Loving what these guys & gals are doing:

Free Art & Technology Overview from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Following on from a visit to Public Works on Friday, an organisation about public spaces and art John is involved with I thought most of their projects came off a bit dry, needed the artist input, something funny/humourous with a pop culture touch.

What I was thinking of was something more like the Free Art & Technology group over at Boing Boing (recently allegedly tagging a Google Street View car in Berlin so you can track it on GPS – probably as the comments say with something like this – ability to track stuff on GPS for $85? ME WANT!)

Like the Kopimi station and the Piratebay/Amazon add-on (piggybacking onto existing sites with artwork or counter-cultural things is very now – I assume this is Steve Lambert as I’ve just installed his Add-Art plugin which displays artworks instead of browser ads) and the GML graffiti robot arm Great projects which force the issue by humorously or intentionally breaking the law, activism, or just brilliant ideas…love the cheap Matrix bullet-time too.

The thing is like the scientists who get training about presentation and PR, you need to present your ideas to a wider public with a hook, a meme, a snappy idea or sentence. And if you’re scared of breaking laws or offending grant-making bodies you’ll not actually engage people – because people don’t exist in some safe padded Tellytubbies world those in charge would like them to live in.

Now if the architects and town planning bods over at Public Works got in bed with the rapper/hacker/artists over at FAT…that would be a marriage made in heaven. Or hell, depending on which (Google) view point

This is the role of the 21st century artist – less Klee and more KLF.

I so wish I had stuff like this when I was doing my degree and creating artwork, I was messing with relays and switch circuits and floorpads…but it was 1995, which unless you were in Silicon Valley with rich daddies you couldn’t afford the decent shizzle…now anyone can afford it!