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.

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.

Piano-playing Merton freestyles in real-time with random strangers on Chat Roulette. He improvises his songs based on his chat buddy.

The Hello Project is an online social collaboration giving people the chance to say hi, hello, or hola on one of today’s most common yet neglected canvases: the Post-it®.

How it works is simple. Take a regular 3×3 Post-it® and write/sketch/doodle your version of hello. Scan it, email it to hi@thehelloproject.com, and then they’ll post it for everyone to see.

SurfaceCities is a research and teaching initiative, established to study our changing images of cities in the context of a new visual culture developing around information technologies. The website hosts a range of projects and papers developed by faculty and students in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. They are using information technologies to explore new ways of reading and handling cities for a variety of purposes, from environmental activism to extreme commuting.

Their approach is to create dynamic, graphic and situated projects that extend or challenge established theories of urbanism. This work cuts across numerous fields (architecture, information science, and urban studies) in order to challenge traditional conceptions of the city that are static, depersonalized, and focused primarily on built form. In addition, it suggests new configurations of people, computers and cities that shift the discourse on human-computer interaction towards human-computer-environment interaction.