The Oxford Project began nearly 25 years ago, when photographer Peter Feldstein set out to photograph each of the 676 residents in his hometown of Oxford, Iowa.

Making counterfeit money, it turns out, may not be as difficult as it seems. Albert Edward Talton, a man from Lawndale, California, figured out how to generate $7 million dollars in bogus currency using nothing more than an inkjet printer and supplies from Staples. Leader of a five-man counterfeiting ring busted in May of 2008, Talton, a man with little to no experience in graphic design or printing, created some of the most convincing phony currency in U.S. history.
A new article by Adam Higginbotham in the current issue of Details titled “The Most Notorious Counterfeiter,” profiles Talton and unveils the [...]

Yesterday, girls in green bikinis took to the streets of Los Angeles, offering a free car wash to any driver behind the wheel of a hybrid. Coordinated by angrygreengirl.com, the publicity stunt was arranged to promote the site’s, ahem, “hot, green, and shameless” environmental agenda; and to also hawk a new coconut-based, waterless cleaner called Lucky Earth. In other words, water conservation — and perhaps fuel conservation? — were the day’s themes.
As evidenced on angrygreengirl’s YouTube channel, the stunt apparently worked, attracting scads of local media coverage. And while the event’s underlying message may have been somewhat muted by [...]

Photographs of boxing legend Mike Tyson’s abandoned 1980s mansion in Southington, Ohio, have been widely circulated on the Internet in recent years (see here). Last August, however, photographer Danny Wills ventured to the vacant Ohio property for an impromptu photo session and has given new life to Tyson’s former home in a haunting new series of portraits.
The sets, titled “Mike Tyson and his abandoned mansion” and “Mike Tyson and his choice of decor,” examine the boxer’s former home, exposing its faded grandeur in a new light. Wills’ lens captured big screen television sets with punched-in screens; broken telephones [...]

Ramble John Krohn, better known as cut-and-paste producer RJD2, recently made a bold move: He began taking ownership of his entire music catalog. For those unfamiliar with Krohn’s music, he has a fairly large body of work, most notably 2002’s Deadringer — an album so heavily licensed to television and film that it supposedly helped keep indie rap label Def Jux (the album’s original home) afloat in its infancy. (Check out the ‘Appearances’ listing on RJD2’s Wikipedia page to see where his music has been used.) The only album that Krohn doesn’t own is The Third Hand, which XL [...]

It’s been four years since The Books released Lost and Safe (Tomlab), the duo’s third and most critically acclaimed album to date. While the group has not exactly been absent — they did release an EP in 2006 titled Music for a French Elevator and Other Short Format Oddities by the Books, songs literally commissioned to be played in an elevator — they have been busy tending to their growing families and pursuing solo projects.
Next Friday, however, guitarist/vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong, will strike out on a series of select live dates to preview new songs from [...]

Founded on the belief that fruit should be a commonly shared resource, art project Fallen Fruit began with the idea to map all the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities (see maps here). But since that time, the project — created by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — has expanded beyond its initial scope to include planning fruit parks in areas that lack such natural resources, and other multidisciplinary initiatives.
For example, back in 2006, the group participated in Civic Matters, a two-week residency project at Los Angeles Contemporary [...]

In Windsor, Ontario, ‘creative research group’ Broken City Lab uses art as a means to “tactically disrupt and engage the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city.”
Located just across the river from Detroit, Windsor shares a similar economic plight to that of its U.S. neighbor, mainly its reliance on automotive manufacturing as a primary source of revenue (Windsor is home to one of Chrysler’s Minivan plants, among others).
And just as groups like Detroit Unreal Estate Agency seek to shed light on the urban landscape that has slipped off the [...]

“In its apparently catastrophic form… Detroit has recently emerged as a figure for abject urban failure,” writes Andrew Herscher of Detroit Unreal Estate Agency. Herscher, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, and collaborators Mirielle Roddier, Femke Lutgerink, and Partizan Publik’s Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat, are attempting to redefine the term economy with regard to Detroit’s post-industrial blight.
Herscher and his collaborators define ‘unreal estate’ as “urban space that has slipped through the literal economy, the economy of the market, and entered other economies, included but not limited to those of survival, invention, play and desire.”
In other [...]

In 2001, Dutch performance artist Iepe B. T. Rubingh — better known as IEPE — erected an elaborate installation titled “The Berlin Miracle” in the German city’s Hackescher Market. The installation centered around a tree rooted in the center of the busy market, one that residents and commuters passed each day. But out of nowhere, the tree began to pour rain from it leaves and branches. One of the passersby in the video linked above says it best:
“I think it’s peculiar and amusing, because usually you stand under a tree to shelter yourself from rain. And now it’s raining under [...]

Long gone are the days when kids spent hours pumping quarters into machines at the local arcade. Ever since the advent of the Atari 2600, the video arcade’s days were numbered. Today you’ll still occasionally stumble across a nearly vacant arcade at a local mall or banks of high-priced games at mega-chain entertainment plexes like Dave & Buster’s; But the glory days of space and fantasy-themed pinball and all-day Pac-Man and Zaxxon benders are over. And sadly, one of the major attractions that got lost in the ether, besides the hours of entertainment, is the stunning artwork that adorned each [...]

Abstract hip-hoppers Anti-Pop Consortium (Beans, M. Sayyid, Earl Blaze, and High Priest) have reunited after a six-year hiatus and are slated to release their new album, Fluorescent Black, at the end of October on Big Dada. After pursuing their respective solo careers for the better part of a decade, the four-piece is back to its experimental origins, a fact evidenced in the album’s preview track, “Capricorn One” — take a listen.
According to Beans, the time apart did wonders for the group. “We’re grown men,” he says. “So our acceptance of our differences has allowed us to bring all that more [...]

Los Angeles hip-hop/soul stalwart Stones Throw Records is well known for its high caliber stable of artists and producers — from Madlib and J Dilla to Wildchild and label chief Peanut Butter Wolf, among others. So it’s no particular surprise that the latest addition to the Stones Throw family — 29-year-old singer/producer Mayer Hawthorne, who hails from Ann Arbor, Michigan — has assembled an ear-catching single in the track, “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out.” Slated for release on his debut album, A Strange Arrangement (street date: October 6, 2009), the song highlights Hawthorne’s convincing falsetto, which channels Curtis Mayfield and [...]