Users subscribe to penultimate via sms and receive the last line written in the collective story, they can then sms their contribution to complete the next part of the story.

StatueMod.org is a comprehensive site that aims to give the Institute for Statue Modification a home on the Internet. Through the website the Institute can better provide resources to citizens across the country interested in statue modification as a revolutionary practice. What’s more, the website serves as a place for participation. In addition to learning about statue modifications in recent history, people can search and contribute to an open catalogue of statues across the United States today in need of modification, and imagine new possible statues for tomorrow.

The Institute for Statue Modification is dedicated to statue modification and its applications for revolutionary change. The Institute aims to investigate where popular opinion and the decorative elements of the urban landscape diverge. At the foundation of this investigation are several key questions: Whom do we choose to monumentalize and why? How do we recontextualize statues, monuments, and other fixtures in urban space when cultural attitudes toward history change? How can we collaboratively enact this process of recontextualization? How does shifting the balance of power in statue and monument representation translate to a political shift in power?

StatueMod.org was created to help the Institute for Statue Modification achieve its mission. The website is divided into three sections. The first is a research center where people can read and submit articles and papers about statue modification. The research center also serves as a news source for statue modification related current events. The second is a citizen-contributed open catalogue called the StatueWiki, where people can add or edit entries of statues in need of modification. The third is the StatueLabs, a place to explore ideas for modified or new statues.

In my project, aimed at teenage girls, I build a series of animated movies for mobile phones. The movies address issues that women in this age face. Body image, self-knowledge and sexuality. The users download a flash file or receive it via MMS. They need to be 4 players, each of them having a quarter of the full image on their screen. When four girls hold their mobile phones up simultaneously they can watch the whole piece together. Their separate screens function as one larger screen synchronized via bluetooth. It involves the challenge to bring a group together and encourages dialog amongst the users. At the end of each animation they are offered to choose between two options of how the story will go on. Right after voting for the next part they continue watching the clip on their phone.

Again, each of them has only one part of the animation, they have to find the right positioning of the phones similar to a puzzle. They have to stand close and find the right angle between the phones in order to see the complete animation. The sound of each mobile phone speaker will contribute differently to the soundscape of the animation. The shape of the phones aligning creates a setting that encourages conversation.
The narration\’s content evolves from the adventures of a girl called “Lu”, the heroine of the story, dealing with specific challenges she is confronted with. Everytime she has to take a hard decision the users have to vote on what she should do. Her story will be told in several episodes.

The United States incarcerates criminals at a higher rate and in greater volume than any country in the world. One in 100 Americans are currently behind bars, a large number of whom are non-violent offenders. Two of the greatest factors in predicting whether an inmate will return to prison are education and literacy–and yet the penal system uses isolation as its greatest tool for punishment, essentially guaranteeing a high rate of recidivism. Meanwhile, exorbitant costs for dialing in and out of prison cut inmates off from their tenuous connection to society and the world. How can we use technology to put inmates back in contact with the world, so they will be less isolated, more socially active, and ultimately less likely to return to prison?

The Neighborhood Network Watch looks to critique the oblique practices of handling and processing of data and information that is used to disseminate fear and perpetuate hegemonic rule, by entities such as the Department of Homeland Security, and to reveal the malleable nature of data and information. The Neighborhood Network Watch actively engages in the manipulation and reformation of data in order to bring these issues to the forefront as well as the existing security implications of public networks. The group operates under the pretense of being a community organization that carries out domestic eavesdropping operations on public networks with the backing of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Packet sniffing is employed to capture data that may include emails, instant messages, and websites visited. This data that is collected is then analyzed, using keyword matching and contextual learning, to determine if the data contains words known to pose potential threats to national and communal security. Statistics are then produced to determine the amount of potentially dangerous network traffic that may be hidden within the normal network traffic. Color coded advisories are then issued based off of these statistics, liken to the National Threat Advisory System, to the networks that are then mapped geographically and segmented into regions to establish trends. These findings are then disseminated via video public service announcements, the Neighborhood Network Watch website, and in public performance presentations.

There is a subset of workers in the “creative class” who focus on creating new unique properties in the arts, film, gaming, fashion or advertising sectors. Creative thinking allows them to thrive. I think technology can assist these creative workforces in their thinking processes. I want to create a user-generated “concept association” database specifically for the advertising creative developer that requires each user to contribute their own unique creative associations to the database before they can use the system to help them meet their own creative needs. When fully functional, the system will grow in creative knowledge as it’s used to assist in creative thinking.

Social Heroes is a ubiquitous game constructed as an API for social interactions. As formal systems of rules, games make it possible for us to learn how they work and to predict the outcomes of our interactions with them. This is unlike the real world, which has far too many variables and unknown rules, and it\’s part of what makes games fun. We learn to do this by constantly evaluating the game state, which is a snapshot of what\’s going on in a game at any given time. It turns out that we treat everything in the real world in a similar way, constantly revising our mental models of how they work and what\’s going to happen next. We mostly don\’t think about these models explicitly; it\’s just how our brains evolved to see the world. There are, however, some areas where we are more conscious of these models because, evolutionarily, it became important to keep them front-of-mind. One of these areas is our assessment of social situations, which is a critical evolutionary development for humans – we are phenomenally good at assessing our relationships with other people. Social Heroes attempts to line up our mental simulation of games with our implicit modeling of social situations by constructing a game about relational identity on top of our real world social interactions.

Project based learning creatively incorporates all areas of study, both academically and artistically, into one collaborative, comprehensive project that fosters teamwork. The production of a claymation movie, falls under the umbrella of project based learning. Throughout the claymation process, children learn to: collaborate with one another, perform research, build authentic sets, design and create clothing, write scripts, complete storyboards, play music and/or select soundtracks, build and animate armature figures, organize and plan a project and complete an entire production cycle.

ClaymationForCurriculum is a blog that instructs teachers on both how to create a claymation film and how to incorporate claymation filmmaking into academic curriculum. The blog provides teachers with a detailed resource for implementation of this project and also provides a space for teachers to network and share.

The promise of a truly participatory democracy has never been clearer than digital media has made it today. The unique distributive nature of the Internet provides a platform that has the potential deliver on this promise by facilitating better group action at lower cost, thereby encouraging actual participation in democracy. There have been many meaningful developments in bringing better information and actions to citizens looking to use digital networks to serve their political needs, but many useful tools and databases remain proprietary and costly while others remain too general or ineffective for political action.

Cause Caller is a specific tool designed to address the needs of a distributed, participatory democracy. It is built upon fully extensible components including Semantic Media Wiki, Asterisk PBX and Amazon\’s Elastic Computing Cloud. The goal of the project is two fold: one, to develop a useful application demonstrating a particular and unique use of Asterisk, and two, to nurture a repository of information about political representatives that is free, editable, and reusable.