Almost a year ago in October you might remember we produced a 3-day Urban Prototyping Festival in downtown San Francisco on the 5m Project campus. Over 5000 people came to enjoy the showcase of how cities can find new ways to invent themselves through the eyes of its citizens. One of our favorite projects was “Pulse of the City”. An interactive piece that allowed pedestrians to place their hands onto sensors that detect heart rates in real time and then played a unique musical composition that is solely based on them.

Today, we are pleased to announce that “Pulse of the City will be installed in several locations around Boston – proving that that our model of urban prototyping in the streets will create permanent installations for cities around the world.

More information about the Boston Pulse of the City Installation
“Pulse of the City” is an interactive art installation by artist George Zisiadis. The heart-shaped piece, when grasped by pedestrians, detects a heartbeat and translates it into a unique piece of music. In early September 2013 five of these solar powered pieces will be enhancing and enlivening the streetscape of Boston.
“Cities are so full of overstimulation and stress. I wanted to playfully help pedestrians take a moment to reconnect with themselves, to listen to their bodies,” says Zisiadis. The piece is unique in how it treats pulses – our essential life force – not as beeps and numbers but as unique, creative expression. Its engaging, playful design re-imagines the built environ- ment and promotes the use and celebration of public space in an uplifting way. Finally, the piece wirelessly uploads its history of interactions, allowing city officials an unprecedented understanding of how people engage with placemaking initiatives.
Pulse of the City was originally conceived in October 2012 as part of San Francisco’s Urban Prototyping Festival which explored how art, design, and technology can help make cities better. In less than one year Pulse of the City has gone from mere idea to enthusiastic reality. Its one of the first major examples of the power of cities to rapidly experiment and innovate in creating engaging public spaces.

If you are in the Boston area and want to check out “Pulse of the City” – units will be installed in five locations around Boston.

– Downtown: Christopher Columbus Park (sidewalk along Atlantic Ave)

– Longwood: Ave. Louis Pasteur roundabout at Longwood Ave.

– East Boston: Maverick Square

– Roxbury: Reggie Lewis Athletic Center (sidewalk along Malcolm X. Blvd)

– Dorchester: Ashmont Station

GO GO GO George! We are so happy to see “Pulse to the City” growing and sharing love all over! Keep up the good work!

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WOW! What a night we had at the last event with The Bunker! We love Atom! It is always a pleasure to host him when he comes to San Francisco. If you were there then you know what how special his set was. We were so excited that he premiered his “HD” with us!

The post Video from The Bunker A/V Sessions: Atom™ "HD" Audio/Visual Set appeared first on Gray Area.

Thank You for Helping Rock the Techno Casino!

A heartfelt thanks to all who joined in for the Techno Casino fundraiser last month. The event was produced to support our efforts to share our Creative Code Education program with the world.

The Regency Lodge was so alive & electric. The gambling tables were packed, funny money was flowing, & the antes were up! It was lovely to see everyone having such a good time. With a sound-track provided by Neel, Monolake, and Deadbeat, it was hard not to be moving and shaking! Check out the photos:

If you are interested in helping create merit need-based scholarships to lower barriers of access to digital art + technology; create an online gallery of student work and open-source code created at Gray Area than please get in touch with us at education (at) gaffta.org or make a tax-deductible donation here

The post Techno Casino Photos and Results Are In appeared first on Gray Area.

The original version of this post appeared on the ESRI blog.

Last weekend Esri joined forces with Airbnb, the City of San Francisco’s Mayor’s Office of Innovation, and GAFFTA to put on the Discover SF Hackathon.  This event brought together designers, developers, and entrepreneurs to hack the urban experience by promoting discovery and exploration for residents and tourists alike.

A sneak peak at GeoTriggers

This was also the first public preview of Esri’s new ArcGIS Geotrigger Service!  The API and service connects you with your surroundings so app developers can provide physical context to users.

To help people get up and running, some of lead GeoTrigger developers were on site to hand out special AppIDs, documentation and samples that the teams could use to build a their own trigger-enabled apps.

The Winners

At the end of the event, 12 projects were submitted to the Discover SF Hacker League site.  The projects included some of the most creative and innovative ideas you could imagine.  We even saw an app that coders could use to find other coders based on the location of their commits on GitHub – all in real-time!  How cool is that?

