La beauté avec les idéogrammes chinois demeure la facilité de les transformer au dessin ou motif sans souci. L’exemple qui suit est créé par la ville de Guangzhou. Mot par mot, les caractères 文明 廣州  s’expriment:

文明 wen ming - c’est-à-dire civilisé

廣州 Guangzhou

Il suffit d’un petit peu de votre imagination visuelle pour interpreter d’autres messages portant dans ce panneau d’affichage.

Que fait le bon street artiste ayant une conscience écologique après avoir peint un mur ? Facile, il recycle ses sprays pour en faire des bennes à ordure fleuries ! Voyez plutôt ce qu’on trouve dans les rues de São Paulo.

Photo par vejaporondengmve

Pas de doutes, c’est vraiment le printemps !

>J’étais au Hong Kong Museum of Art 香港藝術館 pour une exposition sur les cheveux (voir les photos qui suivent), je me suis posé la question, ‘Est-ce que un gouvernement peut planifier un quartier culturel pour une ville de presque sept millions d’habitants?’

Tout dépend de votre définition de l’art et de la culture. Hong Kong, malgré son succès comme centre financier et comme ancienne porte principale de la République populaire de Chine, est assez anémique culturellement selon certains critiques.



The vast landmass reclaimed from sea in Kowloon, what in the future would be the West Kowloon Cultural District, is still undergoing quasi public consultation. Many people asked if arts and culture can be “planned” or “engineered”. Hong Kong is quite eager to shake off the image as a cultural dessert, which has been depicted in various local and international media. If art and culture document human experience, a city of close to seven million should be overflowed with culture. After all, that’s similar in size to Québec, and the latter has plenty of water, physically and culturally! (Un)sustainable development, environment, economy, non-business interest, creativity, cultivation and toruism and internaitonal statue are just some of the issues on people’s lips. What would you do if you are the Hong Kong government bureaucrats running the show? Yes, they want the cake and have it too! It will interesting to come back five, and ten years down the road to see the changes.

Finally hope, Jiansong Chen, China

What do artists, galleries, curators, corporate and individual sponsors, art collectors, the average Joe and Jane, non-profit organizations, etc. have in common? They are all stakeholders of Common Ground - mixing new media, art, philanthropy and environmental projects. Its world touring collection opened on 9 Nov 2008 at Huan Tie Times Art in Beijing.

Ce regroupement des personnes concernées nous fournit un milieu sur place autant que virtuel, pour sensibiliser le public les enjeux envrionnementaux en soutenant des organismes sans but lucratif. If one could link some of the exhibits in one line: As we can’t really reset the clock, it is perhaps time to reflect upon our flowing thoughts to stop the circle of sorrow .

For more of the digital artwork organized in four online galleries, including all the works mentioned in this post, point to commonground2008.cn or commonground2008.com.

Image par Daniel Raphael Cooper, Flickr Creative Commons

Pourquoi je vous parle de tout ça ? hé bien les nouveau locaux de Kung Fu Numerik / Turbulent on une superbe vu sur la dite “montagne”. Je me suis donc juré de faire une photo du Mont-Royal chaque jour ou je suis au bureau, sous un angle ou avec un traitement diffèrent.

Les photo sont visibles ici : http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbulent/sets/72157608308147312/
Pour l’instant on à a peut prêt 1 mois de mont-royal au jour le jour, avec même la première neige !

Toutes ces photos seront bien entendu sur cityspeak !!

Greenpeace has been promoting the message that kangaroos are greener than you’d think. In a release touting the Australian icon as the perfect protein for the environmentally conscious meat eater.

At home in Australia, the Rural Industries Research and Development Corp. have funded a strategic plan to improve the image of kangaroo meat worldwide by publicizing its health benefits: low fat (under 2%), most of which is polyunsaturated, and only 98 calories per 100 gram (3.5 ounce) serving.

