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):

Memories are powerful. If you look at some current pop cultures trends it's easy to find evidence of the power of nostalgia. The fact that we have an orange Care Bear in the office is a good indicator. 80's revival has been in full swing for some time now and I've got my plaid shirts and doc martins on deck for a 90's grunge revisit. For many of us around the triple decade mark conversations often turn to the music, movies, and television we experienced when we were younger. Those of us who grew up in the 80's were really the first generation to grow up in such a media saturated environment and we can easily relate our media experience with just about anybody the same age in North America.  read more »

There is not so much an intersection where community, culture, technology, and geography meet up as there is a big traffic circle, the kind they have in Europe. In the middle of the traffic circle I imagine a Will Alsop-esque open concept building that has an outdoor amphitheater illuminated with projections of camp fires. People turn off, lock up their bicycles, park their electric cars and engage in enlightening ad hoc conversations, form organic groups to get things done, and generally engage in Wuffie based commerce (human capital for non-sci-fi nerds).  read more »

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If email is more your style, you can receive alerts email via subscriptions. Sign up for an account on the site, go into the My Account link and you'll find a subscriptions tab. In there you can specify what content you're interested in.

If you're disappointed that Calgary Arts Development doesn't have a cat blog, go here (lol).

If you look way down to the footer of this website you'll find a little icon with two 'c's in a circle. If you're not paying particular attention you may disregard this to be a typical copyright indication and think nothing more of it. That extra 'c' within the circle makes a whole lot of difference. It's there to encourage our visitors to take the content found on this site, copy it, distribute it, and transmit it in any way they see fit. More than that, we have no problem if our content is remixed, mashed-up, or otherwise reinterpreted into forms that we have not yet fathomed. There is the stipulation that attribution should be given, but other than that, content generated here is open to the public domain. Our Creative Commons license helps demonstrates our organization's value of transparency and community.  read more »

Today a new version of Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, was officially released. I've been using Ubuntu in both server and desktop environments at Calgary Arts Development for two years now and I can say from experience that the OS is robust, accessible, and just plain works (plus compiz-fusion is bling and how can you not like release names like 'Gutsy Gibbon').

As ICT Coordinator here I rely not only on Ubuntu, but on a whole host of open source projects. Yesterday I was handed a DV tape with the intention of publishing a video of our Art Spaces Investment Process Information Session. I'll trace the process with the open source software applied to the task:  read more »

If you've visited our site before you've probably already noticed that things are a little different. Besides the new look, we've upgraded our web application framework to version 5.1 of the excellent Drupal CMS, reintroduced the Creative Calgarian Journals, and have set up a system for classified ads.

If you haven't already, please sign up for an account on our site and you'll be able to post journal entries and classified ads as well as define subscriptions that will deliver site content to your email.

Please take a look around, kick the tires, and tell us what you think.

Last Night I had the pleasure of watching the thought provoking documentary Good Copy Bad Copy about the current state of copyright and culture (hop on BitTorrent and download the XviD: the film's creators want you to).  read more »

The danish filmmakers take a very global approach and interviewed Swedish pirates, Nigerian film producers, and Brazilian Tecno Brega artists. Not to mention famous folks like Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, and Laurence Lessig. (Speaking of Laurence Lessig, if you haven't read Free Culture yet, put it on your list; it's a free CC licensed download.)

"Google search frequency for "art" and "life" from 2004 to 2006 are plotted against each other on a search-volume graph where the number searches for each term is shown in relation to the number of searches done on Google during a given time period. The two graphs synchronize a surprising amount and are generally very close in volume, At least on the web, Art and Life imitate each other." By Caleb Larsen.

Which makes more sense to you: art imitating life or life imitating art? I'm going to go with a both/and answer.

via VVORK  read more »