Grand Prize + Most Innovative Use of Esri Technology Award

SFPOPOS – This creative team took the overall win which included co-office space for further development of their ideas, $1000 in AWS (Amazon Web Service) credits, plus the Esri award for $2000 plus $250 in ArcGIS Online credits.  Designers and web developers on the team created a simple but elegant website to explain what POPOS were and to showcase the application.  The developers on the team actually implemented the ArcGIS GeoTriggers API with a real working iOS mobile application.  The application automatically detected when you were within a certain proximity of a POPOS and the trigger would automatically send you a text message notification.  You can learn more about the app here.

The Airbnb Innovation Award

Fraudio Tours – This team took home the Airbnb Award for $500.  Their mobile web application used your geolocation to provide an audio walking tour of the area (like one you would expect in a museum).  The difference was that the information is written and narrated by a comedian.  What an interesting and entertaining way to discover what’s around you!

Esri and Twilio Service Credit Award

Rainbowsomewhere – This team won the Service Credit Award which included $250 of ArcGIS Online credits and $250 Twilio credits.  The web application worked with local weather services to predict the location of rainbows.  The application used your geolocation and an algorithm to calculate the potential locations in 10 minute intervals and displayed the information on a map.

Where did the data come from?

A huge collection of data made available for this event and the majority of teams took advantage of the extensive collection from the City of San Francisco’s DataSF Portal – https://data.sfgov.org/ and the ArcGIS Online organization.  Most of their data was published as either ArcGIS Online maps or feature services, so developers could easily load these into their apps.

 You can find a list of all of the data resources on the Hacker League site.

What about custom datasets and services?

In order to provide a way for participants to publish and access their own data, we also spun up an ArcGIS Online Hackathon Maps and Services organization.  This included a ton of credits that participants could use to upload, host and even analyze their own data.  And it didn’t take long for a number of teams to jump on board and spin up a few of their own custom geo services.  Here is an interesting one that was created to show the location of Art and Cultural Facilities.

In the end…

Overall the hackathon was a huge success.  Not only did it provide an opportunity for the community to demonstrate what apps and tools they thought would be most beneficial to discover the city, but it also gave the City of San Francisco and the participating organizations some great ideas of what they can do to help solve the problem too.  Not to mention, there were some awesome prizes and awards given away!

From all of the Esri folks that were there, we really enjoyed working with all of the teams and organizations involved, and we look forward to seeing you again at the next one!

The post Discover SF Hackathon Recap appeared first on Gray Area.

Just how frustrated are you when your bus is late or overfilled? While one of the winning projects of the Urban Data Challenge, announced on April 6 2013 at swissnex San Francisco, sought to measure this annoyance with a frustration index, the Fusepool prize winner reminds us that using public transport can also be fun and humorous.

The Urban Data Challenge competition took place over two-months between February 6 and March 31 2013, during which participants explored mobility data sets from three cities—San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich—and were challenged with merging and comparing the urban data to draw meaningful insights through visualization. The Challenge was co-organized by swissnex San Francisco, GAFFTA, Lift, and OpenData.ch with the support of the threee cities. Over 60 designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists completed the challenge in 21 teams hailing from Zurich, Geneva, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Paris, and Singapore.

Watch the highlights from the Urban Data Challenge Awards

The results are impressive. Third prizes winners created a visualization that lets you fly over Geneva along the different bus routes in A City’s Heartbeat, examine transit ridership in 3D in the app TranstVis, and race buses through the three cities in Urban Bus Races. These projects won a $300 cash prize each.

The Frustration Index, second prize winner

The two projects that took home second prize honors received two round-trip tickets each to Switzerland. They both took the challenge a step further using additional data and creating new indexes. While Transit Quality + Equitygets political by overlaying transit data with income levels, the Frustration Index incorporates the emotional aspects of using public transport.

