We’ve been quiet here at Awesome Foundation San Francisco for a little bit, but excited to say that we’re back this month with a duo of amazing projects that we’re thrilled to be a part of. One is a dance party, another is a game festival. Presenting…

1) The Balloon Powered Dance Party

George, Will, and Issac are these three guys that we met recently who in their free time have been launching various items into the stratosphere using hundreds of helium balloons (see, e.g. a Christmas tree). They’ve teamed up with the good people over at the Million Fishes Art Collective in the Mission to do an installation that will fill their massive 22,000 cubic feet gallery floor to ceiling with balloons. We’re funding them to do as much.

This alone would be probably awesome enough to warrant an Awesome Foundation grant, but the added twist is that they’ve been playing around with little radio receiver/speaker/LED units that will fit inside a few hundred of these balloons, allowing them to broadcast some bumpin’ tunes and shine a weirdo ethereal light through the morass of inflated elastic that people will be allowed to wander through. The results, we expect, will thus be a dance party, and ensuing awesomeness. More details on this as they fix a date!

2) Come Out And Play

Come Out and Play (COaP) is a completely free annual games festival that turns San Francisco into an urban playground that’ll be running from November 16th to December 8th out of home base at SOMArts. Starting in New York in 2005, the festival has grown to SF, and we’re helping to fund the many game designers that they’re bringing together to produce a variety of activities throughout the month (see, for example, above: live action Frogger).

When the site updates, more information will be available here as the team continues to bring together all the logistics on it. Until they, you can track them on the Twitter and Facebook here.

Ecstatic to have both of these projects on board! We’ll update here as the details continue to come together for each of them, and we’ll look forward to partying and/or gaming with y’all shortly.