Creative Time’s latest project, Key to the City, involves artist Paul Ramirez Jonas and the City of New York.

For centuries, the key to the city has been used to honor a city’s heroes and visiting dignitaries. Now, artist Paul Ramírez Jonas has created a Key to the City that is not only a symbolic award, but also a functional key—opening spaces across all five boroughs of New York City. This Key to the City is intended for everyday citizens, who will award one another the key for reasons large and small. Once in hand, the key launches a citywide exploration of backdoors, front gates, community gardens, graveyards, and museums that suggests that the city is a series of spaces that are either locked or unlocked.

Curated by Nato Thompson, with curatorial assistant Shane Brennan. Produced by Gavin Kroeber with production assistant Elissa Goldstone.

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” – Timothy Ferriss

Inspired by the quote above,  a group of designers was challenged to create something which provokes an uncomfortable yet important conversation. Participating designers were given complete freedom with the type of object they created, the materials they used, and the topic of the conversation they set out to provoke.

As a result, Uncomfortable Conversations ended up with a wonderfully broad body of work – housewares and furniture, jewelry and fashion, graphics and video. Still, everything exhibited here has one thing in common: the desire to make you uncomfortable.

Women Are Heroes (working title) is the first film directed by JR.
 It tells, in images, the surprising human and artistic adventure of the three years of work around the “Women are Heroes” project.

The film is a tribute to women which dignity is underlined by posting their portraits on the walls of their village and of the whole world. In the film, women express their difficulties in a world dominated by men. In front of the camera, their share their nightmares to exorcise them, but their also offer their joy and radiate their energy …

The film follows the extravagant adventures for which the happy end is never sure: from the presentation of the artistic project to the inhabitants of small villages in Liberia to the organization of a posting in a favela with fragile walls, from the exhibition on houses being demolished in Cambodia to the wrapping of the train that crosses a shantytown in Kenya.

Real-Time, 24/7 Interaction. Virtual Street Corners is a digital media public art project by John Ewing, in collaboration with Carmen Montoya, Kevin Patton, Christopher Robbins and Minotte Romulus.

Beginning in June 2010, a storefront in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, and in Dudley Square, Roxbury will be transformed into large video screens, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into one another’s worlds. Running 24/7, life-size screen images and AV technology will enable real-time communication between residents of the two neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods we have chosen to connect are transportation and cultural hubs with rich and intertwined histories. They are only 2.4 miles apart and a city bus runs directly between them, yet very few people from either neighborhood visits the other. Using technology developed to bridge geographical distances, Virtual Street Corners instead traverses the social boundaries that separate two important neighborhood centers with significant historical connections.

Feedback is an interactive installation that aims to encourage performance from members of the public and circus performers alike. Using the familiar form of a mirror, the installation uses cutting-edge computer vision techniques to allow users to remix their bodies in real time, and display them on a large scale over the interior and exterior of the Roundhouse in Camden.

By dancing, performing – or even modestly gesturing in front of the screen – the installation will capture the movement of anyone interacting with it to create a graphic animation of their body movements. The effect is similar to that of a ‘Hall of Mirrors’, generating an unexpected and magical wobbly, bendy or stretched reflection.

Significant Objects is the brainchild of journalist Rob Walker and Josh Glenn.

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to their hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test the theory? Via eBay!

Significant Objects can be thought of as an experimental, thematic literary journal using eBay as one of its publishing platforms.

See the experiment’s Results here.

‘Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to bring the fight against global warming to the people.  As the film tackles the subject of online activism, we decided that the logical home for ‘Coalition of The Willing’ is here online.

The film will be released on this site in 6 staggered ‘waves’ approximately 2 weeks apart, with 4-5 film sections uploaded in each wave. Prior to the release of each film section you can explore the biography and work in progress of the collaborating artist.

A Love Letter for You is a project by Stephen Powers a.k.a. ESPO with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.

It’s an ongoing graffiti love letter stretching across 50 building facades over 20 blocks along the Market-Frankfurt subway line in West Philadelphia. Powers first started painting on these rooftops as a teenager in 1984. 25 years later he returned home to Philadelphia in the summer of 2009 to write a love letter across the same rooftops facing the Market-Frankford line.

The letter, meant for one, with meaning for all, encompasses 50 walls on a 20 block stretch of market street. Drawing input, inspiration, and work from the community Powers created a letter to and from west Philly. The project required 1200 cans of spray paint, 800 gallons of bucket paint, and the skilled hands of 20 of the finest spray painters in America, who Powers put into the legendary ICY club.

Four Letter Words consists of four units, each capable of displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet with an arrangement of fluorescent lights.

The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.

The algorithm’s tendency towards scatological or “dark” subject matter is influenced by a variety of language and perception studies, especially Elliot McGinnies’ 1949 study “Emotionality and Perceptual Defense.”

While the piece was conceived with idea of displaying algorithmically generated lists, it was designed with flexibility and expandability in mind. The individual units can be connected ad-infinitum, and are theoretically capable of displaying any length of text. While Four Letter Words deals with a specific range of content, the technology can be easily expanded for future textual experiments.

I’m Not An Artist is a work in progress project commissioned by Elisava School of Design with concept, creative direction and design by Soon in Tokyo, a communications agency made up of former Elisava students and teachers.

It started with 56 animated gifs directed by Johnny Kelly and Matthew Cooper and aims to grow and to be a platform with the participation of young designers and creatives from all over the world.