this might be something that could be called a brighter moment…

The local newspaper coverage of the festival and block party was somewhat of a letdown. The article was good, but instead of any of the great photo ops from the entire festival available throughout the day, they published a picture of a lone kid in the middle of the pile of squished boxes… and then mis-claimed that the boxes were “discarded by vendors”, which was absolutely untrue. (This may have been a function of someone who wasn’t actually at the event selecting and writing the caption for the photo…) All the vendors were very neat and cleaned up completely after themselves… and what’s more, Andrew and lots of volunteers put together all those boxes carefully by hand!!!

However, some people on the internet got it right on, and also put up awesome photos! Thanks, Worcester!

“I… immediately saw that there were a lot of boxes…”

“…this level of blissful abandonment (from which all art stems)”

“Do it again! Do it again!”

(We’ve also heard tell that hordes of angry commenters are protesting the crummy newspaper article on the paper’s website, but I couldn’t find a working link for it…)

Here’s a sequence of images of the entire day, from 8:35am until 6pm. Thanks Erika!

Of particular note: painting the street (starting at 08:40), building the wall (starting at 09:10), some great structures (13:25, 14:00, 14:55, 15:40, and at most other times as well), one of many hurricanes (14:05), collapse of the wall (16:00), dancing and jumping on the boxes while Bone Zone played (17:35). The “slideshow” feature fades in and out between each photo, it’s more awesome-looking if you click on the first photo and then click “next”…

As is apparent from the sequence, not many of the constructions stayed up for more than 5-10 minutes. After ten hours, we were exhausted. It was time to bike back (in a last adrenaline rush) to the 11 Forbes St. house, eat dinner and pizza, take showers, and fall asleep on the couch.

The block party was totally what we expected, not what we expected, and even better than we could have expected (as we’ve come to expect from these kinds of projects)!

skipping in time a little bit, here’s some footage of the very end of the Block Party, from Jacob Berendes:

BONE ZONE at stArt in the street, worcester 2008 from fujichia katsuda on Vimeo.

Many, many more photos soon, and you can read Jacob’s wrap up of the whole fest here.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, who built stuff, and who knocked stuff down!

Here’s the workshop, moved further back into the storefront.

folding boxes. . .

Sarah returned for another day of folding and Tina also joined us. Today there was a write up for stART in the paper.

I became partially entranced by the piles of blocks that I found myself surrounded by.

We also began to paste on some brick patterns!

After I got dropped off in Worcester on Monday I headed over to the Clark University’s bookstore to collect boxes from their basement. We stumbled upon their over abundant collection last year when we participated in the Playtime exhibit. Here’s what the basement looked like when I arrived-

And here’s the boxes jammed into Tina Zlody’s car -

This is after I finished, note the basement has a leaking foundation so at the bottom of that massive pile was a water soaked layer of paper mush{gross!}

That is pretty much all I did monday, it took about five trips that afternoon. A big thanks to the the bookstore employees for letting me use their dollies and elevators all afternoon.

Here’s the storefront where the magic happens, you can see the pile of folded plain brown style boxes emerging in the corner -

Here’s the relocated pile of boxes-

I think this is a good depiction of what next years project should look like, real raw.

Stacy and Sarah, two of stART on the streets organizers, stopped by and helped out. Each brought their kids, who also helped. In addition to climbing the boys really liked using the hand trucks to wheel the cardboard around.

And so ended the day. . .

oh yeah. . . I also got my milkshake and pizza!

Tomorrow: Pasting patterns, Folding more boxes, and the beginings of girders.

Now to set the Wayback Machine to last week for a few shots of gathering and making materials. . .

Here’s my housemates van laden with cardboard after a evening trip to the art supply dumpster.

These days I do my printing at New Urban Arts. Here are the many, many sheets of bricks on newsprint.

And here’s some more bricks! Big thanks to Annelise for helping me print.

Printing these sheets is enormously satisfying. It is a definitive quick and dirty process of conitnually adding new colors to the fades and then printing again on top of the halfway dried prints with more and more layers. I went through a lot of the ink dregs from the silk screening studio at NUA; some have been sitting around for years!

Tomorrow I will be in the window on Park Ave. folding and pasting boxes. Maybe I will have some pizza and get a milkshake. . .

This morning, after gathering materially in Providence, driving scenically along Rt. 146, and breakfasting deliciously in a diner on Lincoln St., we dropped Andrew off in an empty storefront dance studio on Park Ave, along with a pile of cardboard, a bag of implements, a creaky Raleigh bicycle, a lil’ stereo, and the 60 Greatest Old-Time Radio Shows on cassette tape.

Onwards, noble builder of Cardboards!!!!

Welcome, Welcome. . .

At stARt on the Street this year Andrew Oesch and Jean Cozzens will be making a big mess of things. . .  You remember playing with building blocks right? Well, Jean and Andrew are going to make cardboard blocks and cardboard girders of various sizes, then on Sunday September 21st 2008 it will be a free for all of street scale construction- everyone can build!

A diagram for your visual aid-

If you want to help us fold boxes or paste on brick patterns, email us! Or stop by our workshop, we’ll be in a storefront on Park Avenue, I think this is the place. . . Stop by tomorrow afternoon!and check back for progress updates.

ps-hyperlinks are fun!