in food desert neighbourhoods. There is no......read more
After a 3-year run launching Bowery Lane Bicycles in New York City, Michael Salvatore headed to Chicago to set off another bike project in his hometown. The result is Heritage Bicycles, a line of vintage-inspired lifestyle cruisers and everyday commuter bikes, made in Chicago from American steel. The Daisy mixte, the company's flagship model, is a classic-styled daily ride that is......read more
It's been a while since we featured a time-lapse video in our Watch section, and this one is as good as they get. "Cityscape Chicago," shot by 22-year-old photographer Eric Hines, takes as its subject one of the most photogenic cities in the world. "The inspiration of this piece was my fascination with the city of Chicago, particularly at night," writes Hines. "For me, there has always been......read more
On Chicago's west side, derelict and empty buildings are a regular aspect of the landscape. And when the buildings get demolished, the building materials are largely sent to landfills. Rebuilding Exchange, a Chicago nonprofit launched three years ago, intervenes in this waste stream to keep construction and demolition materials out of the landfill. According to their website, the outfit has......read more
Since the 1920s, Fulton Market Cold Storage Company has operated in a ten-story refrigerated warehouse in Chicago’s meatpacking district. Last summer the company decided it was time to start anew in a state-of-the-art suburban facility, so the building was sold to developers. But before being transformed into glassy modern offices, it had to be defrosted. Famed architecture firm Perkins +......read more
Chicago-based photographer Craig Shimala has found a nice little artistic niche using a mirror technique he applies to time-lapse vids. It started with a Flickr video shot from inside his car, and now we have this one made from footage of the Chicago skyline shot over several years. The simple mirrored effect turns the city skyline into a gravity-defying monolith cruising through......read more
I recently met Beth Terry, the author of a great blog on plastic pollution called Fake Plastic Fish (the definitive resource on our culture’s obsession with plastics) at a very sobering event – the return from an expedition to Midway Island with photographer Chris Jordan, who traveled there with a film crew to document the “plastic graveyard.” Midway is literally “midway” from......read more
This is the first in a series I’m writing for SHFT called Ars Natura: art in nature, nature in art. Though I typically blog abut media and technology I have become increasingly aware that the problems our civilization faces are not going to be solved by technological ingenuity alone. Yes I believe we can solve the energy problem and perhaps even find a way to deflate the planet’s overheated......read more
