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Projects
The projects below represent my life since 2006. Purdue CIA's mission captures the unity of these seemingly disparate projects:
To live deliberately and among the impassioned, to feel the miraculous and be humbled by the mystery. Playfully spreading joie de vivre we enliven public space and cherish the following:
- Helping others live consciously
- Creating windows out of normalcy
- Expressing enormity and
- Spreading smiles with innocent tomfoolery
Six Degrees of Awesome
Who are the most awesome people in Indianapolis? What drives them? I'll find out in a new experiment using the idea of six degrees of separation. Along the way I'll record inspiring interviews with the city's most vibrant people. (more)
Nonsense Worshipping Flashmob
We tossed ideas around, and our minds sped up. Somebody said we should do a flashmob. Another person said, "make it absurd - worship something big!" (more)
Digital Literacy Contest
Libraries host this contest to engage their patrons and promote their resources. Patrons compete to find information online and in their electronic resources. Customers include universities across the U.S. and Canada such as Cornell, Brown and Northwestern. (more)
Digital Democracy Contest
This is free game teachers can use in class. The contest helps students navigate government information on sites like OpenSecrets and OpenCongress. It's the result of a MacArthur Foundation Young Innovator award and a collaboration with the Sunlight Foundation. (more)
Global Networked-Intelligence Contests
We are outsourcing functions of our brains to technology. Calculators. GPS units. Cell phones remembering hundreds phone numbers, and Facebook remembering our friends' birthdays so we don't have to.
I created GNIC with friends to explore this fact. What’s relevant now is how well you use the Internet as a mental prosthetic - how well you can use it to amplify the power of your mind. We call this "networked-intelligence," and we create competitions in which people use the internet as an extension of their brain.
Why? As technological changes accelerate large groups of people are left behind. Others are super-empowered which threatens our democracy. We use our contests to find the brightest of our generation. Then we spread their insights (with our blog, a primer on digital literacy, workshops, etc.) to help maintain a (relative) equality of skills. (more)
Purdue Collective of Installation Artists
Purdue CIA was a collective of 150+ people who altered public space. Our mission was:
"We wish to live deliberately and among the impassioned, to feel the miraculous and be humbled by the mystery. Playfully spreading joie de vivre we enliven public space and cherish the following:
1,100 Sticks of Sidewalk Chalk
We passed out sidewalk chalk with the following message, "Create! Interact with life! The world is your audience. Turn ground into message board. Communicate with strangers." (more)
Balloon Tower
Some friends and I wanted to induce awe by pointing to the immensity of the sky above us-- so we created a gigantic tower of helium balloons. (more)
Infinity Arrow
This was another project to induce awe by pointing to the immensity of the sky above us (see also the Balloon Tower project). (more)
