(Top) Scrapyard by Tia. (Bottom) Sketch by Don Low.

Urban Sketchers is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel.

The site showcases colorful stories behind the scenes, by volunteer correspondents in more than thirty countries around the world. Some are architects and illustrators, others are graphic designers, web developers, painters or educators, all sharing the same passion for drawing on location. They portray everyday life — from commuters on packed rush-hour subways to coffee drinkers at a sidewalk café, all quickly rendered by the sometimes furtive scratching of pen to paper.

Spearheading the Singapore USk site is Architect and Art and Design educator, Tia Boon Sim: “Since April 2007, I have been spending most of my Saturday mornings combing the streets in Singapore. I started a location drawing on Club Street after buying two beautiful sketchbooks and there is no stopping since.”

StarHub is running a video contest on various creative ways in which you can help animals. Two people stand a chance to win a limited edition HP laptop designed by Studio Tord Boontje.

Watch the video for challenge details, and click here to submit your entry.

Deadline: 1 December 2009, 6pm sharp!

Click to view the installation.

We love guerilla artwork here at Culturepush, so we feel duty bound to tell you about JJ’s Post-It-Note project. Compulsive doodler, copywriter and optimist, JJ, decided to start his project, with the distinct purpose of affecting the people around him, leaving a trail of words and drawings in public places around Singapore.

“Things We Forget came about 108 days ago, on January 15, 2009,” JJ explains. “The agency I used to work with, did a lot of work with the makers of Post-it notes and I would always have stacks of them lying around. I was getting tired of the pessimism that was weighing everybody down. It started off as a tiny little initiative, but now it a labor of love for me. I write, draw, place and shoot. I do one Post-it a day, come rain or shine. And it is my intention to do so for as long as I can. The response I get from people who chance upon the Post-it notes, the comments on the blog itself, and on the facebook and twitter accounts that I maintain tell me that they have an impact, no matter how small, on peoples’ lives. And I really feel blessed to have an opportunity to do that.”

I am excited to announce the launch of  Common People, a project to inspire creativity in Singapore.

Fronted by an online platform, their belief is that in today’s climate, cross-pollination of ideas and dialogue is key to staying relevant to the tide of our times. Their aim is to stimulate a better creative climate, by offering a stronger representation of creative expressions that are happening here.

By presenting a growing archive of video interviews that probe into the creative mind across the arts, design, business, and beyond, they showcase the work of their interviewees, document their practice and elicit their insights on the creative process.

Through their ongoing interviews and future projects, they hope to inspire the community, spark unexpected collaborations, and contribute to the question of what creativity means today.

Watch the videos, subscribe to the blog, join their Facebook group and tell your friends about it!

“This lack of physical space is why the state justifies such a tight control over how land is used. But it is not so much the physical size that limits this city but rather the looming shadow of the state that clouds it. But in the everyday life, one finds pockets of resistance: a street barber, a kampung community and a crew of skateboarders. These are some of the ordinary people in our stories who through their daily actions re-imagine a new geography of Singapore, one of their own, one that gives birth to the question: Whose city is it anyway?”– From the Reclaim Land About Section.

Reclaim Land started out as a final-year project by four journalism students — Justin Zhuang, Wong Shu Yun, Sam Kang Li and Serene Cheong — from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in August 2008.

On their website, you will find stories about ordinary people who have created their own places despite living in the city-state of Singapore. A multiple-exposure series shows how the city is reclaimed through time, and you can go in-depth with academics and experts on ways to look at the city and learn how to make Singapore more livable and lovable.

Click to watch the video.

Noise Singapore is a platform for aspiring artists, designers, photographers and musicians to be noticed by the industry bigwigs when their works and music gets showcased on a national level, and seen by the world through the Internet.

Noise is currently looking for submissions for its 2009 Festival showcase in the following categories:

Art & Design
Outlandish illustrations, ingenious graphic designs, charming paintings, edgy graffiti art – Noise wants them all! Selected works will be showcased on various platforms, including print publications, the Noise website and Noise television commercials during the Festival Showcase in March 2009. Click here for details.

Music
Noise is looking for raw, promising musicians, bands and voices to create original music to heat up the airwaves! Choose from pop to hip-hop, rock to country, jazz to heavy metal, classical to techno…or any other music you know of. If your music truly rocks, Noise Singapore might just come knocking on your door and yank you out of your bedroom recording studio and onto the concert stage. Click here for details.

Photography
Can you capture the “Decisive Moment” on your camera like the great Henri Cartier-Bresson? Do you see a world of possibilities through the lens? Here’s your chance to get your photographs noticed by top photographers in the Noise Singapore curatorial team. Click here for details.

Deadline: 15 December 2008.

SCIENCEWERK is a new experimental project developed by several artist, designers and researchers. The project can be formulated as:

(IMAGINATION + CREATIVITY+ART) X
(LOGIC + KNOWLEDGE + THOUGHT)

SCIENCE + DESIGN AESTHETIC = SCIENCEWERK
EINSTEIN + SAGMEISTER = SCIENCEWERK

Sciencewerk will be hosting an online exhibition entitled CloneWar, featuring work by 33 worldwide artists, including Momorobo, Geeksigners, Yellodino, Vectorscum, Crisvector, ISOPharmacy, Sagmeister, Imaginary Friends Reps, Cropped Circle, ModeFour, Jonathan Leong, to name a few. Visit their website for more details.

It is comforting to see a group of graduates wanting to tread lightly on the planet by spreading the word that green designs can be fashion-forward, edgy as well as sustainably responsible.

Founded in August 2007 by four students from the Republic Polytechnic’s School of Technology for the Arts, RecycloFashion has already generated quite a bit of eco-buzz.

I talk to Ash about the backstory of the earth-friendly initiative …

What is RecycloFashion? What is your mission?

RecycloFashion, essentially, is an ambassador to the many regional “eco” or green brands in Singapore, South East Asia and various countries in Europe and Australia. We collaborate with designers and artists from various backgrounds who use alternative and earth-friendly materials in their work. We come up with marketing concepts and advertisements that the brands use to brand their own ads. So in short, we promote them, and they promote us.

Our mission is create awareness and to make eco look wearable and fashionable for the discerning shopper. To us, eco is beautiful as it combines crucial values to create unique pieces with special individual pieces.

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