TRASH BINS TRANSFORMED INTO PINHOLE CAMERAS

With an eye towards a more literal definition of "street level photography", a team of garbage collectors in Hamburg, Germany converted the city's trash bins into giant pinhole cameras. Dubbed the Trashcam Project, the photos are created by drilling a tiny holes into the front of each bin and placing photographic photo paper inside.

A sample of trashcam photography

Once the paper is in place, the exposure is timed depending upon outdoor light conditions, with some pictures requiring up to an hour's exposure. The images are amazing in their own right, to say nothing of the unique approach and efforts of project creators Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, Scholz & Friends Berlin, Matthias Hewing. Special credit of course should be given to the Hamburg sanitation team who created this project with their work tools.

Self-portrait of a trashcam, by a trashcam

As they describe on the project's flickr page, where these and other images can be found: 

"Standard 1.100 litre containers are transformed to giant pinhole cameras. With these cameras the binmen take pictures of their favourite places to show the beauty and the changes of the city they keep clean every day ... special thanks to Hamburg based photographer Matthias Hewing (www.matthiashewing.de/) for his professional advice and the challenging lab work with the giant negatives."

NYC Police Barrier + Fence = Bench

As the originating blog says, "There is genius and then there is GENIUS." I couldn't agree more.

On an afternoon's stroll through Spanish Harlem, the folks behind the New York Shitty blog came across two guys making good use of a spare police barrier. The genius truly comes through from the side angle:

As the blog reports:

The elegance of this arrangement is truly stunning: cantilevered seating courtesy of NYPD barricades. Initially these chaps couldn’t understand why I, some dotty 30-something Greenpointer, was so fascinated by their creation. Once I explained respectfully (and made it clear they would not be in the New York Daily News) they had plenty to say.

The gent on the right claimed credit for this creation— and stated that the NYPD gives him plenty of guff about it. He told yours truly they come by regularly and roust him from his “bench”. Because it is their property. He then pointed to a NYPD squad car across the street and exclaimed: There they are. Can’t you see them hating me?!?

If the Urban Guide for Alternate Use ran a top ten list, you're looking at one of the top three entries right here.

Images and text courtesy of the excellent NYC blog, New York Shitty.

Rotating Billboard Becomes Carnival Swings

Alt use of objects = good. Alt use of their kinetic properties as well = superb.

That's what we have here, as Prague artists Vojtěch Fröhlich, Ondřej Mladý, Jan Simánek, and Vladimír Turner transform a rotating billboard into a carnival-like swingset. The project, kolotoč, meaning merry-go-round - I still say carnival swings is more fitting... was created with a fair share of risk - the team ascended the structure with climbing rope, carabiners, wooden panels, and balloons.

After gaining access to the billboard structure via its maintenance ladder, they secured themselves to the understructure of the billboards, lowered the swings, and, as you'll see in the video, let the fun commence, as the rotation of the billboards propelled their swinging.

Images via designboom

Spontaneous Urban Games in Strasbourg

Spontaneous play # 5: "ring toss"

Strasgourg, France artist Florian Rivière has an ongoing series of "Spontaneous Games" created with the existing structures found in the streets. 

Spontaneous play # 4: "limbo"

Trash Dumpster / Skip Swimming Pool

Temporary Displacement by Louisa Dawson In a nice moment of synchronicity, Mark from Flavorpill got in touch to say that the recent trend in New York of repurposing trash dumpsters as swimming pools would make a nice post.

Around that same time, a submission came in of a particularly nice transformation of a dumpster (aka, skip, for our UK readers) by New York artist Louisa Dawson, in her work Temporary Displacement.

It's a concept that keeps popping up in cities around the world, but never really gets old. Dawson's extra bit of polish with the tiles and the ladder is the icing on an already great idea.