Urban Play Amsterdam: Most People Play Nice, Some Don’t.

This past weekend in Amsterdam, Droog Design and curator Scott Burnham launched Urban Play as part of the ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 festival. The Urban Play project brought together thirteen works which were released on the streets of the city to allow the public to interact with them.

The projects range in scale from Marti Guixé’s large foam block ‘Sculpture Me’ which serves as a community sculpting project to plastic bag derived ‘Fish in the Sky’ by Nothing Design Group.

The installation by Stefan Sagmeister is getting the headlines partly from what it was and more what happened to it. Sagmeister’s dedicated team arranged 250,000 Euro cent coins on a large plaza to create the phrase ‘obsessions make my life worse and my work better’. The public was encouraged to rearrange the coins to alter the phrase. All was fine until the police got a call in the middle of the night from locals that two people were stealing all the coins by sweeping them into bags. The police caught the pair and confiscated the bags and swept the remaining portion of the work up.

Images of most of the installations are available on curator Scott Burnham’s flickr page. The Urban Play event will continue on to other European cities in the near future.

[via frame]