Dreaming of Lucid Living: Enchanted Entertainment

Touching pixels, or how digital animation and analog performance converge into magic.

As we continue covering TEDGlobal 2010 for GOOD, another short-and-sweet today — Dreaming of Lucid Living, an enchanted performance-animation by California-based multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek.

Matreyek performed an excerpt from this piece at the opening of Session 6, Different by Design, of TED — which you can follow via our live Twitter stream this week.

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Information Pioneers: The Unsung Heroes of the Information Age

What striking down Hitler has to do with laying the groundwork for the iPhone.

Last week, we looked at a BBC retrospective of art history — something deeply ingrained in our cultural appreciation DNA, celebrated everywhere from liberal arts academia to the dinner party table. Today, we are looking at something far less widely acclaimed but no less important: Geek history.

Information Pioneers, a new series by BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, spotlights five vastly different people whose legacy shaped the information society we live in today — Ada Lovelace, the ultimate “woman in tech” whose work sprouted the very first algorithm; Alan Turing, who laid the groundwork for computer science; Hedy Lamarr, actress-turned-wireless-communication-inventor; Sir Clive Sinclair, creator of the pocket calculator; and the great Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited as the father of the World Wide Web.*

A short film portrays each of the pioneers, who were culled from a shortlist of 150, nominated by BCS members, and a different “celebrity advocate” — Ortis Deley, Kate Russell, Miranda Raison, Phil Tufnell, Dom Joly — narrates each story.

You can vote for one of the five — so far, Alan Turing has a staggering 40% lead — or rant about the non-inclusion of your favorite pioneer for a chance to win a well-curated pack of books, each inspired by the life and philosophy of one of the five pioneers.

Mostly, Information Pioneers is a refreshing effort to celebrate those whose legacy is infused in just about every aspect of modern life yet remains largely unknown outside the computer science world. Here’s to you, geek gods of yore and unsung heroes of the information age.

via

CORRECTION: Per Vint Cerf’s comment below, Vint being an actual “father of the Internet,” Tim Berners Lee is commonly considered the “father of the World Wide Web,” not of the Internet.

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The Creators Project

Brazilian digital graffiti, Korean engineering and the evolution of modern art.

Brain Pickings is all about providing a platform of visibility for the projects, ideas and creators moving the world forward. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have the bandwidth that today’s media titans do. So we’re always happy to see said titans pull their media prowess together to give a share of voice to these creators. This month, two of them — VICE and Intel — are doing just that in a new partnership dubbed The Creators Project: A new network celebrating global creativity and culture across media.

From French hipster music darlings Phoenix to Brazilian digital artist Muti Randolph to South Korean engineer Hojun Song, the multiyear project showcases over 80 of the world’s most compelling creators, spanning an incredibly wide spectrum of creativity — art, design, fashion, gaming , film, music and more — which we think is tremendously important in an age when creative storytelling and self-expression continue to take new forms, explore new media and create new vocabulary for what it means to be an “artist.”

At a time in the history of the arts where digital technologies have revolutionized distribution, democratized access, and completely re-imagined the scope and scale with which an artist can create a vision and reach an audience, The Creators Project is a completely new kind of arts and culture channel for a completely new kind of world.

The project has two key missions: One, to continually identify visionary artists and offer a platform for celebrating their work; two, to serve as a content creation studio (they’ve already created a video for Phoenix), allowing artist to collaborate, facilitating the production and distribution of their work, and helping them reach new audiences both via the site itself and through the multiple events The Creators Project is holding around the world. The event series includes collections of curated artworks and installations, screenings, panel discussions and dozens of performances by the featured creators, beginning next month in New York City, then moving to London, Sao Paulo, and Seoul to finally culminate in Beijing with a massive three-day Creators exposition in September.

Co-created by DJ extraordinaire Mark Ronson, the project holds riveting promise for the intersection of creativity and technology. More importantly, it reclaims this future-forward conception of art from the grip of today’s fluff-lined manifestos and creates a tangible, actionable, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is platform for what is so often talked about and so rarely enacted.

You can follow The Creators Project on Twitter and show some love on Facebook. (While you’re at it, show some for us as well, eh?)

via Jawbone TV

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Introducing the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

What liquor stores have to do with the advancement of the digital arts.

Last week, we saw artist-explorer Jonathan Harris’ profound reflection on the current state of the digital world. But as digital culture grows on, we need more explicit, concentrated efforts to make sense of it all and its ever-evolving relationship with the arts. Enter GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts — a visionary Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture, based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing. (Principles validated all the more strongly as Firefox, the quintessential epitome of this movement, turns 5 today.)

GAFFTA‘s programs explore the creative intersection of art, design, sound, and technology — a celebration of the interdisciplinary cross-pollination of ideas we’re so fond of around here.

The world is experiencing an explosion of technological development that presents us with inspiring opportunities and challenges. While the ability to rapidly produce and consume information has fueled quantum leaps in innovation, its abundance can also disrupt our focus and fragment our consciousness. By funding and curating projects that offer insightful perspective on the information of our age, using the technologies of our time, GAFFTA provides a means to decode and humanize the evolving global database.

GAFFTA was born out of the realization that, beyond a limited number of mainstream museums, there is no cohesive public space for exhibiting and fostering dialogue around experimental digital art. Eventually, Gray Area took over 7 storefronts in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, previously used as a porn arcade, liquor store and bar, and transformed them into a Media Arts Center populated by galleries, studios and office spaces.

It’s no coincidence that the ever-amazing Aaron Koblin is on the GAFFTA team, populated by equally incredible creative visionaries and artist-technologists.

GAFFTA‘s inaugural exhibition, OPEN, opened last month and runs through November 18, highlighting work from several digital art pioneers spanning a multitude of formats and techniques. And while such events and workshops are no doubt a fantastic leap forward for digital art, we’d love to see GAFFTA’s mission extended to the broader digital community in a portal or social network that transcends geography and allows for the wider cross-pollination of ideas.

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