“Drift is part artificial wonderland, part physical ordeal, an artwork that asks audience members to rethink our experience and understanding of the urban environment. Using the fountain and pedestrian passageway as principal sites, the work challenges popular conceptions of Taylor Square as a fundamentally gritty urban thoroughfare. It offers instead a meditation on the capacity of temporary inflatable artworks to playfully reconfigure and
respond to iconic public spaces.” 

A huge yellow PVC tunnel inflated over the Taylor Square fountain, Drift offers audiences a very different bouncy castle experience. People may enter, one at a time, to slide along the water feature, navigating unexpected encounters along the way. Once inside, how will you cope with this changed and changing environment? Often using his own body as a starting point, New Zealand-based artist David Cross works across performance, installation, video and public art, focusing on the relationship between pleasure, the grotesque and the phobic. His small - to large scale performance/ installation work incorporates and extends contemporary thinking in relation to participation, linking performance art with object-based environments.

 

For more information visit the artist’s website here. 


REKINDLING VENUS: IN PLAIN SIGHT
Lynette Wallworth
January- May 2012
 

Bringing an experience of marine life to urban Taylor Square, Lynette Wallworth’s ReKindling Venus: InPlain Sight invites you to join a global network of people connecting to the plight of coral ecosystems around the world. Download the free app RKV onto your smartphone to activate a 3D portal to coral reefs, receive real-time alerts about coral bleaching world wide, and link to a website with more information on warming sea temperatures. This work is part of Wallworth’s larger ReKindling Venus project. 

Shown worldwide, Lynette Wallworth’s interactive video environments lead visitors to transcend the everyday and connect with universal themes primarily showing how we are connected, to one another and to nature.

For more information visit the artist’s website here.

CYCLE-IN CINEMA
Magnificent Revolution Australia
24 - 26 February 2012 (from 7pm)

Imagine a drive-in cinema with bikes instead of cars. Arrive early to plug your bike into a generator and take turns riding to power the performance. Each day brings something new: a special Queer Screen event, cult short films and music videos, and a curated program of new media including Indigenous voices. For program details click here.

Magnificent Revolution Australia is an education project that users pedal-power in events, installations and workshops to demonstrate the potential for renewable energy in an experimental and engaging way. MRA is a partner of London-based Magnificent Revolution, which has produced over 100 pedal-powered events across the UK and Europe.

 

For updates and FREE ticket bookings please click on the date below

A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF CITIES
Makeshift
Saturdays, March 2012

 

An unusual craft finds its way into a forgotten, subterranean space, making itself at home and crafting an experimental publication on re-crafting the city – typeset in situ and distributed as a series of short, provocative communiqués on the topic of ‘Craft Futures’.

Part mobile printing press, part think tank, part underground society, A Leaf from The Book of Cities explores the possibilities of a quality-based economy within the context of Taylor Square and the Sydney Sustainable Markets. Temporarily occupying the old men’s and women’s conveniences, Makeshift transforms the ruins of a once carefully crafted pocket of the city into a platform for rethinking craft politics and futures.
 

Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe collaborate on projects exploring other ways of living based on sustainment, dialogue and new economies. Their re-directive practice encompasses sculpture and installation, drawing and printmaking, writing, live art and design, often as part of participatory site-based interventions that make visible contested histories and possible futures.

For more information visit the artist’s website here.

We Make This City, the Taylor Square Art Program 2011-2012 is presented by the City of Sydney, NIEA at COFA, UNSW and the Curating Cities project.