In this talk, Dries Buytaert (original creator and project lead of Drupal) shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. For example, the first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers — at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it’s often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. In this presentation, Dries wants to brainstorm about how large communities evolve and how to sustain them over time.
Some questions to think about ahead of the presentation:
Do you know examples of large organizations that have grown out of volunteer communities?
Why do some communities keep growing while other communities come to a halt?
Is the commercialization of a volunteer-driven community part of a community’s natural life-cycle?
Is it inevitable that over time the operation and/or leadership of volunteer communities are transferred to paid personnel?
Tuesday, May 29, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
The exhibits are strangely hypnotic. So here they are, although, small as they are, we don’t have room to list the whole collection of 26 leftovers.
Prince of Wales, heir to the throne – tiny piece of bread and butter pudding, no mould
Pete Doherty, musician – piece of cheese and pesto toastie, a little brittle, no mould
David Bailey, photographer – crust from cheese and tomato sandwich made from Cornish speckle bread, no mould
Hugh Dennis, comedian – fragment of egg shell from egg used in his egg sandwich, retrieved from bin, slightly battered, no mould
John Woodvine, actor – flake speck from a croissant; smallest exhibit in the museum, no mould
Jan Leeming, ex-newsreader – crystallised ginger from Cornish ginger ice-cream, no mould
Michael Winner, film director and restaurant critic – piece of lemon drizzle cake, no mould
Paul Heiney, TV presenter and journalist – Anchor butter wrapper, contents used on toast with scrambled egg, scrunched
Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, first sea lord from 2006 to 2009 – raisin from fruit cake, no mould
Steve Swindells and Jerry Richards, from UK rock group Hawkwind – coffee grounds and crumbs from shared chocolate brownie, no mould
William Tyler, musician from the US band Lambchop – baked bean from cooked breakfast, deteriorated, black and some mould
Stephanie Creek, former member of cafe staff who came fourth on The Weakest Link – chickpea from a mixed salad enjoyed during her lunch break, desiccated
Excerpt of an article written by Emma’s Eccentric Britain, BBC. Read it HERE
“A proper name is a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it”. ― John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1. ii. 5.)
A name. Everybody has one. Individuals, artists and academics from all over the world share their thoughts about the meaning and purpose of one’s name from both private and public perspectives. The problem of homonym and other reasons for changing one’s name are explored as the film draws references from history, popular culture and individual experiences, leading us to the case of a name change that caused a stir in the small country of Slovenia and beyond.
In 2007 three artists joined the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and officially changed their names to that of the leader of that party, the Prime Minister of Slovenia, Janez Janša. While they renamed themselves for personal reasons, the boundaries between their lives and their art began to merge in numerous and unforeseen ways.
Signified as an artistic gesture, this particular name change provoked a wide range of interpretations in art circles both in Slovenia and abroad, as well as among journalists and the general public.
The film that inspires you to google your name again.
Volunteers and professionals at the Austrian Space Forum are testing a prototype Mars space suit in a series of ice caves that provide conditions similar to those on the Red Planet. Humanity is still far away from a manned mission to the planet, but the enthusiasts here believe it will actually happen one day.
Click HERE for a day by day report of the activities.
On 28th of April 2012, the Austrian Space Forum (OEWF) invited 20 Twitter followers to the Dachstein Mars simulation.
A Tweetup is an informal gathering of people who are using the micro-blogging platform Twitter. This MarsTweetup is a unique opportunity to follow live the Dachstein Mars simulation, to meet the spacesuit simulator Aouda.X and to discuss with scientist and space experts about analog missions.
The contents of one of the most important and eclectic modern music collections in the world – John Peel’s personal record collection, is starting to be made public for the first time through an online archive.
John Peel’s family, The John Peel Centre for the Creative Arts, Eye Film and TV, and website company Klik, are working together to create an online archive of John Peel’s record collection, including specially created videos of key artists, John Peel’s home movies, John’s hand-typed note cards, and other content.
John Peel’s personal record collection consists of over 26,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and many thousands of CDs.
