Abandoned Houses as Art

Thanks to a buddy who pointed me to this link. A lot of New Orleans is still messed up and things are slow to be rebuilt. However, there are still tons of young, ambitious, creative people flooding the area to help rebuild it. There's an artist (Kirsha Kaechele) who started buying abandoned houses and letting other artists use the entire space as a canvas for their ideas.

Imagine the freedom each artist gets when they are presented with an abandoned house. It's a total blank canvas when you have a structure that's useless and waiting for you to give it some sort of purpose.

Songs For Eating and Drinking

In Seattle, they organized an event that featured the top underground hip hop artists performing original works in a-capella. The event was small - 50 people - and set up as a dinner. If you watch the video, you can see how intimate and sometimes intense the whole setup can be. I think it's interesting when you take something out of it's natural environment and see how it works. Context.

A Moving Sculpture

Daan Roosegaarde designed and built "Liquid Space," a sculpture that senses someone who is in it and reacts to them. Even though this is an art piece, it has a lot of implications for UI and design and how far it can go to personalize the experience for you. For example, you can jump into a ZipCar and the seats and mirrors can adjust for you.

One on One Theater

I think to believe that everyone has an interesting is a simple and true proposition. How many times have we thought about what our own reality TV show would be like? Or have you met anyone who is so fascinating that you could sit there and listen to them tell stories for hours? There's a story in everyone.

Using that insight, a German theater company called Rimini Protokoll created "Call Cutta in a Box." It's an one-on-one theater experience where you dial into a call center in Calcutta and the person who picks up will tell you their story. The "actors" use their personal details and improvise through out, meaning every "performance" is unique.

Find more here.