I hope you are all enjoying an awesome break and looking forward to 2012, I know I am!

2012 is going to bring in a slew of awesome conferences, lectures and hackathon to attend. As I am putting together our Hackdays hackathon schedule for 2012 I realized I have not told you all about Art Science Camp and since I am helping Jen Dodd (the managing director of Subtle Technologies) organize it, it is about time to remedy that.

Art Science Camp is an unconference organized co-presented by Hart House and Subtle Technologies (disclosure: I joined Subtle Technologies’ board). Every year Subtle Technologies brings us the Subtle Festival. For 15 years the Festival has been bringing people together to promote wonder, incite creativity and spark innovation across disciplines. The Subtle symposium, performances, workshops, screenings, exhibitions and networking sessions provide a forum to explore ideas and pose questions at the intersection of art, science and technology. I am sure you will want to attend next year’s festival! But in the meantime, join us for Art Science Camp.

So what is Art Science Camp: It is an Art, Science and Technology unconference. A two day conference which will peek your curiosity and broaden your interest by intertwining art, science and technology in a series of peer presentations.

Art Science Camp starts on Friday February 3rd, 2012 at 7 PM and gathers artists, scientists, students, engineers, architects, designers and geeks. The Friday evening party is the venue for collaboratively creating a program of events to take place the next day. Everyone is encouraged to bring a crazy idea, a work in progress, or a vital topic for discussion, and to organize a session around it. Anyone interested a presentation or a discussion can claim a presentation spot on the schedule.

Last year, the first Art Science Camp included presentations by:
Eric Boyd – wearable electronics designer, Toronto Hacklab leader

Dan Falk – Knight Science Journalism fellow, popular science author

Michael Nielsen - quantum computation pioneer and author.

Like last year, Art Science Camp is going to aim at bringing together people who would not normally have conversations with each other, and create a space for surprising and serendipitous connections.

The first Art Science Camp last year sold out, and this year it is about to sell out, so if you are interested in getting a ticket, don’t delay. Registration is open and we have close to 100 attendees already.

We are also looking for sponsors to make this year’s unconference unforgettable. If you can land a hand, help with sponsorships, sponsor lunch, dinner or drinks, please get in touch. An awesome sponsorship which helps defray the cost of this volunteer event starts at $250.
If you have any questions about sponsorships or how you could lend a hand, get in touch.

•  Art Science Camp (#artscicamp)
• Date: Friday February 3rd at 7 PM to – Saturday Feb 4th at 6 PM
• Location: University of Toronto, Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle
• Registration: Open
• Cost: $10.00
• Available for sponsorship

[Photograph (c) Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center]

[...] Petit was a teenager in Paris browsing magazines in a dentist’s office when he saw a rendering of the then-unbuilt World Trade Center. He was electrified. He was already an obsessed magician, juggler, and high wire artist. To an aspiring tightrope walker, the idea of two 110-story towers, side by side, suggested only one thing. Petit drew a line between the image of the two towers. All that remained now was the execution.

Making the walk happen took years of planning. Petit sums up his own attitude with characteristic aplomb: “It’s impossible, that’s for sure. So let’s start working.” He moved to New York and began visiting the construction site, at one point obtaining access to the top of the towers by posing as a French journalist. He made drawings and took photographs. Returning home, he built a full sized model of the WTC roofs in the French countryside to practice the walk. Getting all the necessary equipment up to the tops of the towers was not a one-man job. He recruited a group of confederates, a colorful multinational troupe who offer conflicting present-day memories throughout the film, and who each played a different role in what they privately called the coup. The plan was not just bold but actually rather insane: their solution for the hardest part of the whole scheme, for instance, getting the wire from one tower to the other, a span of nearly 200 feet, was to use a bow and arrow. It worked. Amazingly, it all worked.

Love Philippe Petit! He would fit right in in a startup!

[the eagle] sense of sight is better than every other creatures’ (rhinoceri excluded) and its sense of fashion is better than, though very similar to, karl lagerfeld’s.

(c) Matthew Andrews

Patrick was inspired by our Multicolr search to build a little prototype: this prototype basically takes a stream from a webcam and picks out the dominant colours and passes them through our Multicolr Search to find photographs that match those colours. Very, very neat and you can view it here:

Colrfindr from Patrick Dinnen on Vimeo.

Geek paradise!

Paula: curious [about] how famous you already are ) try TinyEye.

kkart: This thing is INCREDIBLE!
Oh yes, we agree. TinEye is incredible!

evile33: That thing blows me away…I got approved and got the FF extension…it’s awesome!

The Firefox extension we developed is awesome of course. Allows you to search for any image you find on the web with a single click so if you are a TinEye user, don’t go home without installing it.

We will get back to work at the Ideeplex and make TinEye better! We are working on an extension for IE so that should be out there soon!

This lady’s hair brought amazing happiness and cheerfulness to me during one of my Smithsonian Museum visits. It had me smiling all week practically. She was viewing the photography exhibit. I imagine her getting up in the morning and taking the time to create this look and I can’t help but think that the world around her just comes to a total stop until it is done and that nothing around really matters…Perhaps a recipe for happiness, certainly a recipe for making time stop.

From sunset at 7:03 pm on Saturday, September 29, to sunrise at 7:14 am on Sunday, September 30, 2007, Toronto will be bustling with activity as thousands experience a full night of contemporary art and performance in three zones across the city.

I will be focusing on Zone C - the area near my home and independent projects.