Cre­at­ive Cit­ies seeks to ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tion about why inclus­ive, sus­tain­able and cre­at­ive cit­ies are bene­fi­cial, and neces­sary in a rap­idly urb­an­ising region, and to use pro­jects, research and opin­ions to sug­gest factors that aid the devel­op­ment of cre­at­ive cit­ies. They seek to identify and cel­eb­rate the local skill base of cit­ies in the region and to high­light the value of devel­op­ing tra­di­tional skill sets and indus­tries to con­nect with a global know­ledge economy.

The blog doesn’t seek to provide neat “solu­tions” to the diverse issues faced by cit­ies across the region, or to impose the val­ues of one city on another, or to replace the in-depth and ongo­ing work of experts in this field.

Rather, they seek to use a short-term strategy to plant a seed in the minds of a broader audi­ence about the ideas around cre­at­ive cit­ies, and to con­nect that audi­ence with sources for fur­ther inform­a­tion about issues of sus­tain­ab­il­ity, inclus­ive­ness and the poten­tial of the cre­at­ive eco­nomy with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to cit­ies in East Asia.

Thir­teen coun­tries are included in the scope of the Cre­at­ive Cit­ies pro­ject. They hope to secure con­tri­bu­tions from them all and to high­light the skill sets, strengths and unique con­di­tions of major cit­ies in each of these countries. The countries are: Aus­tralia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malay­sia, New Zea­l­and, Phil­ip­pines, Singa­pore, Taiwan, Thai­l­and, Viet­nam and UK.

The Context Project is an Independent Study Project through the University of Central Oklahoma created to explore the contextual relationship between examples of Industrial Design and their surroundings. In short: What if everyday items had museum tags next to them? Are they now a piece of Art?

Adam LeNaire is writing a book to attempt to address, or perhaps just ask, these questions with the hope of providing a different viewpoint to both industrial design and works of ‘found’ art. The Context Project blog was set up to increase the spread of objects in the book to global proportions instead of only local works.

Adam invites people to go and take amazing photographs of things with little cards next to them. This includes: fences, sewer grates, metro cars, train tracks, anything that is manufactured. Visit the website for more details.

The ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ programme of events, focused in Helsinki (Finland) and Kurzeme region of Latvia, explores the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing, biological and hydroponic technologies.

The traditions of finding and knowing about wild food in the local Nordic environment are slipping away from the current generation. How can one attract their attention: With books, online maps, workshops, mobile-guided tours, open-source information or DNA code? Or learn how to grow them yourself, over the dark winter months? The Pixelache Festival events introduce the different meeting points between the three collaborating partners, include presentations by international artists and Finnish botanical experts; workshops sharing that knowledge with the public in Botanical Garden of Helsinki; a round-table discussion about foraging in the urban context; a manifestation of the ‘WindowFarms’ project by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray(US) that will be built and exhibited in the Takaikkuna of Kiasma, the Museum of contemporary art of Helsinki.

Following, in a pre-midsummer expedition to rural Rucava in Kurzeme, Western Latvia, SERDE Interdisciplinary Art Group will lead fieldwork to learn about the cultural heritage of Balts using wild plants, and create documents for the younger ‘digital native’ generation.

10 Days. 10 Questions. Answer one question per day in your own secret online 10Q space. At the end of the ten days, hit a magic button and send your answers to the secure online 10Q vault for safekeeping. One year later, the vault will open and your answers will wing their way back to your email inbox for private reflection. If you want to keep them secret, perfect. You can also choose to share any of them, anonymously or with attribution, with the wider 10Q community. Next year, if you so desire, the whole process can begin again. Make it serious. Silly. Salacious. However you like. It’s your 10Q.

Click here to get your 10Q on.

A Life Well Wasted is a podcast about video games and the people who love them, produced by freelance journalist and aspiring radio producer, Robert Ashley. The episode posters were created for the show by artist Olly Moss.

THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers.

THE THING’s current year of subscriptions (issues 9-12) will begin with an issue by visual artist Ryan Gander; and continue with issues by writer/radio personality (most notably from This American Life) Starlee Kine; visual artist Chris Johanson; and end with an issue by the clothing design collaborative DOO.RI.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

For three years Mark Menjivar traveled around the United States exploring the issue of hunger. The more time he spent speaking and listening to individual stories, the more he began to think about the foods people consume and the effects they have on individuals and communities. An intense curiosity and questions about stewardship led him to begin to make unconventional portraits of the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the Untied States. .

Artist Statement: “A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, “May I photograph the interior of your fridge?” to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed “as is.” Nothing added, nothing taken away.  These are portraits of the rich and the poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, members of the NRA, those left out, the under appreciated, former soldiers in Hitler’s SS, dreamers, and so much more. We never know the full story of one’s life. My hope is that we will think deeply about how we care. How we care for our bodies. How we care for others. And how we care for the land.”

For more photographs, click here or visit Mark Menjivar’s website.

Repurpose offers a look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of ‘user generated content’?