I was looking for a particular website with great samples of old Viennese shop signs, but it seems to have been taken down. On Flickr I found plenty of images instead, notably two groups with retro shops worth having a look at here lukertl and plasticbag.
Delete! was a street art project two years ago, or public installation, where all shop signs, advertisments and logos were covered with yellow foil in one of Viennas busiest shopping streets. It was organized by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf, who had quite a job convincing all the shopkeepers. I remember looking for a particular shop and getting lost. Read more on various sites such as here and here and here and see more pictures on Flickr. It is related to Matt Siber’s The Untitled Project, where he digitally stripped photographs of urban settings of all traces of textual information.
Neubaugasse in Vienna
Digitally enhanced New York
Neda Bei has been taking pictures and cataloguing flowers and other plants in the urban enivronment of Vienna since the summer of 2005, and you can see the results on Rosa Mundi. Among them are images of brave plants fighting their way through brick, stone and tar.
This coincidental flickr find unites several personal meanings within one image. I have been researching early literacy and how children long before attending school are able to read (and appropriate) semiotic resources such as logos. The very first letter of the alphabet which I remember learning was the P, taught to me by my grandmother with the help of the “Palmers P” – Palmers being a well know chain of high street shops selling undergarments. The church shown is located close to where I live now. I wished I knew which saint is represented here, holding a golden branch, as I also spent years researching the “Tree of Life” in art and literature.
I found this graffiti on the house next door, in Haidgasse. “Das Leben ist schön” translated means “life is beautiful”.
Quotables
word and image 