“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… read more →
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.
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: 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. 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… read more →
“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!
“Oh my god, it’s full of stars” 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… read more →