Urban Cartography

Conflux is the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets. Currently in its third year, Conflux will take place September 14 - 17th in Brooklyn. Over 80 artists from across the US and countries including Canada,UK, Spain, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia will come to Williamsburg to present projects including experimental walking, biking, boat and public-transport tours; street games and tech workshops; mobile broadcasts, performances and a number of temporary installations.

highlights include:

• street art tour by Streetsy and the Graffiti Research Lab
• human-scale Othello game on the streets of Williamsburg
• museum tours by the City Reliquary
• mobile art installation in a truck by the Rider Project
• urban tourism mash-up of New York and Baghdad
• audio bus tour by The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology [NYSAE] with members of free 103.9
• 24-hour road trip through the 5 boroughs
• over a dozen multimedia presentations by noted artists and writers, includingthe Miss Rockaway Armada crew and author Adam Greenfield
• Alice Arnold's "To Be Seen" street art film screening
• free money hidden in public space by artist Sal Randolph
• mark Tribe's historic protest speech re-creation
• student projects and workshops from NYU's ITP program
• events all four nights of Conflux

Conflux headquarters: McCaig-Welles Gallery, 129 Roebling Street, Williamsburg. open 10 am - 7 pm.

Conflux is free and open to the public, and is produced by Glowlab. Additional background information and press release.

Edwin Heathcote has a review of the extensive but disjointed Future City exhibit at the Barbican, which opened last week and runs through mid-September.

Nothing dates faster than the future. That is why architecture, the slowest of the arts, is probably the worst medium to express it. But that hasn't stopped architects trying and their futuristic fantasies have been hugely influential in our cities. This was never more so than in the early 20th century, when the modernists conceived of rational cities that would replace random street-patterns with gardens spiked with skyscrapers linked by streets in the sky. The best ended up like London's Barbican (yes, the best), the worst like the decaying housing projects that circle nearly every major city.

So it is entirely appropriate that Future City, a paean to architectural utopias, should sit in the Barbican, London's last chunk of architectural utopianism. (Conceived in the 1950s, it was finished only in the 1980s, when it was already painfully passé.) Future City is an attempt to display architecture's most radical visions from the lasthalf-century. It is a superb collection of stuff, with fantastic, visionary drawings, pasted-together manifestoes and stunning models.

pictured: David Greene / Archigram's 1967 Living Pod, photographed by Philippe Magnon.