The first-place winner, Dots on the Bus, took home theFusepool prize for app development earning $5,000 to develop their visualization into something truly useful for every day. They won the jury over by bringing humor to the difficult issue of public transport and engaging the ridership. This visualization proves that even though riding transit can sometimes seem intimidating, everybody’s doing it. Pick a route off the map and watch a day in the life of the line. Buses speed by, passengers jump on and off. Some lines are slow, some are hopping, and rush hour is often hilarious.

Antoine Stroh from Transports Public Genevois

The Urban Data Challenge proves the power of Open Governmental Data. The collaboration between creatives and representatives from the cities Geneva, Zurich, and San Francisco allowed both sides to exchange and learn from each other. Antoine Stroh, project manager for Transports Publics Genevois (TPG), is amazed with all the work put into the project and the results. The TPG opened up its first data set for the Urban Data Challenge. For Antoine Stroh the results of the challenge seem to point into the right direction. “This is a first step,” he says. “I am sure that we will carry on with open data.”

The same is true for swissnex San Francisco—this is only the beginning. We are excited to move forward and follow the insights, actions, and implementation of the three cities and work with LIFT and the City of Geneva on a touring exhibition of the projects. Stay tuned!

For a full list of projects and more on the Urban Data Challenge, visit www.urbandatachallenge.org.

The winners at the Urban Data Challenge Awards

The post Winning the Urban Data Challenge appeared first on Gray Area.

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Art Hack Day @ GAFFTA – 2012 from Mulchio on Vimeo.

Back in December 2012, Art Hack Day took place at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA). Participants gathered in a space overlooking one of the busiest and highly trafficked streets in San Francisco to work tirelessly for 48 hours to create projects based on the theme of ‘lethal software’. As I stepped into the work area to catch the hacking in real time, I recall faces concentrating and looking intensely at brightly lit laptop screens. I even passed by some participants and saw lines of code cascading down as reflections on glasses. While a daunting task to create around a theme associated to death and morbidity, the myriad of ways to approach showcased the immense creativity and innovation of the makers. The projects forced the participants to look figuratively and literally at the notion that software and technology can be used as a medium to interpret ways we understand loss, violence, surveillance, decay, and death. From the whimsical to social commentary, below are some of my favorite projects from the Art Hack Day and an image gallery.

KillKillKill!!! by Chris Bisignani and Emily Martiny: A simple game enter your mobile number and asked to kill someone and suffer the consequences of that “kill.”

Face Theft Mirror (Performative) by Toby Schachman and Gabriel Dunne: Projection and a webcam were used to let visitors perform in front of what seemed to be a mirror thus allowing a screen capture where the next visitor acquired the face of the previous looker.

Spinning Beachball of Death by Toby Schachman: A new spin (pun absolutely intended) involving the Mac Wait Cursor. Visitors were put into an enclosed space given headphones, and asked to look at an LCD monitor linked to a presence sensor. As the onlooker meditates over the cursor, it grows larger and multiplies.

Drone Strike by Max Ogden, Abram Clark: A live video feed of open space with target picking interface and bomb button. When a target is selected, a remote helicopter is launched. When the bomb button is pressed, a randomly located noise / light bomb is triggered.

Wrinkle In Time by Jonathan, Erik, and Jean-Pierre: Aptly named after the sci-fi fantasy novel by Madeleine L’Engle, digital images of text are made to virtually disintegrate through an accelerated aging process as the viewer attempts to read the piece of text as quickly as they can.

okKillMe by Jeremiah Johnson and Sarah Grant: The notion of language, figures of speech, and semantics were at the heart of this project. A pseudo match making site that paired people using the hashtags: #readytokill or #readytodie

Lethal Software Memorial by Jeremiah Johnson: An elegantly and minimalist work that provided historical cases of databases and software malfunctioning that led to human fatalities. Quite the commentary on how human death and software relate.

Vortex by Andrew Benson and Stijn Schiffeleers: A cathartic way to alleviate stress! Visitors sent a text message with ‘something they wanted to get rid off‘. Subsequently, a printer would provide a receipt of sorts and the message would get sucked into a vortex projected into a hole in the wall.

Near DJ Experience by Valentin Burov and Natalia Ricalde: Innovative approach of taking a 4 channel mixer/sequencer and producing music using folded pieces of paper. Great way of combining digital and analog.

