The year of PANTONE 17-1463, Tangerine Tango.
The year of the bee in the Netherlands.
The year of the Water Dragon.
The year of Co-operatives.
The Centenary of the birth of Alan Turing.
The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
The European year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations.
The Walloon year of Gastronomy.
The Australian year of the Farmer.
Well, where to start when writing a tribute to this multitalented, brainy, considerate, funny, knows-where-all-the-coolest-stuff-is, amazing and strategic-thinking woman.
Hmm. Guess that list of adjectives was a tip of a tip of the iceberg, but one has to start somewhere.
I first met Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino in Singapore, at a policy summit on digital technologies and the arts. I was jetlagged like I had never been before and staying awake in the 100% humidity was mostly a feat of will. Then Alex started speaking and I sat straight up, captivated by her presentation on how she founded the design studio Tinker! in London and how she was evangelizing for open hardware all over the world. I have to meet this woman, I thought to myself. Fortunately, I did, and a few years later she’s now a partner at Really Interesting Group, working on high profile stuff for Mozilla, and working on a fascinating project about emotional robots for a major European Union funded research group. I also invited her to share her expertise on the Internet of Things and speculative design at my latest Blowup event at V2_. You can read her text, “Is this thing on? Identity, robots, and spying through everyday objects” in the free, downloadable e-Book that accompanied the event.
So yes, she’s a heavy-hitter and every time you chat with her, you’ll learn something. Chances are you’ll laugh, too. Her dry sense of humour comes out in many of her design projects, including this one, Curious Scarves, a way of advertising your relationship status and which gender you are seeking, because “it’s hard being single in the big city”:
Ada Lovelace Day or not, it’s just high time I wrote a little tribute to Alex, my friend and colleague, who is basically number one on my speed dial** when I want to know what’s what in the worlds of design, internet of things, robots, and future thinking.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. This is my contribution for 2011.
My previous contributions were:
2010: About Eva Schindling
2009: A little story about Anab Jain
** – OK, she’s not really on my speed dial, because I hate the telephone. (I really hate the phone… don’t call me. Please.) We need some kind of new way of expressing the symbolism of speed dial, but for email and Twitter DMs and whatnot. If you think of/invent/know of a term like this, lemme know.
I have been running Curating.info as a free resource for curators of contemporary art since 2006. It was borne out of a “why not” attitude towards sharing and openness, since I was compiling research on curating anyway. I also thought it would help me make my research more rigorous, as writing on this blog during my Master’s thesis did. A few years later and Curating.info is getting fan mail and picking up a lot of attention. Today I’m able to easily recruit four fantastic interns to share the burden and we have nearly 5000 fans on Facebook. The question was what to do next with this great platform. With thousands of people paying attention, what can you do and what should you do?
I had a vague idea that I’d like to create a Curating.info Scholarship, part funded by donations from the Curating.info community (that I had, thus far, never directly asked for any money) and could think of several good curatorial Master’s programmes that would benefit from a scholarship in place. I went to the IKT Congress in Luxembourg this year, and in the cavernous and highly atmospheric basement of the Casino Luxembourg, ended up chatting with Sally Tallant, Head of Programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Sally, who as it turned out knew and loved the site, listened as I tipsily described the nascent plan for the Curating.info Scholarship. “But why not do even more?” was her response. “Make it an experience in a gallery you love and trust, something where people can get real experience. There are already loads of scholarships out there.” Immediately I saw how right she was, and changed course accordingly. My first thought was to partner with the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, in part because it’s a great institution and a fellowship would fit with its ethos, and in part because its Director, Francis McKee, is both a visionary and a highly trustworthy person. Francis was onboard, and so it was born: the Curating.info Fellowship in collaboration with the CCA in Glasgow.
The Fellowship is a chance for an individual to conduct curatorial research and produce an exhibition at the CCA. The Fellow will work at the CCA four days per week over the six month fellowship, developing a curatorial project or body of curatorial research. Fellows will be paid a flat fee of £8,000. Ideal candidates for the Fellowship are emerging or mid-career curators who can demonstrate passion and fresh thinking in curating and writing about contemporary art, and who have a vision for what the role of the curator means today.
The deadline for applications is October 21, 2011. Applications will be judged by Francis McKee, Sally Tallant, and myself.
We’re really excited about it. I hope you will spread the word, contribute to the crowdfunding campaign, and apply to be our first Fellow.
Contribute to the crowdfunding campaign here.
Apply for the Fellowship here.
Tomorrow I have the pleasure of launching the series I have been working on in my capacity as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.
The name of the series, Blowup, was inspired not only by Antonioni’s film but by the notion that blowing an image up reveals detail; blowing an inflatable object up creates form; blowing something up explosively can be festive or threatening.
The first event in the series is entitled Wild Things, and is about art for animals to appreciate, inhabit, or interact with. Three incredible speakers: Amy Youngs (US), Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL), and Elio Caccavale (IT/UK), plus one cat: Barbie (NL), will be presenting over the course of the evening.
If you are anywhere in the Benelux region, you should rush to V2_ tomorrow night (July 7) and get there by 8 PM to enjoy the evening. For most readers, you are far enough away that I cordially invite you to tune in via webstream. V2_’s streams are really excellent, I would almost dare to say it’s even better than being there, because we use multiple cameras and the camera operators are so good. You will miss out on the custom cocktail, the “Wild Zebra”, but you can attempt to replicate this at home by making a White Russian and trying to make chocolate stripes on the side of your glass. Ya, I know — tricky. Just make White Russians and visualise the stripes. You can even participate in the online chatter by Tweeting about the programme using the hashtag #v2_!
So if you are nearby, see you there; and if not, get comfy in front of your computer, and tune in to: http://live.v2.nl tomorrow, July 7, at 8PM Central European Summer Time.
Also — every Blowup event will have an e-Book reader released with it. Keep an eye out, I will amend this post with the download URL for this, the first Blowup reader!