“Roots To Resistance is an Art and Activism Project in which I am painting twelve Women Activists on a large scale, doing groundbreaking, risky and extremely important work here on the planet. In addition to the portraits, the Roots Project has created a Global Postering and Postcard Campaign that displays each of the Women Activists and the issues they fight for and against, and sends them across the world via global partnerships with organizations and individuals. These Campaigns seek to build social engagement and support systems through international and local partnerships, working together to empower people and communities. People are Postering and passing out Postcards in Kenya, Russia, Guatemala, Australia, South Africa, Afghanistan, New Zealand and across Europe and the United States. A School in Portland Oregon is using the Postcards and posters as part of its curriculum and Prison Book Projects across the U.S. are partnering with the Roots Project to bring the postcards to folks living inside of the prison system. It is so deeply inspiring to see that people out there in our communities care about these issues, and so powerful to raise our voices together in support of these women and in support of each other as we engage in such profoundly important resistance work on the planet!
I am remembering that while we are helping to share the histories of these women, the present times we are living in like many times past, will be the histories of the future. As we watch entire countries and communities around the globe risking so much to rise against oppression, I am reminded that in these times we are writing our histories and the histories of others with what we do and say and with our actions vs. inactions. I give profound thanks for the work that these 12 women are engaged in, under tremendous pressures and at great risk to themselves, and I encourage everyone to consider the histories we are each writing here today. With our support of and partnership with each other, we will help to lift up the voices of many as they continue to lift us up. Thank you!”
Unfinished Modernisations is a collaborative, long-term research platform on architecture and urban planning. It brings together partners from both institutional and non-institutional sectors from South-Eastern Europe: TrajekT, (Slovenia), Umetnostna galerija Maribor (Maribor Art Gallery) (Slovenia), the Croatian Architects’ Society and the Institute for Contemporary Architecture, Zagreb (Croatia), the Belgrade Architects Society, Belgrade (Serbia) and the Coalition for Sustainable Development, Skopje, (Macedonia). The initiators and authors of the concept of the project are Vladimir Kulić and Maroje Mrduljaš.
The project is aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research on the production of built environment in its social, political and cultural contexts. It encompasses the countries that succeeded former Yugoslavia, spanning the period from the inception of the socialist state until today. The topic of the 14 researches is the way in which divergent concepts of modernization conditioned architecture, territorial transformations, and urban phenomena. The project seeks to detect effective, resilient, and socially responsible models of architecture and urban planning in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. Special attention is going to be paid to critical re-reading of modernization processes and contextualization of local architectural and urban planning concepts within the framework of international evolution of architectural discourse. While largely unexplored and lacking appropriate interpretation, many of the models created in the region were original and experimental and may be used as inspiration for a progressive current practice both inside and beyond the regional borders. The project also seeks to reconstruct an important segment of the shared history of Central and South-Eastern Europe and to strengthen cross-cultural respect and understanding through trans-national collaboration and mobility.
Unfinished Modernisations will be carried out through a variety of activities: 14 researches, 5 conferences (Zagreb, Skopje, Beograd, Split, Maribor), exhibitions, publications, and interactive web-site/blogs. All these efforts will culminate in a final exhibition in Maribor (Slovenia), the 2012 Cultural Capital of Europe, which will give the project broad European exposure.
Hamburg´s garbagemen portrait their city in the Trashcam Project – with their garbage containers. Standard 1.100 liter containers are transformed to giant pinhole cameras. With these cameras the binmen take pictures of their favorite places to show the beauty and the changes of the city they keep clean every day. The Trashcam Project was developed by Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, Scholz & Friends Berlin and the Hamburg sanitation department. Special thanks to Hamburg based photographer Matthias Hewing (www.matthiashewing.de/) for his professional advice and the challenging lab work with the giant negatives.
Garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz is taking a picture with a 1.100 liter garbage container transformed into a pinhole camera. It will take 2 minutes of framing and one hour waiting. Picture taken by Mirko Derpmann with a fuji gw690 on Fuji Velvia.
St. Georg is a part of Hamburg where one can find clear signs of gentrification and quite an organized oppositional movement. This site should be occupied by a massive glass and steel cube by now. But somehow the process seems to have slowed down mostly due to the financial crisis. Photographed with a pinhole garbage container by garbageman Roland Wilhelm, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 10 minutes exposure time. In the front you can see the shadow of the bin.
The Fleetschloss in Hamburg photographed with a pinhole garbage container by
garbageman Hans-Dieter Braatz, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 45 minutes exposure time.
Velocommerce is commerce that is dependent on the bicycle (from the French word ‘velo’ referring to bicycle). India is a fantastic place to observe velocommerce in action.This project has opened our eyes to this crazy universe of activities, products, services, design, economy and humanity that is mobile using bicycles. The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital. It is special because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized, last-mile service delivery.
