informal urban practices

Colour Me!

Our life in the urban environment is surrounded by visual information.

Melbourne city has filled in bright and vivid colours, asymmetrical shape with movement, not in scaled size objects has become a symbol of the Melbourne architecture and many people love the character of Melbourne.

Our project was aim to understand how people remember the colours of visual information from the daily routine, such as architecture, transportation, branding logos and things that people might saw in Docklands. How colours are accurately transformed to people$B!G(Bs memory? Is unusual form and interesting fonts are supporting effectively to memorise the objects? We made 8 colour paper on board and various grey scale images, we choose the location where has $B!H(BNo Colour$B!I(B in the middle of white sculpture to let people to think what colour was this image?

In summery, Friday night was supposed to be the busiest time in Dockland but cold and windy esplanade was almost empty.  But White sculpture was popular little spot so we could manage to find people.  Asking for 3 min to dedicate their spare time for our project was the maximum duration. 5min didn$B!G(Bt work. Shooting their face on camera didn’t work as well. Corporate branding had strong impact in colours, but buildings, space, and memory of things in Dockland was a little blur.

Emi, Pang, Harris, Irene

colour me from informal.urban on Vimeo.

The previous suburbs our combined group studied were Collingwood and Albert Park, we chose to continue with Collingwood and based our occupation in Smith Street. For the occupation we decided to interview people about the informal urban practices that they were undertaking in Collingwood and their opinions on what Collingwood has to offer in regards to it’s formal and informal spaces. We were extremely lucky with the people we interviewed, one woman was heavily involved in the aboriginal and african communities in Collingwood and stopping public drinking in the Smith Street area. Another man we spoke to was a street artist who had done street art in Collingwood, however he felt that the gentrification in the area of Collingwood over the years had taken away some character from the suburb. The time conditions we initiated our occupation in showed a notable difference in the type of people in the area of Smith Street between Saturday afternoon and Monday night. The most notable difference was on the weekend people seemed to be coming from outside areas to visit Collingwood but on the Monday the people we encountered were usually residents of the area.

Elliot Henkel, Jiazhen Ken Chen, Oscar Langley, Tim Bagnara

We chose to undertake an urban fashion commentary in the sleepy suburb of north melbourne, beginning on a friday night.  We set up shop in a central location on Errol street, the main hub of North melbourne.

We expected it to be farely busy, with plenty of foot traffic walking to and from the many eateries and take-away shops that complete the small shopping strip – it was not.  We managed to commentate a few different kinds of people walking past, going about their Friday night business; picking up food, going to dinner, buying alcohol and other such mundane tasks.  The manjority of the people we picked on did acknowledge us by a smile or ‘thumbs up’, some like a nice american gentleman stopped for a while and even tried to commentate us, in a nice way of course.

Our final visit to the site,  was on a monday morning, we set up in the exact same place as the previous time, in front of a coin laundry.  The flow of foot traffic was very similar to the friday night we observed.  Not a particular amount of business dressed people, but just people going about their average monday morning rituals.  On this morning we commentated only a handfull of people, recieving the same small, but pleasant reaction – except the final “model”, a loverly young “lady” who simply turned to us, smiled and flipped us the bird.

So we went to Preston Sunday morning and then Monday morning. On Sunday we asked people four questions:
1. What are you doing with your Sunday?
2. Do you do this activity every Sunday?
3. Do you do this alone or with friends and family (social or quiet time?)
4. How long has Preston been part of your Sunday routine?

Then on Sunday, we just generally asked people about their day, and kind of let them talk about themselves or whatever else it was that they wanted to talk about.

We initially felt awkward about just straight-out asking people about their lives, so we decided to make it into more of an ‘occupation’ perse. So we went to Woolworths, bought a few packs of Cupcakes and some paper and made a sandwich board and taped it to Nick that said: “Have a cupcake and tell us about your day.” We thought that giving people cupcakes in exchange for/encourage conversation would be a little more of a subversive tactic and kind of a fair exchange.
We where asking them to stop and do something that wasn’t the norm in terms of how you would usually behave in that particular space especially since we where strangers baring cup-cakes.

We found the people of Preston to be quite reluctant to speak with us. They didn’t trust that the cup-cake was free. Our actions where very out of the ordinary. The public felt suspicious of us. We think this has to do with the issue of safety in the area.
The participants that did approach us and then became comfortable with the situation where very willing to give us information about their lives.

The semi-permanence and transient nature of our free urban art gallery echoes the free experience of those participants who travel the worn bike track as part of their daily commute.
We simply took what was an existing informal urban practice as well as an important element of the local architectural fabric intrinsic to Brunswick and placed emphasis on those travelling the path to take notice and browse its wares.
Themes explored in this gallery included a context very familiar in Brunswick with the act of public gifts and a modification of the ordinary. Right then and there at that time, the space has been claimed for the purpose of entertaining passersby, for no other purpose other than to enhance the locale visual.
When creating this particular occupation, we re-cycled found objects located near the site in dis-used areas of public space, i.e. along the train tracks. We questioned worth, value and the idea of exchange within this fleeting interaction that the user has within the space as they pedal through the graffiti riddled corridors.
This raises the issue of possession and territory amongst the users and regular occupiers of the space. Is there perhaps an unspoken understanding or informal authority on what is allowed and accepted as art within the public arena and such a busy thoroughfare. In essence our occupation asked the question ‘why not?’ and informalized the presentation and subjectivity of art, all packaged up in a brief experience for those trafficking through the space to enjoy a brief moment of positive questioning whist on the daily commute.

