Urban Play 2008 Sagmeister Inc. “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”

Eight days of work condensed into 6 minutes.

Bright TV interviews us and other about the Urban Play event.

Interview with BrightTV

To everybody who saw this event: As it came to such a sudden end we have to make sure that we document the few days this whole project existed. If you have any pictures, please send them to us. We will make sure that every photo will be credited whenever it appears in any publication…Thank you so much!

A very quick and incredibly surprising ending to our work here: On Sunday morning we revisited the spot to see the results of the night, and when we reached the square we couldnt believe our eyes: All the coins were gone. Not one eurocent was left on the square. We were expecting everything, but not this fast and this complete. After the initial shock we found out the following: In the morning somebody showed up with a couple of plastic bags and started putting the coins into his bags. Apparently one of the neighbours saw this and thought this person is “stealing the artwork”, and called the police.
They showed up, talked to the guy with the bags, who had no problem with leaving everything right there. Somehow the police must have thought that is not enough to protect the artwork, and after trying to reach the owner of it, they decided to get into action themselves. They called a city cleaning company and cleaned up the whole square with brooms, and brought all the coins to a “safe” room at the police department.
So not more than 20 hours of completion of the work it was gone again already. And it was not removed by homeless people, not completely messed up by the youth coming back from clubbing. No, it was cleaned up by the authority, due to a big misunderstanding, to help and protect us and our work. Thank you!



Luckily Jens was around to at least take these great pictures of what happend.

Everything is done! We managed to finish it! With the help of many many great helpers we managed to put the design down with 250.000 eurocents! And since right now the webcams are up as well. The opening is taking place right now.

Yesterday two journalists from SBS 6 came to make a little feature about our project. You can view it here.

Three amazing timelapse videos just showed up on flickr. Great to finally see what we are doing here from a distance. Check them out!

We had a great two days Monday and Tuesday, and even today everything is going great! Very nice weather, nice people, and a big group that came to help with a couple of tiles (Thanks, Ingrid from HvA Institute for Interactive Media.
We are still behind a bit, but are confident that we will make it!

We made a little video to show the progress on Monday evening. Especially when moving around you can see the four different shades we are using for the design—sadly the youtube compression is not too great. Well, you just have to come here to have a look yourself!

jajaja

Adam Chapman, who helped us this Sunday, set up a flickr group to collect photos. There we can all contribute to have a nice collection of pix.