6 StreeTALK: WHAT IS YOUR DREAM CITY?* StreeTALK is a participatory installation of commentaries and drawings on the future of the city. A street corner is re-staged as a space for creative placemaking for residents, visitors, commuters, or students passing by. Framed by a basic set of rules, they are invited to address the simple prompt, what is your dream city? The ensuing responses become a conversation rooted in the intersection of thoughts, ideas, concerns and suggestions. The street corner turns into a lively universal agora. The final piece stands as an information tree and an unpredictable collective artwork in its own right. Today more than ever, the merging of walls, people and play is an invitation for our imagination to further revitalize the urban fabric and make it more organic. StreeTALK is also a design experiment in which we are exploring the dynamics of creative control. In both city planning and individual creations, we enter into a set of relationships where the contextual demands are often too great to allow the free flow of solutions. Cities can be as inherently dysfunctional as they appear extraordinary. Paradoxically, it may be the very nature of these tensions that promotes vitality in our cities. The rules of making and usage are contingent on conditions that must be controlled by a collective body. Somewhere between order and entropy everyone has an opportunity to find a place of coherence.
PLAY BUILD REGULATE StreeTALK what is your dream city? BEAUTIFY MOVE EXCHANGE * StreeTALK was commissioned by The City of Palo Alto for the Code:ART festival on June 1-3, 2017. Code:ART had the support of an Art Works grant through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and support from local corporate sponsors.
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