Transform Your City 2014 – Celebrating Dublin Creativity

Offset, the three day creative conference, has been and gone – it came, it inspired, and it certainly transformed dear Dublin.

Outside the walls of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Offset made its presence felt throughout Dublin. Transform Your City was a collaboration between Offset and Absolut to celebrate the city’s creativity – making Dublin a canvas for a host of local artists. Here’s how Offset transformed our city for the better:

Toejam and The Project Twins painted a new mural outside The Bernard Shaw pub in Portobello. This one will remain if you want to see it, or you can mesmerise yourself by watching their Vine here.

Down the road artist Nicky Hooper and Le Cool installed benevolent vending machines on Camden Street, which gave away free goodies from local businesses and shops. If you missed these, well what a pity, but you can relive the experience here!

Over at Leeson Street an interactive digital mirror installation was set up by practice&Theory while on South William Street the inaugural South William Sentinel – which isn’t a newspaper – was, nevertheless, a welcome alternative to The Metro. The Sentinel by Studio AAD featured imaginations from several Dubliners on architecture, art, business, fashion, food, love life and politics – TD Stephen Donnelly even offered up his take on ‘5 Things The Dail Could Learn From South William Street’.

By tweeting a photo of Henry Grattan on College Green with the tag #TYCDinners, five dinners for two by five chefs were given away as a collaborative project between designgoat and me&him&you. The dinners took place on location in a miniature pop-up restaurant (see lead image).

To Temple Bar where Making Space had a public poster printing workshop inviting Dubliners to share their love of Dublin by tweeting photos which were transformed in to posters and made available for free in Temple Bar.

Panti and Pony’s ‘disco-bobulated‘ yield signs around Capel Street. They chose this “public heterosexual space and changed it into a gay space using an ironic and humorous twist on Irish road signs and gay stereotypes”.

Down at the GPO, O’Connell Street illustrator Mr Steve McCarthy played a part in this transformation giving away 500 free souvenir postcards.

And if you picked up fruit and veg from the street vendors on Moore Street on March 14th you would have been lucky enough to also bag a tote by artist Maser, featuring his trademark ‘Maser loves you‘ and ‘Give Moore love‘ encouraging support and love for the traders of Moore Street.

Thanks to Offset and Absolut and all involved for transforming the city. What wasn’t to love? If you missed Offset, listen out for the talks which will be appearing on their Vimeo channel shortly.