Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Greetings from California! I’m glad to officially announce that, after much deliberation, the September Fellowship of Awesome Foundation SF goes to the superbly fantastic project brewing over at Papergirl SF. The project clearly forwards the interest of awesomeness, and we couldn’t imagine a more perfect summer scheme to support!
Dubbed a “a mail-art and delivery systems art project that is participatory, analogue, non-commercial, and impulsive,” Papergirl SF plans to broadly collect pieces of work mailed to them, and then distribute them in rolled bundles on bikes to random passerbys, old-school paperboy style.
If you’re interested in participating and submitting artwork to be distributed, the deadline for submissions is September 18th (details on how to do that here).
And, best of all, the Papergirl crew will be holding a showcase of all the work submitted on September 26th during the Mission Bicycle Festival at the Women’s Building. We’re definitely planning on being there, and hope you will be too!
There’s more details available on their website here, for the curious. And a Facebook page, for those so inclined. Congratulations!
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Congratulations to the July grant recipient Claire Schoen, who is creating a series of awesome audio tours about how climate change is affecting the San Francisco Bay. These tours will celebrate the biodiversity of the Bay while exploring the impact of sea level rise on coastal communities near the Bay and the human and natural life that depends on them. It will also explore what steps people are taking to address this shift. Claire Schoen is a media producer living in the Bay Area. Along with audio tours, Claire creates documentary-style radio programs for distribution on public stations nationwide and multimedia “webstories” for the Internet. Her media work has covered a wide range of subjects including nuclear proliferation, physical disability, communications technology and care-giving for the dying, as well as the environment. Claire uses sound to place listeners into a scene by employing verite storytelling and rich ambience beds. Check out www.claireschoenmedia.com to hear her past work.
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Access to communications technology is AWESOME, but not everyone has it. Cell phone towers are expensive and developing, remote, rural, and/or disaster ridden areas often don’t have those resources.
Expose an already weak communications infrastructure to the destruction of a natural disaster, and you have our collective nightmare: Asia circa 2004, Haiti, and the site of the next international incident. When chaos strikes, the speed and proficiency of local relief effort coordination translates directly to saved lives. With those critical moments in mind, Paul Gardner-Stephen (a post-doctoral fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia) founded The Serval Project.
The project goal is to, literally, give voice to communities outside the grid. The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences granted the project $1,000 in May 2010 to fund the adaptation of the Android OS for disaster relief communications.
Paul and his colleagues have spent the past few months writing software to create instant, decentralized, P2P phone networks. The equipment requirements are Android handsets and Village Telco’s “Mesh Potato” (a lightweight, low-cost, and low-power unit that serves as a building block for ad hoc networks). A key feature of Gardner-Stephen’s system allows users to send and receive messages using their actual cell phone number. With this rapidly deployed, cheap, and robust system, it is conceivable that local ground efforts could begin within moments of a disaster.
This week the prototype passed a field test in the South Australian desert with flying colors! Click here to see the local ABC affiliate coverage of their trip into the Outback. It’s AWESOME, but don’t take our word for it. Come to the Venture Cafe in the Cambridge Innovation Center (11th Floor) on Sat, July 24th @ 6p and see the technology in action for yourself.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
“Let not the world’s deceitful cares
the rising plant destroy;
But let it yield a hundredfold
the fruits of peace and joy.”
- Rev.John Cawood, 1815
This summer, Emily Comeau (a fibre artist from Quebec) and Emily Cook (a book and paper artist from Ontario) will be collaborating to create an immense and interactive tunnel book made from local plant materials to install in a barren patch of city.
The “book” will be 10 feet high and 12 feet long and contain 6 “pages” featuring a cut paper story of urbanism in archway shapes that people can walk through and interact with. The structure will be made of live willow branches and the paper pages made of flax paper infused with seeds. As the elements erode the paper, the sculpture will disintegrate and the seeded paper will sprout. This way the sculpture will have a changing life and meaning as the urban world we create with the cut paper will be eroded and changed by the living materials.
Emily Comeau is a recent graduate of Concordia University, majoring in Fibre Arts and was awarded the Prix Diagonale for her artistic achievements. Her art practice is largely fibre based. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and events in Ontario and Quebec. More information about her and her art practice can be found at her website.
Emily Cook holds a BFA in printmaking from Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is now practicing in Toronto . She makes paper based sculptures and books, and sometimes teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards and shown in both the US and Canada. You can see some of her work at her website.
 Emily-Comeau |
 Emily Cook |
Our award ceremony will be hosted at The Code Factory on Friday July 16th at 6pm. Please RSVP in the comments or via Twegather: “@twegather #awesomeottawa http://bit.ly/dvA7W5 Yes/No/Maybe”.
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Awesome Foundation NYC’s latest grant goes to the Hip-Hop Word Count by Tahir Hemphill.
The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day.
The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting stats about the songs themselves, but also describe the culture behind the music.
How can analyzing lyrics teach us about our culture?
The Hip-Hop Word Count locks in a time and geographic location for every metaphor, simile, cultural reference, phrase, rhyme style, meme and socio-political idea used in the corpus of Hip-Hop.
The Hip-Hop Word Count then converts this data into explorable visualisations which help us to comprehend this vast set of cultural data.
This data can be used to chart the migration of ideas and builds a geography of language.
Stay tuned for details about our summer party.
