At 11:00 a.m., April 23, 2012, artist Joey Skaggs will lead a band of outraged costumed muppets down to the Goldman Sachs offices at 200 West Street in NYC. Skaggs will be peddling his Mobile Homeless Homes prototype — a low cost alternative living space for the millions of upside-down, underwater or foreclosed homeowners who have lost their houses due to the banking crisis that caused the real estate collapse.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Outraged Homeless Muppets to Converge on Goldman Sachs

“Homelessness is a great American tragedy. Our financial system and government have let us down and we, together, must take a stand to change the way the system works. With over 11 million homes underwater and millions in foreclosure, people are frightened, distressed and angry,” says Joey Skaggs.

Although not a cure, Mobile Homeless Homes (MHH) offers a temporary solution — low cost alternative living spaces for the millions of upside-down, underwater or foreclosed homeowners who have lost their houses due to the banking crisis that caused the real estate collapse. The MHH centerpiece is a camouflage, stealth, mobile home made from a series of connected plastic garbage cans, propelled by a tricycle, that will be undetectable by authorities. It blends into any urban environment. (more…)

From Joey Skaggs:

Mobile Homeless Homes

Submitted by ABOVE:

Blood Diamond

Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army’s war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted. This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg’s largest diamond trader Jewel City. Jewel City is a six-block mega-precinct that serves as a base for some 300 diamond traders as well as South Africa’s Diamond Board and State Traders Association. Jewel City is the largest diamond exporter in the southern hemisphere with over R7-Billion worth of Diamonds being exported every year.

I was able to get away with this diamond wall heist because I told the owners I would paint in big letters “Diamonds are a woman’s best friend” on the exterior of their building.

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From Alex Case:

SF Bay Area ‘Tacocopter’ Deliver Service (Unfortunately) Fake
by David Murphy
March 24, 2012

Never get between a Silicon Valley geek and his or her tacos. That’s the lesson learned from the flurry of reporting this week surrounding the rumored “Tacocopter”— a San Francisco Bay Area delivery service that was alleged to have been able to deliver one’s taco order by way of an unmanned quadrotor.

Any rational individual might start to wonder about the authenticity of a service that’s supposed to air-drop one’s lunch in any given location around the San Francisco Bay Area. First off, that presumes there’s an army of people sitting in a control room somewhere all practicing their flight skills across a roughly 50-mile stretch of land (assuming a Tacocopter could deliver from San Francisco to San Jose). (more…)

Egypt artists “reopen” street by graffiti protest
Nasser Nasser
Seattle Post Intelligencer
March 29, 2012

Cairo (AP) — After Egypt’s ruling military sealed off streets around Cairo’s Tahrir Square with walls of imposing concrete blocks, a group of artists decided to reopen the avenues on their own — in the public imagination, at least.

On one of the walls, they painted an exact trompe-l’oeil reproduction of the street behind it, as if it were open. The perspective painting matches up with the architecture of the neighboring buildings and even has some “pedestrians” strolling along the boulevard. The street’s new name is “No Walls Street.”

The graffiti piece is the work of the Revolution Artists Association, a group of young Egyptian artists who say the uprising against authorities in the country continues a year after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.

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More great urban art from Street Art Utopia:

As seen March 2012 in Chiang Mai, Thailand:

Lace Fence by Demakersvan:

In Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Felipe Carrelli. A car was abandoned 2 years ago. It burned and Filipe and his friends decided to make a garden on it. Before, during and after the intervention!

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From Mike, Linda, and Ed:

Floris Kaayk: ‘Birdman’ Video A Hoax, ‘Jarno Smeets’ Not Real
by Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Huffington Post
March 22, 2012

A Dutch man named Jarno Smeets became an Internet sensation this week after posting a video on YouTube in which he appears to fly like a bird.

In the video, he straps on a contraption that supposedly syncs the motion of his flapping arms to that of a huge pair of wings made of kite fabric, allowing him to flap the wings and take off into the air.

Except not.

As reported yesterday by Life’s Little Mysteries, CGI experts quickly found flaws in the footage of Smeets taking flight that revealed the video clip had been tampered with. Internet marketing experts suggested the video may have been a viral ad campaign — for Nintendo Wii, perhaps, as Smeets claimed to have used Wii controllers to operate his wings. By the end of the day, doubt surrounding the video had soundly overtaken belief in the amazing new invention it seemed to show in action.

And now, the jig is up.

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From Adbusters:

Tactical Briefing #27 – #LAUGHRIOT

Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,

In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May’s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland. Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.

