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.