Official designation: State of Sabotage, Abbreviation: SoS
SoS is a secular, sovereign and democratic state.
All citizens of the SoS state are to adhere to these principles.
The Constitution is the highest law of the SoS state and is binding for all SoS state authorities. The SoS State Constitution was publicly recited and resolved on September 4, 2005 and has been valid and legally binding since that time.
The SoS state symbols are the colors black and white, the coat of arms in the state flag, as well as the state anthem. The two official SoS state and diplomatic languages are German and English. The assets of the SoS state are the creation, protection, mediation, and positioning of art and culture. SoS is the first sovereign cultural state according to international law. SoS fulfills all criteria required of a sovereign state (territory, population, and state organization), as well as education and training in terms of artistic freedom.
They say: “The Instant Favelas Project means the constant research and dialog between disciplines and Art. We base the project in our own exploration and concerns. Those confluences create, and this provoked the first pilot project (Piloto Kamikaze) where we explored interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary elements such as urbanity, culture, esthetic, music, environment, etc.
Instant Favelas creates a nomad city in open spaces of Zürich. These cities develop during one, two, or three weeks, and are normally built with free-hand collaborators-Favelanders. Our mobility or nomadism plays as much with external and natural factors as with the urban rules of the city where we play.
Inside of our Restless Doubts we attempt to achieve that the viewer’s role will be active, not merely looking at the process of construction, but also asking oneself, What is going on? Why here? Why this? Is it safe? What does it cost? What does it say? And of course, Is this Art? Hopefully we will arrive at the point where the viewer translates himself into a Favelander — free-hand – mind collaborator, who will perhaps create further interventions…
Instant Favelas as an open Art-Lab Experiment collaborated with interventions inside of our constructive structure. While building and networking our city-within-a-city, we try to understand cities. Our simulation becomes a laboratory where we invite other people to make an intervention—in the sense of a collaborative response to our project—so that we can reflect together about different aspects, such as space, economy, society, demography, spirituality and so on, that shape and define a city.”
‘The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied arts. Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds including designers, artists, bankers, skeptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious.’
FabFi is an ambitious project which is creating Internet networks for eastern Afghanistan whose main components can be built out of trash. It’s low-tech, it’s simple–and it works.
The Afghan city of Jalalabad has a high-speed Internet network whose main components are built out of trash found locally. Aid workers, mostly from the United States, are using the provincial city in Afghanistan’s far east as a pilot site for a project called FabFi.
It’s a broadband apart from the covert, subversive “Internet in a suitcase” and stealth broadband networks being sponsored by the U.S., aimed at empowering dissidents, but the goal isn’t so different: bringing high-speed online access to the world’s most remote places.
Residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once. While it sounds like science fiction, FabFi could have important ramifications for entire swaths of the world that lack conventional broadband.
FabFi is an open source project that maintains close ties to MIT’s Fab Lab and the university’s Center for Bits and Atoms. At the moment, FabFi products are up and running in both Jalalabad and at three sites in Kenya, which collectively operate as an Internet service provider called JoinAfrica. Inside Afghanistan, FabFi networks are used to aid local businesses and to prop up community infrastructure such as hospitals and clinics.
Three generations of a teaching family near Jalalabad, shown in 2009, discovered Wikipedia on a laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program. Their Internet access was facilitated by a FabFi network. Credit: Keith Berkoben/Fab Folk. NYT
The Abramović Method was born from the artist’s reflections on three major performances from the last decade: The House With the Ocean View (2002), Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and The Artist is Present (2010). These performances left a deep imprint on Abramović’s perception of her work in relation to the public.
“In my experience, as developed in a career of over 40 years, I have arrived at the conclusion that the public plays a very important and indeed crucial role in performance,” she explains. “The performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said, it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performer are not only complementary but almost inseparable.”
The PAC in Milan is the venue chosen by Marina Abramović to host her eagerly awaited new body of work, entitled The Abramović Method. This is the first major museum exhibition premiering new works since her groundbreaking retrospective in 2010 at the MoMA, New York. The Abramović Method will be on view at the PAC from March 21 through June 10, 2012.
Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.
Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.
Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.
The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.
Designing Economic Cultures is a research project by design duo Brave New Alps that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.