DAN KERRIS, PHILIP PILLE, MICHELLE MCDONELL, CHRIS HERMAN

Over two separate days Amy and I headed down to St Kilda to occupy an area and see if we could engage the people of this beautiful bay side suburb in a simple game of noughts and crosses.

Through this Informal Urban Practice we hoped to gain a greater knowledge of the residents of St Kilda as well as the visitors to the area. We set ourselves up on a wall just inside the arcade that lead to Woolworths on Acland Street on a busy weekend afternoon. Immediately we had people stopping and looking. We encouraged people to join us and in the end played over 20 games of noughts and crosses.

We then went back during the week and set up in exactly the same spot. Acland street was less busy and most people were residents doing their everyday shopping and therefore we found it a lot harder to find people that were willing to play with us as most of them had somewhere to be or something to be doing, as a result we only managed to play around 5 games vs. the 20 that we were able to play the day before.

It was clear in the end that the visitors and residents of St Kilda were a lot more willing to give us their time and enjoy a simple game with us on the weekends as apposed to a weekday. We did however have a lot of fun over the two days.

Laura Black & Amy Carlwell

As we all know elections are on next week, so we took this event as a starting point. We gave people in Sunshine the opportunity to express their opinion about this current event in public space in a rather informal way. We placed posters in specific locations such as bus stops where people would spend some time to recognize, think and react.

Without giving any instruction to people, only a cause for thought, we waited for their reactions and how they would use the given tools.

With this informal practice we wanted to observe what people think about this particular event, with such great importance. We wanted to see if people care and if they were afraid of doing something to this images that included Kylie Minogue as a non political Australian citizen. Sunshine seemed to be an appropriate place for this experiment as it’s apparently a rather underprivileged district of Melbourne where political variations are abundant.

Our intention was to provoke different reactions – some people enjoyed, others seemed to be scared or disapproved and some even scrutinized the legality of our project. We just anticipated for more reaction to the Kylie poster since she didn’t fit into the political range.

By  Janine & Jose

We want your opinion, Sunshine! from Janine Broering on Vimeo.

We took this assignment to mean occupying a space in order to create a change. Our 1^st idea was to create a realistic looking roadside speed camera. We tried this in a number of locations till we found a place that would give a clear view of the camera the cars came down the road.

The result was amazing as even people doing the speed limit slowed considerably

The 2^nd experiment was about creating a realistic but signed as fake situation. There were three signs, fake danger, fake cleaning and fake maintenance. They were set up along with cones in believable situations. We first tried at Doncaster but this did not work out as security did not even alow us to set up. The 2^nd place we tried was Eastland, in this case we were able to set up and move to a safe location. But within 5 minutes staff removed both the sign and the cones.

While it was up however most people got a laugh out of it

Ryan O’Donnell

Miranda Nesci

The two suburbs that we had to chose from where South Yarra and Footscray. That was an easy choice we decided to go with South Yarra, being a safer place to go out to film, document our findings and interact with the public. The direction that we were going in was to generate conversation tactics by asking the public various questions which are directed towards fashion as South Yarra is known as the fashion street.

We put together three boards all showing celebraties in fabulous and glamorous outfits. The first was “Who got it right?” there were four pairs wearing same or similar outfits. The choice was from Gwyneth or Amanda, Miley or Jessica, Jessica Marais or Jennifer Hawkins and Sofia or Julianne Moore. The winner was Jessica Marais and Sofia Vergara with three points each then followed by one point each for Amanda, Miley and Gwyneth and no points to Julianne Moore and Jennifer Hawkins. This was very entertaining to hear why each wore it better and who got it wrong.

Another conversation tactic was to spot five differences within an image everyone seemed to find them all easily.

The last board was showing five celebraties, dressed in different outfits and they had to choose who looked the nicest. The two popular ones were Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry. They all seemed to based their answers with who looked sexier, stylish and also personality.

When looking back we achieved what we set out do and made the day fun and enjoyable.

by Helen, Ivan, Brian & Rahul

2 pairs of students are to work together, as one large group (4 people).

You are to return to one of the suburbs of your investigation for project 2 (exploration).

You are seeking to learn more about informal urban practices as lived by people in that suburb, by engaging with those people (whether residents or visitors.) through undertaking your own informal urban practice.

Develop a strategy / set of tactics / a method to engage with instances of informal urban practices and the people involved in them.

Undertake an ‘occupation’ in that suburb that allows / affords you opportunity to learn. You are to undertake your ‘occupation’ twice, in two distinctly different time conditions (eg weekday/weekend; day/night; etc.)

Strategy / tactics used should consider (i) spatial relationships and (ii) time and duration (iii) likely concurrent events and happenstance events – including informal practices.

Your ‘occupation’ is to have some spatial and/or temporal presence.

Examples of strategy / tactics could be:

- Conversation generating tactics

- Staging an event

- Stage a ‘play’ way of engaging people in a ‘game’

- Advertisement provoking reaction

- Face-to-face encounters

Document the occupation.

Uploaded Blog entry for your group under “occupation”:

1 x 200 word summary

1 x 180 second self-playing digital presentation (video)