Urban Experiences - Minature Art Installations

Slinkachu is a UK based artist who does these great installations of miniature model train characters around London.

He says: "My 'Little People Project' started in 2006. It involves the remodelling and painting of miniature model train set characters, which I then place and leave on the street. It is both a street art installation project and a photography project. The street-based side of my work plays with the notion of surprise and I aim to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings. The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography, and the titles I give these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humor. I want people to be able to empathize with the tiny people in my works."

Check out more of his works on his blog or see all of his work/exhibits/books etc on his website.




































































Buy his book Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu here - its great...and another must have for coffee table browsing. Again...I have this book and can definitely recommend it!

All Slinkachu photos are from the website.



Another of my favorite artists working with mini people is Vincent Bousserez. He's an all around amazing photographer but his miniatures are spectacular! He has them all posted to his Flickr account here and here. And here is a great article on his work in My Modern Met. Below are two of my absolute most favorites!!








































Photos from Vincent Bousserez's Flickr stream.

Urban Experiences - Ethnicity & Tourism Mapping

Eric Fischer has beautifully mapped hundreds of cities. He mapped racial and ethnic divisions in over 100 US cities based on the 2010 census results. These maps reveal such an interesting natural of cities. Some are pretty homogeneous while in others, strict divisions are visible. New York City's map to the left is so interesting to me - you can see Chinatown in downtown Manhattan - and its got a great mix of all different ethnicities. The key for the maps is red is white, blue is black, green is asian, orange is hispanic, yellow is other, and each dot is 25 residents. His whole collection of Race and Ethnicity Mappings is available on his Flickr stream. I think one of the most interesting maps is Detroit - the division from one side to the other around 8 Mile Rd (think Eminem) is pretty intense.

Another of his projects is Locals and Tourists where he mapped photo locations based on geotagging from public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. The photos are then colored coded as locals, tourists or unknown. Multiple photos in the same city over a period longer than a month classified the photographer as local. Its interesting to see the series (130 cities sorted by highest number of local photos) because it shows which cities really are mostly just tourism focused, and which cities have photos by locals too. London is at the top of the list for photos by locals, followed by NYC, San Franciso and Paris.

This project is a derivative of his Geotaggers World Atlas project - which is, of course, also awesome :)





See the full Racial and Ethnicity Mapping project here
See the full Locals and Tourists Mapping project here
See the full Geotaggers World Atlas here