The fundamental question that the project poses at its outset is: how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent capitalist system, its organisational forms and its problematic consequences, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?
In other words, how can designers, who have a critically engaged practice, keep on developing this practice without selling themselves off or being crushed by the market? Designing Economic Cultures is an attempt to articulate, develop and share a wide range of tactics and structures that allow designers to produce work that contributes to the development of a more autonomous, democratic and heterogeneous society.
The role of Transition Network is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organize around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions.
“In Transition 2.0 is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. You’ll hear about communities printing their own money, growing food, localizing their economies and setting up community power stations. It’s an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism. In a world of increasing uncertainty, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing vegetables in unexpected places”.
#UNRAVEL is a new collaboration by FOUND + Aidan Moffat on the reliability of memory. This is a 3 minute documentary featuring the artists explaining the project.
#UNRAVEL is a collection of devices making up a gallery-based, reactive sound installation, through which the audience will attempt to unravel the truth about The Narrator’s life by playing records from his collection.
When we tell the story of a memory, how much of it is true and how much is shaped by who we are talking to? Once we’ve told the story many times, how do we even know what is true any more – what is constructed and what actually happened?
The installation is the work of Edinburgh based arts collective / experimental pop band FOUND, whose members include Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman and Glasgow-based author and musician, Aidan Moffat best known as one half of the band Arab Strap. FOUND and Aidan Moffat are signed to Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground.
As digital media proliferates, these newspapers face increased pressure. Our hope is to create a modern version of this successful model, offering homeless individuals an opportunity to sell a digital service instead of a material commodity. SxSW Interactive attendees can pay what they like to access 4G networks carried by our homeless collaborators. This service is intended to deliver on the demand for better transit connectivity during the conference.
Dragoş Lumpan: I started this project for several reasons. The first was curiosity. Travelling by train or by car I have seen sheep in the fields. Sometimes I have played “sheep” – that is a sort of Romulus and Remus numbering game, but with sheep. Close to the sheep was a shepherd. I was curious to know more about shepherds: where they sleep, what they eat, what they do during all day long, during the entire year … I have found out that there are shepherds who roam every day with their sheep, hundreds of kilometres in a year, who sleep wherever the night covers them, under the sky, regardless of the season. They live in a different realm, in a different time, following a quasi-cosmic calendar. Yet, from time to time, we come across them.
Another reason is that I like cheese. It seems that cheese is one of the oldest staples of Romanian exports. Etymologically the word “cheese” originates most probably from the Geto-Dacian language; it was adopted by almost all the languages that surround us. The Slavonic languages use bryndza; this word entered into German as Brinse, Brimsenkäse in dialect. Sometimes it appears as Brinzenkäse. In German Käse means cheese, so that, most probably, the word is a tautology. However, this product is usually thought of as coming from Switzerland, from a town named Brinz, so that Brinzen-Käse could have meant “the cheese from the town of Brinz”. The most likely hypothesis is that the city was named after the staple it exported. That staple was prepared by the Romanian shepherds. In Southern France the word brousse is used for cottage cheese. Its etymology seems to be the Romanian word brânza that reached France via Switzerland”. (The Dictionary of Travelling Words by Alexandru Graur). Due to my visual arts background, I have tried to narrate the story of cheese and its authors in my language, that is to say through images.
The third reason is the extinction of transhumance. Due to social changes, shepherds do not want to be shepherds anymore. Or, at least, they do not want to travel every day, every year, throughout their lives. Shepherding is more than a job. It is a hard way of life. It is very intense. Fewer and fewer shepherds are prepared to make the sacrifice.The title of this project “The Last Transhumance” came from a Romanian shepherding family which had been travelling for generations. I followed them for 18 months. After that they told me they wanted to give up transhumance, or “transformance” as they were calling it. They have remained shepherds, but now they are sedentary ones. In the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran we read that: “Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a worker of the ground”. Ancestrally, somewhere along the line, we all had a shepherd in our families. We are witnessing the extinction of an ancient way of life, when people were content to live around a camp fire. I cannot stop the fire from going out, but I can try to record its dying embers.
The Digit is a giant chrome double-finger that looms over unwitting passers-by in Union Square, NYC. More precisely, it is a double-sided finger, with a second appendage extending out of where the rest of the hand would be. The two fingertips methodically double-tap and swipe, while reflecting the surrounding architecture on their bulbous surface.
