Weeknote#18 Upcoming Workshops, SXSW & Ateliê Urbano

We will be in Louisville, KY, in November to conduct a workshop with the City of Louisville, Creative Commons and other stakeholders involved in the Sensored City Project, including community leaders. This workshop is geared towards streamlining design ideas & visual language (above) for the data art piece showcasing air quality data in Downtown Louisville. We’ll post more information around this post-workshop. (scroll down)

The interactive installation for the Seaholm Power Plant Redevelopment project is in its nascent design stages. Grasshopper 3D is one of the tools which we will be using to create the geometry of the piece. It is a visual programming language, primarily used to create generative algorithms. Before jumping into the software, we conducted an internal workshop with the team to focus in on the aesthetic inspiration for the piece. This involved choosing from a vast variety of forms, sculptures and designed objects, combining it with floral, organic inspiration from Texas, and ideating in small groups around desirable outcomes. This gave us a variety of ideas to work off of, which included broad outlines around time of day, seasonal changes, movement, scale, geometry, points of origin and more.

Some good news came in, in form of SXSW session approval email. We’ll be hosting a core conversation session at SXSW Interactive 2015. Dates and details to follow. We will be talking about ‘The Future of Digital/Physical Creative Placemaking’ and sharing examples of our work including the Seaholm Power Plant Installation which is located in Downtown Austin and is walking distance from any SXSW Interactive venue.

Urban Matter Inc. was featured alongside other creative studios, artists and designers in New York, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as a part of a show called Ateliê Urbano that talks about different types of urban artistic expressions in these three cities. The show was aired at 10.30pm EST on Oct 22nd on +Globosat in Brazil. UMI was a part of a series called ‘Revitalização’ or ‘Revitalization’ which is the core of our mission. We will post a video as soon as we have access to it.