TEDxPhilly

Temple Performing Arts Center is a stunner. Ever been? We’re thrilled to be in this inspiring space for TEDxPhilly: The City on Tuesday, November 8. Over 25 speakers and even more performers will take the stage to share with the audience some of the greatest challenges, innovations, concepts and realities that shape and are shaped by cities and their inhabitants.

All photos ©2010 Anne Todd

New York was planning to tear down the High Line, an abandoned elevated railroad in Manhattan, when Robert Hammond and a few friends suggested: Why not make it a park? He shares how it happened in this tale of local cultural activism.

Lilium Urbanus is an amazingly beautiful animated short by Anca Risca and Joji Tsuruga which ilustrates that all great things, even cities, start small and often in the most unexpected of ways.

 
 
This is what the creators had to say to the folks over at Scientific America about the making of the film:

We embraced the idea of urban growth and saw it as something uncontrollable, having a mind of its own. Like a growing flower, a small town constructs larger buildings and becomes a flourishing city with skyscrapers for leaves, airport runways for petals, and airplanes for seeds. Our goal was to show that a city is like a living being, constantly growing, changing, and spreading.

Augmented Reality is changing the way we interact with our surroundings, from geolocated public art exhibitions to interactive gaming applications, our perspective of the world around us is a combination of people and places, concepts and interactions. Augmented Reality is moving into its next phase with some projects aiming to change how we see the city around us by bridging the physical and the virtual, creating new urban landscapes in the process.

On October 15th, Re:Activism at ICA will turn Philadelphia’s history of local protests, demonstrations, and other sites of social activism into an interactive game using cell phones and SMS, inviting participants to “play their city”. All necessary game and transportation materials will be provided, but at least one member of each team will need a smart phone. The game will conclude with a pizza party/wrap up session at Kelly Writers House. For more information & to register to participate, check out the Eventbrite page.

Mechanics of Place is a collaborative art project by Hana Iverson and Sarah Drury focused on creative urban engagement. Participants contribute adding their audio, video and images through a Mobile Augmented Reality platform, co creating experiences that bridge the physical and virtual. This process creates an expanding collection of AR poems which are then geotagged in specific locations around the world.

Reconfiguring Site: New approaches to Public Art and Architecture is a six-week residency program at The School of Visual Arts that serves as an innovative model for interdisciplinary approaches to public art, delving into site-specific aspects and intrinsic elements of creating art in an urban setting: scale, history, social meaning and formal aesthetics. “Crossing the boundaries into architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, new media technologies and other arenas, the revitalization of public art has become a global trend, as more sensitivity to the nuance of site is increasingly valued.”