When the friendly folks at the New Music Centre Project  asked our team to participate in their latest fundraising efforts we responded with some seasonal enthusiasm. It is a sure sign that the holidays are upon us when you find yourself constructing local landmarks out of quantities of baked goods and sugar. This Edible Eddy project is a way to bring some funds and awareness to the New Music Centre's goal of restoring the beloved King Edward Hotel to former glories. It's going to be quite the comeback.

We are lucky to have Deeter Schurig on our team, who has studied architecture and has experience designing theatrical sets. He responded to this challenge as any good architect would and fired up the computer aided design software. The technology behind the construction doesn't end there either; the latest techniques in transferring pixels to icing were also employed to tell our story about the transformation of Calgary's arts and cultural landscape both then, now and tomorrow. 

The Eddy is not the only grand old king in our city. The other Eddy resides in South Calgary and is also undergoing a transformation. King Edward School, with the help of the Calgary Foundation, is on its way to becoming an arts incubator (here is an impressive fly through of the vision). To further infuse Dickens (see title), the ghost of Eddy(s) past and the ghost of Eddy(s) future have informed this gingerbread construction while the ghost of Eddy(s) present wants to bring you sweets while you support these projects.

We all want new Eddys for Christmas. You can support the New Music Center by donating online or by coming out to their fundraising event: The CORE ‘Twas the Night on November 30th.  Cantos will be debuting the top three Edible Eddys that night, you can vote live at the event on our Edible Eddy and enter to win a $250 Shopping Spree to The CORE. You can help us be one of the top three by voting for us through Cantos' Facebook campaign. 

Calgary’s newest performing arts hall is going to be a real Alberta beauty.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi was among the dignitaries on hand at Mount Royal University Tuesday for the sod-turning of the university’s new $73-million Bella Concert Hall and Conservatory.

The new venue, which the university anticipates will open in the fall of 2013, will provide the campus, and the entire city, with a state of the art performing arts venue and arts educational hub.  read article

Developers may just be drawing up designs for new condos in East Village, but city artists have already turned an existing EV building, the former Seafood Market, into a living, breathing, hub of the emerging neighbourhood.

The Seafood Market Studios, a CMLC initiative in partnership with Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA), opened its doors just last September. Today, the studios house 45 artists of all disciplines in all stages of their careers: there are playwrites and visual artists of every medium, emerging talents and well-established figures. It’s a microcosm of the East Village to come: varied, dense, friendly, creative...and very good at ping pong.

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Here is a moving video documenting Reg Knelsen's success via the arts, courtesy Primetime Alberta.

Watch Video

The observation deck and lobby of the Calgary Tower will soon be getting dressed up with the addition of art displays featuring local talent.

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Calgary Tower Art Partnership Details

...Terry Rock and the 2012 Cultural Capital of Canada Bid

We are one of the most youthful and educated cities in the world, with a great arts scene that is not hindered by the past. The art here is much more likely to be something that is about new creation, as opposed to something that was created before. We have a bit of irreverence for history.  So as much as the Western heritage is so ingrained here, there’s also a whole amount of work that we ignore. We just forge ahead.

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The 100 block of Seventh Avenue S.W has an opportunity to transform into a space devoted to arts and culture. 

It’s a one-block strip with a reputation for cultivating drug habits, criminal behaviour and discomfort for passersby.

But a local developer with a soft spot for restoring historic buildings thinks he can salvage the notorious 100 block of Seventh Avenue S.W. and its crumbling historic buildings by developing the area into a thriving arts and culture hot spot.

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What is Calgary Arts Development doing now? You can find out now on Twitter. The team here has started dishing out tasty tidbits of information via this micro-blogging platform.  If you are not familiar with the service, here's an introduction:

Twitter in Plain English Video

Our Twitter is grabbing all of the content appearing on CalgaryArtsDevelopment.com so you can follow us there to stay informed.  New classified advertisements posted on our website will go out through Twitter as well so you too can tweet to the Calgary Arts Development followers.

@CalgaryArtsDev

Richard Florida, who spoke on Monday as part of ACAD's Stirring Culture series, referred to culture using biological metaphors at least twice. Once talking about DNA components of culture and again drawing Darwin into the discussion. It's a apt analogy and one that seems to always be referenced sooner or later when trying to understand a system of meaning. There is much talk of memes on the internet which are ideas that get transmitted through culture that undergo Darwinian style natural selection and evolution. The Lol cats phenomenon is one of my favourite examples.

Biomimicry is a buzz word that you may have heard circling around the idea flowers recently. The concept of modeling after nature is often used a in scientific context. Using the design of termite mounds to create passive climate control in modern housing is a good example. This approach has worked very well with engineering endeavors and there is the added bonus that naturally occurring systems usually have some kind of built in sustainability. There is no reason that biological systems can't be used to understand any naturally occurring system of organization. Having sustainable, fully integrated cultural systems is becoming increasingly important. Ad hoc, organically forming systems tend to be more resilient and adaptable. What ways can we learn from nature in how we approach culture? Read more »

If you don't already use and love RSS we've created an option to turn pull into push but before you sign up to have yet another piece of bacn (it's like SPAM only you asked for it) delivered to you inbox, let me extol the virtues of RSS.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an information delivery method that all of your favourite websites employ.  In order to view this content you need aggregation software that will pull in all of this RSS data and will give you options to organize, search and read at your leisure.  This is why RSS is pull media; you have to fire up the aggregation choose which feeds you'll subscribe to.

Pull media is great when you've got time and inclination to search out information. Having information pushed towards you will more likely grab your attention. I signed up all the CADA staff for this email because we are all sometimes too busy to pull even the low hanging information fruits (I've also started bombing everyone with bacn from our project management software).

You can sign up for a daily email of the RSS feed for all of the new content that goes onto our site below (you can also use the user account subscription feature for more tailored emails):