Bus-Tops - a call to artists!

September 15th, 2009 → 2:37 pm @ Bus-Tops

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Summary:

This post is specifically looking to engage artists with the Bus-Tops proposition, and seeking ideas for what artists might create for the platform. The Bus-Tops project is the proposed installation of approx. 40 LED boards on the roof’s of bus shelters across London. Anyone can then create work for any or all of these installations using online tools. We are seeking original and bold ideas to make up an initial curation across the canvas should the project go ahead. Have a look at the Comments for what people are saying so far, and please read on for lots more detail.

What would you make for the Bus-Tops canvas?

Bus-Tops is a proposed installation of approximately 40 1.75m x 1.3m LED panels on the roofs of bus shelters across all London boroughs. It is one of 5 shortlisted proposal for the Artists Taking The Lead fund, a major project of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad being developed by Arts Council England in partnership with London 2012 and the arts councils of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The Bus-Tops installations will display work created by the public. Artists who identify as such but critically it is for absolutely anybody who has a voice and has something to say to people in London. The installations are intended to pleasantly and wonderfully disrupt commuters experience of riding on buses… To jolt us out of our ipod-listening-london-paper-reading habits and inspire joy and wonder in the last place you’d expect it - on the roof of a bus shelter.

If our project is chosen, we will have the network of LED Canvases installed and operational from July 2011 to August 2012. As well as the public submitted work which the project focuses on, we will be curating work which celebrates the values of the cultural olympiad.

A big part of the development phase that we’re in right now is in imagining and understanding just how people might use this new canvas. The fund is for up to £500k and in our budgeting we have allocated 20 artist grants of £2,000 each. These grants might be for individuals, groups, or collectives.

This post is a call to any artist interested in working with us, whether you are in London, the UK, or anywhere in the world. We are looking for beautiful ideas for how the canvas can be used to engage London bus travellers. We hope that through your ideas submitted here we will be able to build our first curatorial arc of the project.

Routes and Pebbles:

The way that we have decided to install the panels was through looking at which boroughs are traversed by which bus routes. Some bus routes take in up to 9 London boroughs, so working with these sorts of routes makes a lot of sense. As well as routes, some boroughs simply don’t have routes that go very far, and so we’re looking at installing Bus-Tops in one’s and two’s in some areas.

Thinking of routes, imagine you get on the 243 bus at Wood Green, and travel all the way through to Waterloo, traversing 6 London boroughs. Along this route there are 6 Bus-Top installations that you can create for. You might want to write a series of 6 Haiku’s celebrating each borough the route passes through. You might want to create work that reflects and explores the character of the location of each installation. The Bus-Tops installations will exist along many routes, and so you can create narrative structure when you are working along them, exploring the nature of a bus commute and engaging passengers along their journey.

The other type of installation we will have we are calling ‘Pebbles’. We do not yet know where these pebbles will be, and in fact we’re going to be asking people where *they* think we should put them. Perhaps one of the pebbles is at a dusty and desolate-feeling spot. Perhaps one is directly in front of an office building with hundreds of office workers windows looking down on it. Pebbles are an opportunity for self-contained expression, and are a lovely contrast to the narrative nature of the route installations. Below are two images that stylistically represent where the installations might be.

Click for full-size images

The drawing tools:

In the image below you see a stylised (and in no way final) representation of what the drawing tool-kit may look like. You can upload an image, animation, text or video (videos and animation can be no longer than 10 seconds and must loop), start completely fresh, or even start from another artists work. The screens are monochromatic. At the moment we are working with black and white although we are still considering different colours like Mad Magenta or Panic Pink.

Click for full-size image

In the images below you can get a feel for how the canvas might be used, with text, images and animation (animations should loop and be no more than ten seconds long).

Click for full-size images

Animation Copyright Julian Opie ‘Keira Walking’

The panels contain 15,000 monochrome pixels (150×100 pixels, 5mm square)

Tell us your ideas!

We hope that this project excites your creative brains and we’d really love it if you could share some of your ideas on how you would use this network of canvases to celebrate art, culture and London. You can either send us your ideas via email here, or leave them as comments below (comments would be great so that other people can get inspired).

Thanks for reading and even if you’re not submitting ideas we’d love to hear any comments or thoughts you might have on the project, and we’d doubly appreciate it if you could lend your support to the project in the official projects forum at the Artists Taking The Lead site.