The Digit is a virtual (augmented-reality) sculpture that can be viewed with an iPhone application available for free at the App Store. Simply launch the app when you are on the southern tip of Union Square and look up through the iPhone’s camera.
The sculpture is a response to two public art works located in Union Square – the statue of George Washington (one of the first public sculptures in New York) and Metronome – a recent installation about time that occupies 3 building facades just south of the square. Incidentally, Metronome includes an enlarged replica of GW statue’s hand (located just above the smoking hole). The Digit follows this trajectory by isolating the index digit of George Washington and appropriating it as an emblem of the digital condition.
The Digitalso exist as an interactive web experience and in the form of physical souvenirs. WebGL compatible Browser Required (Firefox 4 or Chrome 9 and up) or you may need to update your graphics card driver.
BeetleCam is a remote controlled buggy with a DSLR camera mounted on top. After the first model was destroyed by a lion, Will Burrard-Lucas created a new model one with more advanced capabilities and an armored shell.
Wherein a few brave souls watch entire horror-movie franchises in a twenty-four-hour period, risk their sanity, and suffer from total narrative dislocation, but maybe, too, remember what it’s like to be in love.
Discussed: The Failed Commodification of WASPy New England Recluses, Swarming Narrative Cosmoses, The Persistent Re-incubation of Evil, Resident Bad Shrinks, The Ominous Whisper-Creep, Final Girl Nancy, Talking to the Fourth Wall, Arguably Feminist Clown Suits, Gropings in the Dark.
The Method
Primary objective: to reexamine five representative horror-movie franchises released on the heels of horror cinema’s Golden Age (1968–1981), beginning with the first installments: Friday the 13th (released in 1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Halloween (released in 1978, dir. John Carpenter), Hellraiser (released in 1987, dir. Clive Barker), A Nightmare on Elm Street (released in 1984, dir. Wes Craven), and Night of the Living Dead (released in 1968, dir. George A. Romero).
Radio Boredcast is a 744-hour continuous online radio project, curated by artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival. In response to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed.
With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”
You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, at www.avfestival.co.uk or www.thepixelpalace.org.
Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.
Look at the program and listen to Radio Boredcast HERE
Read Collateral Damage by Vicki Bennett at The WIRE
“In the early 2000s, increased bandwidth allowed recombinant artists to enter the gift economy. It’s a freedom we should defend at all costs, argues Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us.
In 1999 I bought my first fast computer – and although it was dying to do speedy things, I was on dial-up, reduced to a crawl when it came to information retrieval. Logged into file sharing communities, I’d sit in the chat and watch people posting files that would take me a day to download, so I’d just read about them. Then I’d go to the WFMU website and try to stream the station and just get blurts and gaping silences. Then I’d visit archive.org and look at all the wonderful synopses for Rick Prelinger’s films, which were too large to access. It wasn’t long, however, before affordable broadband reached my area of London. Then everything changed. Forever.”
“Condoms are an essential tool in preventing unintended pregnancy and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV,” PPGNW New Media Coordinator, Nathan Engebretson, said in a press release. “We hope the site promotes discussions within relationships about condoms and helps to remove perceived stigmas that some people may have about condom use. “Where Did You Wear It” attempts to create some fun around making responsible decisions.”
Distributed around community colleges and universities, the condom’s bar code can be scanned by smart phones that connect users to the website and allows them to upload their location, along with general details and anonymous reviews of their sexual experience. Users can rate their rolls in the hay on a scale from “things can only improve from here” to “ah-maz-ing — rainbows exploded and mountains trembled.”
Excerpts from an article written by Nic Halverson, Discovery News.
This section explores the complex map of sound art from a variety of points of view, structured into different series and curated programs. VARIATIONS, led by Jon Leidecker reconstructs the history of sound appropriationism by looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and commercial media, and the convergence of all these trends today. Meanwhile, LINES OF SIGHT, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà, explores different ideas linked to transmission as a means of creative expression and in PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND, Felix Kubin leads us on a tour of underground sound production in Eastern Europe. Finally, INTERRUPTIONS intermittently “interrupts”” the Curatorial series in order to explore the many possibilities of music-on-demand and mix formats.
Three generations of a teaching family near Jalalabad, shown in 2009, discovered Wikipedia on a laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program. Their Internet access was facilitated by a FabFi network. Credit: Keith Berkoben/Fab Folk. NYT
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