Artist
Artists: Damian Hadley, Hannah Tribe, Maix Mayer
Curator
Curator: Steffen Lehmann
Date Installed
Installed 20 Oct 2009 - 28 Jan 2010
Location
George St to Pitt St, SYDNEY, 2000
Project
Project: Laneway/City spaces

George St to Pitt St, SYDNEY, 2000

Artwork Description

The laneway is converted from a place of movement and passage to a place of stasis and conversation about the city. It is re-contextualised and opened up to new uses and new interpretations.

– Artist statement, 2009

Part way along Abercrombie Lane were installed the barcodes of two texts about the city. These ubiquitous, machine readable, representations of data were enlarged to a civic scale, with the idea that the public could quite literally occupy a kind of space between the two texts.

Three metres in the air, an enlarged diagram of the barcode of Jan Gehlʼs book Life Between Buildings was suspended in white fluorescent tubes, animated by the interaction of the public passing through the lane. This influential Danish Architect advocated improving the quality of urban life by re-orienting city design towards human scale, the pedestrian and the cyclist.

Beneath this suspended code on the ground plane, lay another bar code painted in black. This code was that of Two or Three things I know about her, a 1967 French Film by Jean-Luc Goddard that was both socially and stylistically radical.

The two codes sought to frame a space of dialogue on the city and create the opportunity for one to engage with it.

Project team

Maix Mayer – Installation Artist

Hannah Tribe, Tribe Studio – Architect

Damian Hadley, SDA – Structural Engineer

Laneways Temporary Art Program 2 - By George! Hidden Networks

The Laneways temporary art program ran from 2008 to 2013. It aimed to activate the laneways, inject new energy into the urban life and stimulate creativity and innovation in the city.

The second Laneways program was titled By George! Hidden Networks and sought collaborations across at least three disciplines to address climate change and urban renewal in the city’s lanes. It was curated by Dr Steffen Lehmann and consisted of eight artworks.

Get arts and culture updates from City of Sydney News.

Sign up