This Monday, the Awesome Foundation NYC held our end-of-summer party at Tribeca Tavern, where we celebrated our recent grantees: Sub Base One by Lee Von Kraus and the Hip Hop Word Count by Tahir Hemphill. Thanks to everyone for coming out and thanks to Grolsch Grants for the free beer!

Monday, September 13, at 7:30pm Tribeca Tavern 247 West Broadway (at Beach St) RSVP Now on Facebook

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.

Access to communications technology is AWESOME, but not everyone has it. Cell phone towers are expensive and developing, remote, rural, and/or disaster ridden areas often don’t have those resources. 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 used 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… read more →