Newmindspace: May this Fearless and Fun Creative Force be with You.

Jedi and Sith mark your calendars. On the night of November 16th, an epic lightsabre battle is set to take place in front of a museum that "looks like a Jawa Sandcrawler" (the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum). 1,000 blacklight-reactive, meter-long cardboard tubes will be distributed to the assembled and six massive blacklight cannons will be aimed at the fighters. Starting at 9:30 pm EST, the ensuing mayhem will rage until every single tube is destroyed.

The event is the brainchild of Newmindspace, a mischievous art collective consisting of Lori Kufner, a University of Toronto sociology student and Kevin Bracken, a transplanted Long Islander who is studying political science (also at U of T). The pair has been organizing free public events and art installations in Toronto, Montreal and New York since 2005 with the aim of "reclaiming public space, inventing new ways of having fun, and creating community."

Past events have included the annual capture the flag game in Toronto's Financial District, public pillow fights in Toronto and NYC, Subway and Streetcar parties (including a trick-or-treat party last Halloween), and two renegade street parades (unlicensed and including the TTC's subway system as part of the parade route).

Some of the collective's public art projects involve LEDs including throwies, designed by the Graffiti Research Lab, an organization that provides non-destructive "open source technologies for urban communications," for the purpose of creating unauthorized public art installations that do not deface or otherwise damage public spaces. Throwies are made by taping together a diffused LED, a lithium battery and a rare earth magnet, creating individual points of light that can adhere to any ferrous surface. They are thus named because they are designed to be thrown at their intended target, preferably by a group of people, thus enabling an unauthorized assembly to reclaim an otherwise institutionalized public space.

The first such project by Newmindscape, Night Lights (November, 2006) was designed to counter and call attention to urban light pollution by creating artificial constellations using individual LEDs suspended from helium ballons, and string of LEDs attached to a weather balloon (called a string of diamonds). The event was unfortunately undermined by the theft of 300 LEDs during the night's proceedings.

A second event, Radical Illumination (December, 2006) invited participants to amass at the corner of Queen and Spadina in Toronto's busy Design District to pelt an undisclosed object with throwies. Hundreds gathered in subzero temperatures and the target was revealed to be a passing streetcar.  The assembled swarmed into traffic and attacked the northbound street car, creating a moving work of art. They then turned their attention to the southbound car, also pelting it, but the latter stayed put and soon Toronto's finest arrived, not so much to interrupt the proceedings but to ensure that nobody was hurt while the event ran its course.

Kevin and Laurie use blogs and sites such as facebook, flickr and youtube to promote and report on their events, to draw participants and to engender a sense of community. In doing so they are bringing the spontaneous non-hierarchical nature of online social networks and the creative anarchy of the Internet into the real world, resulting in real, rather than virtual spaces, that transgress societal norms and remove the barriers that confine art to career artists and to institutionalized spaces, such as museums and art galleries.

Posted by Christos Tsirbas.

links
http://www.Newmindspace.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/radicalillumination/interesting/show/