Art, Tech & The City

This month we're taking a look at the various ways technology and the arts are informing our relationship to the cities we live in. From collaborative storytelling projects, to creative data visualizations, to location-based projects, these fields intersect over and over again and entwine to give us new ways of experiencing and understanding our urban lives.

Schedule:

7:00pm - Doors

7:20-8:30pm - Presentations

8:30-9:30pm - Informal networking over beer, wine and snacks

Food and Drinks are being generously provided by our host, Google Places!

Speakers:

Esther Brown - http://google.com/places

City Atlas - http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/

Local Projects - http://localprojects.net/

Alexander Chen - mta.me (http://mta.me/)

Festival of Ideas - http://www.festivalofideasnyc.com/

About the Venue/Sponsor:

Find, review and share the places you know on Google to discover new ones you'll love. How? Via Google Places, Google's online database of businesses listings (i.e. restaurants, hotels, bars). There are more than 50 million Place pages, which pull together information from Google and various sources across the web (contact information, photos, and reviews from Google users). You can find these relevant pages when you search on Google, Google Maps, Google Places or via the Google Places app (for Android (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhSGvi6q6i4) or iPhone) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22a-UKTeng8&feature=relmfu) . To learn more, visit http://google.com/places or follow us on Twitter @GoogleNYC (http://twitter.com/googlenyc) .

P.S. You will also be invited to join a Google Places reviewing challenge as a follow-up to the Meetup. Entrants will be given the opportunity to win brunch for 8 at one of the NYC's top brunch spots! Stay tuned for details!

Speaker Bios:

City Atlas is an innovative bottom-up sustainability plan that allows average citizens (and some experts, of course) to have a platform to design and share sustainability initiatives for New York City. It will include both information about the city's past environmental transformations, and a projection of its potential future, while showcasing the innovation of New Yorkers today. We hope it is a useful tool to help people think about life in the future and about the effects of choices we make now.

Ian Curry is the Director of Interaction Design at Local Projects, and teaches a course on interaction design for public space in SVA's MFA Interaction Design program. Local Projects were the interaction designers for StoryCorps, a nationwide initiative to oral histories, and are the co-lead designers for the National 9/11 Museum at ground zero. Other current projects range from an online civic engagement platform for the NYC Mayor's office, to an augmented reality learning center within an art museum. Ian previously worked with frog Design, where he helped create websites, large-scale interactive displays, product UI, and iTV interfaces for clients including MTV, BBC, Hewlett-Packard, IPC, and Microsoft. Ian has also worked on interactive projects for Eyebeam R&D, and the United Nations.

Alexander Chen is living in Brooklyn, working at Google Creative Lab. He has released albums under the names Boy in Static and The Consulate General. In 2002, he created Sonata for the Unaware, a piece which generated music from video footage of Philadelphia subway commuters. In 2011, he launched www.mta.me (http://www.mta.me/) , which turned the New York subway system into a string instrument. He also recently created the Les Paul doodle with a team at Google.

Annie Wachnicki is Senior Marketing Manager at the New Museum. Annie has been involved in the Museum’s programs since 2006, from the opening of their new building at 235 Bowery to the inaugural Festival of Ideas for the New City. She launched and continues to manage the Museum’s social media initiatives, including Facebook and Twitter.