Hey there! As per usual, we’re having an awards ceremony/party this coming weekend. Won’t you join us? Thx, Mgmt. The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and The Information Superhighway Cordially Invite You To… COTTON CANDY CANNON: THE WEAPON OF THE FUTURE An Awards Ceremony & Party September 17th, 2009, 7:00 PM – 12:00 AM For all you completionists, the details are cross-posted on Facebook & Upcoming. Betahouse, 13 Magazine Street, Cambridge MA *Please note: we’re switching the event location this month.* Price =  free. You can expect beverages, food, ideas, cool people, & a big ceremonial check. This month, we are extremely proud to award our October Awesome Fellowship to Josh Gordonson, whose plan is to construct a handheld cotton candy cannon that can “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes.” Need we say more? Read more about the proposal here. Come celebrate with us, meet the fellow and our micro-trustees. We’ll be talking about and hear what we’re scheming for the future, and answer your questions about how you can apply for the next round of Awesome grants coming out in October. To submit to be the Awesome Fellow for October, please drop us a line by the 10/15/09…. read more →

This mean-looking badboy is the brainchild of Josh Gordonson, close to a decade in the making. It is, indeed, the first working prototype of a rugged cannon that deploys an entirely new kind of ammunition. One that is likely to change the face of battlefields and fairgrounds forever. Specifically, it shoots cotton candy. This is huge, people. Absolutely huge. The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is proud to announce today that Josh is the winner of this month’s Fellowship. Specifically, we’re funding the production of a handheld blaster that will be able to, quote, “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes” (that’s verbatim, from the grant) and will feature “Three buttons [that] will dispense food coloring into the sugar just before it’s extruded. Color mixing should be possible, giving the artist machine-gunner a full palate of tooth-decaying paint.” And best of all, the plans will be made available, online, at Instructables. We’re also planning a public debut of this project, once it’s all ready to start shooting. SET PHASERS TO AWESOME! We’ll have more details about the awards ceremony, coming up ASAP. Stay tuned, kids. ————- More about Josh (from the man himself):… read more →

This month’s Awesome Fellowship goes to Greg Kapfhammer, whose project is to hold a forty day data visualization contest, what he calls the Forty Day Visual Feast Project. Prizes to include a good deal of cold hard cash as well as quality large-scale reproductions of the winner’s visualizations. So get to reading Flowing Data again, get your Processing dusted off, and your volumes of Tufte all ready to go. Plans are still coming together and details for the competition will be announced on this blog. If you’re interested in keeping posted about this, join the project mailing list or drop an e-mail to tim AT timhwang DOT org. More details about the project available here. Greg describes: Have you ever seen a visualization of a data set, process, or phenomenon that took your breath away because it effectively explained a difficult to understand concept? The Forty Day Visual Feast Project (FDVFP) will support the creation of forty exciting visualizations that are designed to inspire and educate both scientists and artists. Upon its completion, the FDVFP will showcase forty images, a description of the steps that you can take to construct them for yourself, and a commentary on their strengths and weaknesses. The FDVFP site will include… read more →

The Awesome Foundation is extremely proud to award its first ever grant to Hansy Better Barraza, professor at Rhode Island School of Design and all around architect extraordinaire. Based on her interest in “bringing people together through design of public art and objects”, Hansy plans to design and build a huge hammock in Boston Common. The Awesome Foundation and Information Superhighway are co-hosting an award ceremony and party on Friday, August 7th in Cambridge, MA. Details are posted on Upcoming and Facebook.

Following the call for the creation of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and an ensuing wave of retweets, the staff over here at Broseph Stalin have been busy trawling through the micro-trustee applications that floated through the ether to us. We’re still waiting on two more to get back to us (will be posted here as soon as we hear back from them), but I’m happy to announce today that the bulk of the micro-trustees have accepted their offers and we’re happy to go public with the inaugural board of the Foundation. They are: David Nunez (Dorkbot Boston) Reed Sturtevant (Director, Microsoft Startup Labs) Emily Daniels (Dorkbot Boston) Keith Hopper (Public Interactive Group, NPR) David Fisher (Web Ecology Project, Development Ninja) Erhardt Graeff (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society) Evan Burchard (Developer, Rocker) Tim Hwang (ROFLCon) Kickass. We’re pumped here at Broseph by the collection of organizations represented, and the e-mails we’ve already gotten to apply for micro-genius grants. We’ll be meeting up this week to get everything in place for the summer, and they’ll be information on how to apply for Awesome Fellowships shortly. Stay tuned… Update: as of this morning, we’re happy to announce… read more →