At the recent US Social Forum in Detroit, we got our first look at the Beehive Collective‘s amazing new campaign graphic: The True Cost of Coal, a project Provisions commissioned as part of its Brushfire initiative.  It was a sensation, as throngs of social change activists not only got an amazing education on coal, they witnessed how a great arts and social change project functions.

Below and above, excepts of a somewhat flat data-visualization of World Cup economics. Although it fails to go very far with the information it is an interesting starting point for some follow-up analysis and discussion.

“On June 11, nearly 100,000 soccer fans from around the world will gather at Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg to watch the opening game of the 2010 World Cup. Millions more will tune in their television sets at home. During the four weeks to follow, the world’s eyes and ears will be directed towards South Africa, following one of the world’s premier sporting events. Soccer may not be overwhelmingly popular in the United States, but on a global scale, the World Cup is the largest sporting event in terms of viewership. Collectively, more than 26 billion viewers watched the games of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany…”

Full Visualization

Note that a link in the article to a Fifa Facts & Figures Marketing site proves to be just as interesting.

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream and to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Thanks to CDN in Napa for the tip.]

Here’s a way to get perspective on the current size of the BP oil spill.  You may need to download Google Earth to make it work.

From Good Magazine’s excellent Transparency feature.

The COP15 Conference, the  meeting in Copenhagen for countries party to the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCC) on Climate Change, has begun in earnest. With it, a flood of foreigners has washed ashore in Denmark, among them NGOs, IGOs (Intergovernmental Organizations), the Press, and delegates from UNFCC signatories. Among them, unfortunately, is not your correspondent, Wilson Dizard, the one writing this blog post from Copenhagen. Others are in a similar position, and not just due to the fact that the they basically accredited twice the number of people the conference center can hold.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of interesting things going down around town that concern the arts of social change. Here are the first photos of the acts at the conference.

Alright, this is a picture of a ice flow in Iceland, where I had a rather long lay over. Iceland’s endangered glaciers are a topic of discussion at the Conference, as you might imagine.

The Bella Center. The world will have to wait to see what kind of substance, if any, might manage to emerge from this building a fortnight from now. Look at the cranes in the background, evidence of economic development chugging along. And then there’s a wind turbine, too. To be sure, Denmark is a land of contrasts.

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Blane De St. Croix:  “My recent body of work explores the geopolitical landscape through drawing and sculptural installation. I conduct extensive research on each project,–through site visits, photographic documentation, interviews, and satellite imagery. Employing a combination of natural and industrial materials, I am interested in articulating humankind’s desire to take command over the earth, revealing distinct conflicts with ecology, politics and ourselves in large-scale installations that utilize architectural space in a distinct, powerful and imposing manner.”

Black and White Project Space in Brooklyn, has unveiled De St. Croix’s massive new site-specific work, Mountain Strip, a monumental miniaturized landscape revealing the impact of strip mining for coal on  West Virginia’s Kayford Mountain.

Image: Etienne Frossard

Submit work online for a design exhibition on Democracy.  There will be no curators in this groundbreaking exhibition: everyone can get involved and the public votes on the submissions.

The Democracy exhibition will take place in Newcastle upon Tyne in October as part of Design Event 09.  It will feature the very best of the work submitted to the website, as voted by you. Votes can continue to be cast on the website and at the exhibition, so the art on display will continue to change, making this the most democratic exhibition ever.

So, create an artwork based on the theme of democracy or vote on your favorites!  The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2009 and voting continues throughout the exhibit.

More here.  And here.

Info graphic by Peter Bell.

Evan Roth’s Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris seeks to discover the stylistic diversity among graffiti characters. The following video  gives a basic synopsis of the purpose and findings of the study, which was made possible with the help of Foundation Cartier.

Over 2,400 graffiti tags from a multitude of different artists and locations in Paris were photographed during a four day period in April, 2009. They were then archived and sorted by letter, allowing Roth to compare not only the diversity of how each character can be represented, but also how many times each letter was used. The ten most popular letters (which were A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S, T and U) were isolated for further study and eighteen tags of each letter were used to “represent the diversity and range of that specific character”. Some of these tags are simple and clean in design, some are almost illegible, some very complex and detailed.

Roth’s project showcases both the diversity in the way we use and represent language and the true artistry behind graffiti. For more information, visit the Graffiti Taxonomy website or Foundation Cartier.