The Bike Man

Saw this on my walk on Saturday afternoon in Cambridge, this bike, completely overtaken by the surrounding foliage. Got me thinking about comedy camouflage...


from izismile.com

Spring-Cleaning my Mind

Sporadic word / idea vomit (insert better word here):

from joevancleave.blogspot.com

Picture your counters/work tops/shelves filled with not items for sale but t.v's - As many as we can get, old, new, b+w or colour. They show the images of the items once sitting there, flickering screens on loop of inanimate life.  Spooky. 
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Trapped utopia.  Mini Eden projects. A garden stuck indoors. Plants. Bench. Grass. > Contained in shop.  Why not make every empty shop into a courtyard or urban park?  Turning commercialisation inside out, more "gardens" will pop up just as shops are known to.  Lead on to inviting people to rest, or eat lunch in our closed-off nirvana.  Create a real, live, growing shop display: invite allotment enthusiasts and guerilla gardeners to contribute. National Trust's - Country air in a jar. Sell freshly cut grass from our very own lawn.  The Smell of Summer. Reinforce shop trading. It could go on.

from AndyPryke.com

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Sandra's face-cut-out progression.  Boarded shop fascia with oval cut-outs.  Once peered into a kaleidoscope of images made from your face is seen.  Use of CCTV or poor man's version to document the shapes and patterns.  Then add to your interior to act as more image (but this time moving) for kaleidoscope, keep building until really nauseating.  Will require mirrors and some engineering brain power.
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This doesn't require access into a premise.  Write and post as many letters to a shop until the place fills up.  I always notice an empty place by the piles of mail on the floor.  The idea of being away too long. How many posted DL envelopes will it take to fill.  Just pick an address, find out?  How many times can a printer print an A4 black page before it runs out of ink - Daniel Eatock

To the note pad, Robin!

Are you adding a note or a person?

Thinking outside the shop box...
Inside/Outside Shop reflection...

SHOP AURA / MIRRORS / WINDOWS TO THE SOUL / PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS

Mirror Image

On the subject of creating optical illusions using mirrors, or mirror images (that's an interesting topic alone because what we see in the mirror is never 100% true to reality blah blah...). A couple of years ago I was looking into photography for an FL shoot, I had these stored away - two images below by Schohaja Staffler - which resurfaced the other day. The reason these are so pleasing to me are because of the old trick of displacing objects, the inside outside etc. Can we bypass the issue of even obtaining a shop by creating the inside of the shop outdoors and the window is our mirror in...! Whoa...

unknown source

* Also thought I'd add one of my favourite pieces just as a treat, the Wooden Mirror. Génial!

Mirror-montage

I was reading about handmade special effects last week and admiring Jan Von Holleben photographs.



I found these surreal optical illusions very inspiring for our shop window project, I liked the way he uses every day life objects to create these absurd compositions, like cut-and-paste.

I was also flicking through the "Hair Wars" book

at RD Franks and I thought I would like to make something with synthetic hair, lots of it! well maybe that would be a little expensive...
However I kept thinking about

18th century wigs


Brixton arcade

I also remembered an exhibition (someone told me once or twice that I see too many!) I saw many years ago, "When Philip met Isabella"

where Philip Treacy's wonderful hats where placed on black hatstands, inside glass cabinets so you could see your face reflected on the glass and it looked like you where actually wearing the hat

I don't think that was intentional as it wasn't very obvious but it inspired this idea:


(The grey areas are mirrors where passers by can see their reflection and it looks like they are part of the composition of 18th century wigs printed on paper and stuck on the window, the background is wax print fabric pattern as I imagined this in Brixton, maybe it used to be a hairdresser's shop...)

What do you think? it's not necessarily what the window should look like but rather a way for people people to interact with the window, in a very low-fi way, this is just a layout and I still believe there should be a message behind it which could inform or be part of the composition