Doomsday Clock by Matthew Gerring: Sounds and images of drone surveillance of your neighborhood, featuring a countdown clock to the day the FAA will authorize drones for use in civilian airspace!

If you would like to see more pictures of Art Hack Day, visit the tumblr site or the projects site.

* All photos by Dorothy Santos

The post Retrospective: Art Hack Day Lethal Software appeared first on Gray Area.

In 2012, we took our learnings from Summer of Smart and developed them into a new global initiative, Urban Prototyping (UP), which we began in summer of 2012. UP uses a similar process of rapidly testing and scaling projects to improve cities, but engages with challenges related to the physical as well as digital environments of cities.

In 2013, we are taking our initiatives around the world. More than 20 cities have asked us to take our experiments to their streets. We are committed to bring the Urban Prototyping Festival to 2 cities a year through 2015; allowing art, design, and technology to serve as tools for civic participation. We have already produced festivals in Singapore and San Francisco, with the third event happening in London in April 2013. Each year, UP:San Francisco will showcase the best projects in the field from our core Bay Area community and from around the world. The program fostered 23 new projects and the street festival had over 5,000 citizens in attendance.

Meet some of the people and projects behind San Francisco’s 2012 Urban Prototyping Festival. An initiative of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, in partnership with Intersection for the Arts, 5M Project, Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, in collaboration with IDEO and Rebar.

Urban Prototyping is a global movement exploring how rapidly-prototyped design, art, and technology projects can improve cities. UP Festivals are being held around the world to inspire and showcase the next generation of creative projects that address local issues.

The post Prototype quickly. Scale what works. Make cities better, faster. appeared first on Gray Area.

Support Gray Area this year by volunteering this Saturday, December 15th…..

Beginning tomorrow, 50 creative coders will inhabit Gray Area Foundation For The Arts to create a flash exhibit on the theme of ‘Lethal Software’. New art and projects created during the hack will be on display during Gray Area’s fundraiser and holiday party on Saturday! Creating an exhibit in less than 3 days takes an army and we need your help! We have plenty of 4 hour shifts, so please share this with friends.

Review the shifts below and please respond to volunteer@gaffta.org with your selected shift(s) to let us know if are available to help us celebrate!

Open Volunteer Shifts for Art Hack Day

Setup team shifts (helping us to set up the exhibit)
2 people to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 12:30pm to 4:30pm
2 people to volunteer a 3 hour shift from 4:30pm to 7:30pm
If anyone would be open to help for 7 hours from 12:30pm – 7:30pm please let us know!

Greeters/door people (helping us to greet people and collect donations)
2 people to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 6pm to 10pm
2 people to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 10pm to 2am

General event assistance (helping us to keep order during the event!)
2 people to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 6pm to 10pm
2 people to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 10pm to 2am

Lobby Guard (directing people away from neighboring offices)
1 person to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 6pm to 10pm
1 person to volunteer a 4 hour shift from 10pm to 2am

Thanks in advance and see you on Saturday!

The post Volunteers needed for our Art Hack Exhibition this Saturday! appeared first on Gray Area.

Artists, Students, Patrons, Friends!

Help us reach our goal of $500,000 by December 31, 2012 and donate $50- $500 today.

Thanks to you, our amazing community of designers, coders, makers, and innovators, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is considered the leader at the intersection of art + technology + society. We have grown 325% in the past four years and our local programs are scaling internationally! We continue to keep our class costs low, our public programs free, and our research the first of its kind so that our mission stays true: We apply digital art and technology to create positive social impact.

We need your support, to ensure we continue to grow as an organization. Our growth is outpacing our budget and our small staff is working around the clock to code, connect, support, and raise funds for all of our groundbreaking programs. Tuition and ticket sales cover less than 25% of our operating budget, and institutional support can rarely be applied to our operating costs. We rely on the support of our community to keep our lights on, staff paid, and projects awesome.

Your donation directly supports the creative application of technology to explore and experiment with new solutions to social challenges- like scaling the Urban Prototyping Festival around the world, teaching the NEWEST open-source software to artists and technologists, producing the coolest hackathons, A/V events, and supporting high-impact digital projects.

The post This December, help us meet our 2012 budget goal! appeared first on Gray Area.