City monsters – Interactive Urban Instalation (co. designer Ido Abulafia)

Awg was a short studio project for a toy design seminar by Boaz Drori (2.2014).

Street art and urban instalations bring joy of life to deserted spots of the city, sometimes turning the most boring ones into vibrant collages of styles and aproaches – but they get old. It’s not that they wear out to quickly – it’s that crappy feeling you get walking down the same street, passing the same old graffiti bomb made just a few months ago by some local kid, wishing somebody would cover that graffiti bomb with a new one allready. not that he’s a toy or something – it might be a really cool piece – but it never interacts.

the urban environment can be devided into two groups of items – Objects – the still, inanimate objects, and Subjects – the living tissue. stree art is an attempt to revive the concrete – but is it so? what makes street art interesting (other then “Style”)?  SoundTaxi (Yuri Suzuki X AIAIAI) is a reconstructed London black cab, with a system which draws on ambient street noise and transform it into music. the Forest in a truck  was a Banksy project in NYC corresponds with Olafour Eliasson’s Waterfalls and makes you re-examine your urban jungle. 2014 was the 8th year since brussels declared 1 May the day for Sunflower Guerilla Planting. all these examples are not only beutifully covering objects – but also address subjects in the urban environment, which makes them change with time, seasons, tides, noise or human behavior. this gives this sort of street art a third dimension of interaction – it becomes alive and now is a subject by itself.

We wanted to create something beutifull, but most importantly – subjective. we first imagined shapeless creatures, urban monsters that live somewhere in the city, and then we walked the center of Jerusalem and tried to find a good medium – a habitat for such creaturs. we saw electricity and network cables hanging on front walls, sewer lids, radio antenas – and then we saw drainpipes. from there it was all about sketching and modeling our concept for a nice frontal presentation.

Birds live in nests, bees in hives, and humans in cities. people are wonderfull individuals and when they live their homes they search for interaction – they need it as part of their nature – they want to be part of something. giving them just that without trying to sell them insurance, bank account, agenda or a shiny car – interacting with them – is  simply being human.

Shhigg.