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From Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere:

Spinning Beach Ball of Death

For our latest mission, a presenter at the TED conference has his talk interrupted by the Mac spinning wait cursor, commonly known as the “Spinning Beach Ball of Death.” As he stands awkwardly and waits, things get weird.

Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our report.

For the uninitiated, TED is an annual conference in Long Beach, California that focuses on “Ideas Worth Sharing.” I gave a talk at a TEDx event last year that was promoted to TED.com. For the conference this year, the TED curators approached me about staging something unexpected to surprise their audience. We had previously staged a musical prank at a conference, but I wanted to do something new and different for TED. I came up with the idea to have a fake speaker give a talk and make it seem like his big moment in the spotlight had been ruined by a computer crash. Apple users love to hate the notorious Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I started with that image and set out to heighten it to absurdity.

Produced by: Charlie Todd and Cody Lindquist; Shot & Edited by: TED; Starring: Eugene Cordero as Colin Robertson; Animation by: Bob Bonniol; Song by: Tyler Walker; Still Photos: James Duncan Davidson, Charlie Todd

Click here for more about Improv Everywhere.

WikiLeaks: “Private Spies” Stratfor Helped Dow Chemical Monitor Bhopal Activists, The Yes Men
by Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Democracy Now
February 28, 2012

Emails leaked by WikiLeaks from the private intelligence firm Stratfor reveal the chemical industrial giant Dow Chemical closely followed the work of activists around the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster, the 1984 gas leak that killed anywhere between 3,500 and 25,000 people. Of particular interest to Dow was the group, The Yes Men, the anti-corporate pranksters who pulled off a famous 2004 hoax that led the world to believe Dow had finally taken responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy. “With us, they were carefully paying attention to every move that we were making publicly, especially anything to do with Dow and Bhopal,” says Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. “What surprised us in those emails, though, was that we would have assumed that Dow would be really concerned with the exact issue of Bhopal and Dow’s responsibility, stuff that could directly impact their bottom line. But what S[t]ratfor seems to be really a bit obsessed with is whether we or other organizations are going to draw this into a bigger critique of corporate power.”

The Whitney Biennial web occupation
by Matt Seaton
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 28 February 2012

An artful web hoax announced the sacking of the Whitney Biennial’s corporate sponsors and apologised to artists for their exploitation. So whodunnit?

This week, the Whitney Museum in New York City gives over most of its exhibition space for its 2012 Biennial, showcasing the work of more than 50 contemporary artists. As in previous years, the Biennial is sponsored by Deutsche Bank and art auctioneers Sotheby’s. The co-curators of the show, Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, describe some of their criteria for inclusion:

“Artists are bringing other artists into their work – a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids. There is also the radical production of new forms, fabrication on a more modest scale. Artists are constantly redefining what an artist can be at this moment and this Biennial celebrates that fact.”

An unknown number of artists/activists – with notably good web skills – took this brief of reinventing and borrowing for the purpose of rewriting the Biennial’s “standard narrative” a few steps further than the Whitney had anticipated. (more…)

Holes Of Happiness is a short documentary by Steve Wheem looking at the reactions of the public to some pothole gardens that have been popping up around East London. See more at http://www.thepotholegardener.com

From Erin:

Here’s a sampling of 106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos–Year 2011. For attributions and to see more, visit StreetArtUtopia.com.

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‘The Cacophony Society’ is more than just a clown show
by Richard Chang
The Orange County Register
February 10, 2012

Grand Central Art Center is exploring one of America’s most playful fringe organizations in ‘The Cacophony Society – Zone Show.’

Multi-colored fliers line the walls outside Grand Central Art Center’s Main Gallery. A blue banner hangs from the ceiling and reads, “Welcome Homeland Security.”

A red, black and white sign just inside the Main Gallery mysteriously states: “You may already be a member.” Further inside, chaos and mayhem ensue.

“The Cacophony Society – Zone Show” is the newest exhibition at Santa Ana’s Grand Central Art Center. It opened Feb. 4 with a massive reception attended by thousands crowding the Artists Village, and continues through April 15. (more…)

Submitted by Emerson Dameron as seen on Gawker:

A Stealthy Inmate Added a Pig to the Vermont State Troopers’ Squad Cars
by Emma Carmichael
Gawker
February 2, 2012

The prisoners working out of a St. Albans, Vt. shop that produces car decals and license plates successfully sneaked a small outline of a pig onto the official crest that adorns every trooper car in the state. The heifer now has a pig as a spot.

No, this is not some leaked plot line to the Super Troopers sequel that will never happen; this is real life, (more…)