Saturday night the Awesome Foundation Melbourne met at Veludo in St Kilda. A few micro trustees were away and we had a visiting guest economist Nicholas Gruen. We discussed and named our final selection, and the grant recipient was Melbourne Macarons. However as Xavier Shay is a vegan, Xavier decided to give his $100 to the Animal Liberation Front. Today I met Linda from Melbourne Macarons. She was very happy to received the $900 towards her secret macaron project. All the best Linda, and we look forward to hearing more once the secret project is unveiled!

At the end of April the Melbourne Awesome Foundation met for dinner, and chose the Melbourne HackerSpace ArduinoLab as the grant recipient. I have to admit I didn’t totally understand their project, but the energy for their project from all the other micro-trustees was so awesome, I trusted that and gave them my vote too. We called the guys immediately, and they were thrilled to receive the grant. They were working on their project while we were eating dinner on Saturday night! Here’s their blog to explain what they do – I certainly can’t. 🙂 http://tinyurl.com/arduinolab And here’s their submission: Who: Founder of the Melbourne HackerSpace (not-for-profit community technology group) Project: High-school science portable electronics laboratory-in-a-box Awesomeness: Promotes science experimentation in schools with an affordable device that is open and customisable/extensible by teachers and students. How: The Melbourne HackerSpace has completed the initial design/prototype and has the members and track record in completing several previous projects of this complexity. We work closely with Freetronics (http://freetronics.com), a local Melbourne company that can manufacture/distribute open-source hardware designs on behalf of others. Overview: The ArduinoLab is a portable unit consisting of a graphics screen, buttons/knobs for user interface … as well as several… read more →

It’s with great pleasure that the micro-trustees of AF Sydney can announce our April Recipient! After a very long and intense discussion, we’ve decided to award this months grant to ‘Communion’ – a project by Julia Burns. You can see some of Julia’s work in her video showreel below. From Julia’s submission: The work will be titled ‘Communion’ and is being made for submission to the 2011 Blake Religious Prize. It will feature a short video of two male Aboriginal dancers performing an intimate ballet sequence at the altar of a Catholic church. Filmed at the site of the first Catholic Church in Wollombi and one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in Eastern Australia, this work presents an unconventional scene featuring Aboriginal spirituality and male intimacy within a traditional Christian context. It refers to the adaptability of believers to find spirituality in religions that may not have originally been their own and asks the viewer to question their own ability to adapt to a scene foreign to their expectations. There are obviously some very subjective and sensitive issues around the work that Julia is going to create – in fact, the submission stimulated quite the discussion around our board… read more →

It’s with great pleasure that we can announce that the first recipient of the Awesome Foundation Sydney grant is the team from Big Fag Press, who submitted an awesome application to us in March. The guys at BFP have at their disposal a huge printing press, which they are going to use to create a unique map of the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo. Here is an extract from their application, to give you some idea of what it’s all about. Woolloomooloo is awesome. It contains some of the wealthiest bankers, swankiest restaurants, and pristine apartments in Sydney; it also contains a huge population of homeless folks, plenty of public housing, and loads of social services and cultural institutions. Its current urban form was made possible through union Green Bans in the 1970s. For the first time ever, our map will put all this conflicted data on a two dimensional inky collision course. To create the map, the team will print up a ‘first version’ of the suburb map and then walk around the area. They will mark on the map, by hand, anything ‘weird and wonderful and important that we happen to bump into.’ They will then take this information and… read more →

It was perhaps out of character that Nick and I both arrived on bikes for the handover of Awesome Foundation Melbourne’s March grant, given Nick runs the not for profit group Tram Sessions. Tram Sessions encourage Melbourne artists and bands to perform on city trams, trying to bring more culture into the public space. The sessions are recorded and uploaded to the Tram Sessions website, where you can see the awesome in action.