And that’s the whole idea with my new series. I’m going out
and looking at what people are actually doing as they are hanging out
on the street. So all of it is actual street scenes. To take pictures
and make drawings, to look and see what people are doing when they are
hanging out on the street. To make a portrait of the city.”

“That is a group of friends who do lots of like open public projects.
We started because a friend of mine named Sal
Randolph threw an event called the Free
Biennial, which was a month long series of project, kind of parallel
to the Whitney Biennial, except that no money was being exchanged and
they were all taking place in open space.

I threw a street party we had pirate radio broadcast off of a rooftop,
all sorts of different stuff was happening. It was so much work. And there
were so many people involved, that I was like, you know it seems to be
the same people getting involved in all these projects that are happening,
so why not say we’re a collective and form a cohesive idea and do
stuff.

Over the Summer we did a series of street parties. We started out with
a giant junk band, where we made hundreds of instrument out of garbage
we would find. And we made a marching band. We went off to the Lower East
Side, playing and making such a total ruckus. This was May 19th. It was
a Friday nigh. People were pouring out of the bars., yelling “What
are you doing.” And we’d yell back “It’s the marching
band, come join us.” And there was actually a couple of people who
just left their posts, came out and grabbed instruments.”

I think I heard you guys go by my apartment.

“We circled the neighborhood, and ended up with a police escort
of five cars and three paddy wagons. We tried to go to the East River
Park. And they were sort of going to let us, but then somebody lit up
(it was contained) but it was a bonfire. And they were like “oh no!”
(Laughs) It was really fun, it was really great.

Then we did Pirates
on the Staten Island Ferry (photos).
It was somewhere between kind of a joke. Like “Take this boat to
Staten Island!” and a way of creating outrageous festivities in unexpected
spaces. We had some people who were riding the ferry who came to dance
with us. And then we went to the park and had a good time.”

I talk about Lovesphere and how
hard it is to keep a collective effort going.

“I’ve been out town four or five months out of the year. It’s
really hard to keep focus, and people are in and out, and people don’t
want to keep doing the same thing. We’ve only been existing for a
year, so we’ve had one really strong year and we’re still going.

We did a bicycle
tour of street art. These are really only political in the sense that
drawing a picture of a guy sitting on a milk crate is political. It’s
the politics of every day use of spaces, and every day city life, and
street life.

We did a project last week, in the park, where we rolled out a giant
sheet of paper. And kids came and drew, and then we turned them into billboards.
That was trying to include kids from the community.” (photos)

You mean you took what they drew and put them over billboards?

“Yeah, pasted them up. It looked beautiful, they’re just joyful.
They’re wonderful to walk by.”

You pasted during the day?

“Yeah.”

Just went up and did it.

“Yeah. We tend to do things that we think are positive. We’re
not trying to be destructive or even edgy or anything. We’re just
trying to do things that we think should happen. If it’s something
we think should be happening then we’re going to do it. So here we
are on a Sunday afternoon pasting up. People love it. People were walking
by and like “ Oh that’s beautiful.”

It’s a thing about not sneaking around, not trying to make something
illegal. Because you want to be open about your activities. You are just
trying to create a discourse about what happens in the city. Whose walls
these are? Who participates in these things.”

Whose walls? Our walls!

(Laughs) “Exactly! The thing with the kids is that we weren’t
just creating our own drawings. We were trying to involve other people
in the project.”

Any other things you’ve done with billboards?

“A few years ago there were a few projects of getting artists making
paintings, and then they would go out and put them up on billboards. The
thing with the kids was an extension of that.”

“Recently I’ve been doing more of the wheat-paste on the walls,
the portraits and stuff. With those I’m trying to create a feeling
of a person standing on the street. So it’s more important to be
on ground level.”