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!

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.

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.

“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”.

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.

The SF micro-trustees recently discussed what it means to be Awesome, and the types of projects we want to fund. We have received some truly AWESOME project proposals so far. We realize, however it would be helpful to articulate some guidelines to help future applicants write the best proposal possible.
It’s difficult to reach an easy opinion on what awesomeness means, and we didn’t agree on everything—which is probably a good thing. But we did come up with the following suggestions:

1. You could be the most awesome person in the universe, and have the most awesome idea, but if you don’t tell us how $1,000 will be used or why it will make a big difference, we won’t fund you.
2. A project that requires millions of dollars, or even several tens of thousands right now, is not a strong candidate for a $1k micro grant. Even if it’s a great project, it won’t get funded if we don’t think the grant will move your project forward in a significant way. We would much rather fund a project where $1,000 is the difference between yes and no. (That being said, we like people who think big, so if a $1,000 is an early catalyst toward something huge and that is awesome, and we’ll consider it)
3. We lean towards local projects (SF Bay Area-based). There are Awesome Foundation chapters in many parts of the world, and more are forming each month. A local chapter is more likely to understand a local project.
4. We’ll probably choose a project with a community focus over one with an individual focus. The project should affect people somehow. Tell us how. It doesn’t have to change the world, but it should make people do one of the following: laugh, cry, talk to one another, start a conversation, inspire a revelation, look at the world differently somehow, make someone say “That’s Awesome!”

None of these are hard and fast rules, but are work in process guidelines. We hope to find exceptions to everything, and if you or your project really is Just That Awesome, we’ll probably fund it! 

Tell us at right at the beginning of your proposal what your project is, why it is awesome, what you plan to do with the cash.

And good luck! We want to hear from you!

— Kevin Adler, Rachel McConnell, Jesse Taggert and the rest of the Awesome Foundation San Francisco Board.

“I am bad-ass enough to actually do this.”

Jonathan Foote is co-organizer of Dorkbot-SF, has a PH.D in electrical engineering, and makes objects that change the way we experience things. He received this month’s Awesome Fellowship for his clear and compelling proposal to build robotic desk lamps.

From his proposal: “Remember Luxo Jr. from the Pixar short? Like that, but for real…All the components are off-the-shelf available: servos, microcontrollers, full-color high power LED lights, and remote control via RF so multiple lamps can move in choreographed synchrony. The whole thing would be a platform for more cool things, like web control, open choreography software, you name it. And naturally it would be open HW/open source, yadda yadda.”

We’re especially curious about what the yadda will entail :)

Congrats Jonathan!  We’ll keep the Awesome World posted on your progress!

The Trustees of the Awesome Foundation’s London Chapter are delighted to announce the winner of their inaugural fellowship: Oscar Lhermite’s ‘Big Dipper Project‘.

As our cities become increasingly populated, the man-made mix of pollution and light have all but banished the stars from our skies, eroding our magical relationship with these distant balls of white-hot plasma.

‘The Big Dipper Project’ is an attempt to recreate the constellations in the night sky over major cities using a combination of black helium balloons and white LEDs. Oscar, a French product designer and artist currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London, has been perfecting his technique by tethering his stars in a variety of configurations across the city. He aims to use the money to turbo-charge his efforts, bringing in bigger balloons, arduinos and advanced software to ensure precise star locations and minimal drift. This will culminate in a recreation of The Big Dipper somewhere over London later this Summer.

(Photo by Cormac McGloin)

The London Trustees were impressed with Oscar’s passion and enthusiasm for his ideas, and chose him for the May Fellowship because of this project’s general awesomeness, its connection with our city, and the delight it will bring to all that are lucky enough to see it. Check out Oscar’s presentation on SlideShare.

(Oscar with his £1,000 cheque)

Submissions for June’s grant are open now, the deadline is June 30th.

Balloons? (check)

Beer? (check)

The only thing left on our checklist is you.

Come meet Jeff Warren and hear about how his work makes it possible for Louisiana citizen mappers to capture powerful images of the Gulf Coast oil spill.

WARNING: you may want to make your own satellite and/or join the 108+ backers who’ve given Grassroots Mapping the green light on kickstarter.com.

6:30p – 8:30p – Design Annex – Union Sq, Somerville, MA
8:30p – The discussion & beverages will move next door to Cantina La Mexicana (247 Washington Street, Somerville, MA)

Last week, AF-NYC micro-trustee Catherine White met with AF-London’s Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh and James Carrigan over a beer in Shoreditch to discuss transatlantic Awesomeness.  Tonight Tomorrow (June 9, 2010) AF-London will be awarding their first grant with a party starting at 6.30 pm in The Griffin (93 Leonard Street).  We’re really excited to hear who they pick.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond, Awesome NYC are planning their 4th award party – details soon.