The Doxa

Rebar will appear with Off the Grid founder Matt Cohen for an informal discussion and presentation about public spacemaking Thursday, June 23, 6-8pm at DEGW.

Rebar’s Blaine Merker will be giving a talk at the Department of Landscape Architecture on Wednesday, April 6 at 12PM in the Atrium of Building 7, College of Environmental Design.

If you’re in the LA area, drop by and say hello!

If you are in San Francisco this weekend for the massive and extensive Noise Pop Festival, consider stopping by the Culture Club event on Saturday afternoon at Public Works.

Rebar’s Matthew Passmore will lead a workshop on temporary urban transformations and how guerilla artists just might save the city!

A brief talk will be followed by an interactive workshop. Bring an image or ideas for how to reclaim vacant lots and other underutilized fragments of our city!

Noise Pop Culture Club
Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011 at 1 PM at Public Works, San Francisco.

KNUDEN, Copenhagen created by Christian Fumz, Photo: Bettina Lamm

Rebar has been invited to present at a conference in Denmark. “Contemporary Art, Play and Temporality” in Copenhagen.

The conference is organised by landscape architect Bettina Lamm, University of Copenhagen department of Forest & Landscape in collaboration with curator Charlotte Bagger Brandt, Råderum – office of contemporary art.

The working title of Rebar’s talk is ElastiCity – User generated urbanism and the adaptive metropolis. We will post more about the conference, and Copenhagen as the date approaches.

Rebar will be represented on a discussion panel at the Just Metropolis conference, 9:00AM-10:30AM, at the University of California Berkeley this Friday. There is a full slate of conference topics ranging from ecology to decoding military landscapes, so it should be an interesting event. Rebar’s panel will include other authors of the forthcoming book Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, which we’ve mentioned here a couple times before.

Last fall a group of CCA architecture students, led by Landscape Architect David Fletcher and Rebar art and design studio shared a meal together at a local taco truck for a class assignment.  Our research seminar explored San Francisco’s food and wastesheds. Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed. The research seminar was a part of the URBANlab, an innovative curriculum component of The California College of the Arts Architecture Program.

Please join us for a talk by Jessica Diaz of Gracias Madre, a new restaurant serving organic Mexican cuisine to the Mission District of San Francisco, a presentation of Back to Basics by Materials and Applications - a recirculating fish taco farm charged with rainwater at the beginning of the season, stocked with locally spawned tilapia and raising tomatoes, onion, and lettuce by harvest / party time; and a presentation, exhibition, and discussion of the results of our Tacoshed research.

Thursday February 25^th, 7pm

The Studio for Urban Projects

3579 17th Street
San Francisco, CA 9411

Suggested donation: $5-$15 at the door.

Mark Andrew Gravel of Bouwerie will be serving organic black bean tacos from his Spotted Rooster project.

Rebar will be in Paris, France next week to take part in Smart City: New Urban Challenges, New Artistic Practices, an international conference and workshop. This year’s workshop theme is mobile cities, which the program describes:

Mobile media, localisation media, new map-making and storytelling forms as well as other mobility instruments have infiltrated our cities and lifestyles.They have mutated city-dwellers relation to time and space; we are witnessing a multiplication of mobility practices and forms, of trajectories, of theintensity of the communication flow and trips. What is the impact on our perception of geographical areas, on urban forms and city planning, on ourlifestyles? This is the question that the artists are to explore in the workshop, developing varied artistic projects directly linked to the territory (strolling,mobile interface, urban game art, immersive systems, ephemeral architecture…)

Also at the conference are several artists and collectives from around Europe including Adelin Schweitzer, Ulrich Fischer, Studio 21bis, Antonin Fourneau, Zoom+Infraksound+Damien Masson, Collectif Zoom, Damien Masson, Christophe Goutes and Pixel 13. If you are in Paris, come see us. Rebar will be presenting on Thursday January 28th at 2pm, at the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. More updates on the Doxa, from the road!

We won’t actually be in Bilbao, but we will be streaming live from our studio to the conference over the internet. If you’re in Bilbao…or near our studio!…you can come check out the talk titled ‘Temporary Transformations and Tactical Urbanism’. Rebar’s newest intern extraordinaire, Berta Lázaro, will be translating and moderating. The talk takes places at 7:30pm Central European Time, or 12:30pm PST. More here.