The controversial Greenpeace report is claiming the main reason kangaroo meat is ‘green’ is because the animals don’t ‘break wind’ as much as other farmed animals. Cows and sheep release higher quantities of methane through belching and flatulence, which means if only 20% of beef consumption was cut in favour of kangaroo, it would reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by an astonishing 15 megatons by 2020. They need less food than sheep or cattle, are better adapted to drought and are far less damaging to the fragile topsoil than their sharply-hooved bovine counterparts

Personally I think this is going to be one of my one million acts of green… (See Donnelly’s post from Oct 23rd) http://green.cbc.ca

Read more and see what you think http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/skippysizeme

DaJuYuan, Shenzhen

If you are just looking at the few skyscrapers against the clear blue sky and brand name stores, with the somewhat present palm trees here and there, you would think that you are in Miami, Florida. Not! Meet Shenzhen, the (fishing) village turned special economic zone and up-and-coming, if not already there tier-one Chinese city.

Situated across the river from Hong Kong, the geographic location help propelled its rise in the past thirty years. Depends on how you play with the numbers, the per capita GDP of Shenzhen rivals that of better known heavy weights such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Selon certains urbanistes, l’avenir de la région de Hong Kong-Shenzhen a besoin de mettre ensemble des ressources de Hong Kong, Shenzhen et quand même Zhuhai et Macau, comme géographiquement la “San Francisco Bay Area” aux États-Unis. La raison d’être pour cette suggestion? La concurrence de Shanghai, la première ville chinoise au nom de population et d’économie. Autrement, lorsque Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture, il y a eu des oeuvres provisionnées par les militants-artistes traitées sur le sujet de développement urbain. Hong Kong est déjà la ville la plus densément peuplée du monde. Pour rendre la région plus performante et durable, le partage de ressources et d’infrastructures, etc., fait jaser beaucoup de monde. Chose certaine, la Chine veut répliquer des résultats de Shenzhen ailleurs, en améliorant la région encore.

Danielle and her girlfriend are helping to make the bike lifestyle present here in town at Revolution Montréal. The store also specializes in lesbian haircuts! The sign is one of Montréal’s most priceless pieces of CitySPK.

Danielle is the lovely lass perched on the bike, surrounded also by a host of the pieces from ongoing art shows. With a bunch of bike mechanic type workshops there seems to be a true DIY mandate…

Image taken by 顔なし, Flickr Creative Commons

It isn’t only reserved for far the hinterland regions. The Vancouver region saw a serious mauling a few weeks ago. Is this the natural conclusion to seamlessly attaching a lush forested city to a vast rain forest?

Fortunately, in this instance the bear was only going in for the kill on the all-dressed twelve inch veggie special. A young bear with questionable table manners opened the door to a Subway restaurant and then sniffed around before leaving. The bears every move was caught on the store’s security camera.

In New York, the reverse is true — this is what kind of bears you get if you cover every inch of a town in concrete and packs things so tight you have to put the trains under the ground, with only the air grates to breathe from… this is an entirely different sort of subway.

Trevor Browne aka eatdrinkpaperink is one hell of an illustrator and one of City Spk’s chief designers — and part of the originating crew. brrrup! Big shout outs to him and his imposing clydesdale sized calves.

He just finished one hell of a three month coast to coast Canadian bike ride. He kept a photo and narrative blog called cog blog. By some estimates he could have biked to the moon and back a jaw dropping 14 times. That makes him 7 times better than Neil Armstong — by my, rather informal, calculations anyhow.

Throughout Quebec he used the best and most extensive system of bike paths in NA called Route Vert. In Cape Breton he met up with friends and fellow designers Soyouz, who trek the globe on their bike and keep lovely photo logs of their journies on their stellar web site.

In a related piece from WIRED magazine blog: The loverly Gina Trapieri’s bike is one of a small fleet of GPS- and cameraphone-equipped bicycles that Flickr has deployed in several cities around the world. Flickr + GPS + solar power + bicycles = how can I not be utterly charmed? It automatically maps photos to the web. Sounds like some secret stealth military thing that just teleported from the future.

And finally, in the above thumbs, i leave you with some striking examples of why Trevor is probably, hands down, one of Canada’s, nay the Western Free World’s, most talented young illustrators for hire. Make sure to check out his site for a wide array of his artistic stylings.