Now Amber and Kelly Dobson are running a four-week g-speak workshop as part of the Digital+Media course Outer Space Inner Space, as Kwin writes at oblong.com.

Luis is organizing an effort to archive Openstudio drawings through Flickr. The Openstudio Flickr group is a place for folks to share drawings and other memorabilia:

Running from 2005 – 2008, Openstudio was an experiment in creativity, collaboration & virtual economics created by the Physical Language Workshop led by John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab. Participants created and sold artwork in an online marketplace using a virtual currency.

More than a thousand participants created and traded art in Openstudio. This group will function as a space to archive and share the content that former Openstudio users backed up before the site went down.

It’s fun to see that people have saved so many of their illustrations, and the hundreds of profile pages that Kyle has uploaded. I have a small collection of images, and hopefully you do, too! Thanks to Luis for getting this effort started!

Oblong Industries unveiled TAMPER at Sundance Film Fesitval this year as part of the New Frontier exhibition in the heart of snowy Park City. Visitors to the site used their hands and gestured to create whimsical digital video collages (as in the video above). Some of those collages — along with footage of their creation — are up on our YouTube Channel.

Happy holidays!! I made an interactive greeting card for the new year … it animates some snowflakes made out of letters when you wiggle around the mouse. The source is written in Processing.

It feels good to write some code after a semester of mostly print-based work. I hope I can make some more time for work like this in 2009.

The Oblong Industries website is now live! Hello, future.

In Type I, we’ve been making a bunch of collages with found type, exploring how to place words on a page, and just this week started a project with the letter press! No pictures of the letter press project yet (I’m printing tomorrow) but these are a few of the collages I’ve made for the class.

Form and Communication is our big studio class. We have workshops once a week with the undergrads, where we work with a different design concept every three weeks. We also get a chance to meet a lot of the RISD faculty in Graphic Design because every workshop is taught by a different instructor. John Caserta teaches a special graduate student section of this class, where, among other things, we have weekly assignments taking photos to illustrate words.

More (images) to come.

We are excited to announce the 2008 Spring term Monday Nights@VAP entitled “Zones of Emergency” which bring together practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and fields to examine the scale and complexity of catastrophe and disaster scenarios through lectures and panel discussions. Lectures and panel discussions will range from the philosophical and cultural understandings of the emergency to practical “on the ground” operating organizations to current use of networked technology examining its own breakdown. This lecture series is co-organized by Ute Meta Bauer (Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program), Jae Rhim Lee, and Amber Frid-Jimenez.

In tonight’s lecture, artist Alfredo Jaar will present a selection of works that focus on his practice in zones of emergency like Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide (1994 -2000). Kayvan Zainabadi, former president of Amnesty International at MIT, will speak about his experience at MIT working with Amnesty on crisis in Darfur.

The lecture is open to the public, so if you’re in the Boston area feel free to drop by! If not, you can catch tonight’s lecture (and future lectures) on our video blog at http://www.zonesofemergency.net/.

Last night I presented some highlights from Openstudio at Pecha Kucha Boston #3. I had never been to a Pecha Kucha Night before, but really enjoyed the fast-paced format. Each speaker showed 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide, sharing their art/design work and/or philosophy. If you’re curious, here’s a PDF of my slides, and the organizers will be posting more pictures from the event in the Pecha Kucha Boston Flickr group.

Putting together the presentation for the slideshow made me a little nostalgic about being in the Openstudio community. It was fun to revisit the project and look at some of the creative things people did with it.