Just back from a few days in Berlin, where, among many other things, I had a chance to get together with Aram Bartholl to talk about his SPEED SHOW project, a beautifully simple initiative to turn your local internet cafe into a digital art show.

As Aram describes in his SPEED SHOW manifest:

“Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)”

I love the simplicity and DIY nature of SPEED SHOW, done in five easy steps:

1. Find Internet Cafe. Rent time on all the computers for the evening.

2. Select work to show on standard browsers. Create gallery plan.

3. Invite people.

4. Enjoy the show.

5. Make Internet Cafe owners incredibly proud and happy.

For a full description of the project and more video and photos, visit the project site here.

Photos by Kuc, top video grab from Aram’s video on project site.

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For most people with even a passing interest in innovative urban problem-solving, the words Jaime Lerner and Curitiba, Brazil will hold special reverence. Lerner is the urban planner and three-times mayor of Curitiba who transformed the once traffic-congested, economically and environmentally challenged city into one of the world’s most livable urban spaces. This Wednesday at the British Film Institute, London, a documentary exploring his innovative approaches for “transforming problems into solutions” in the city will be shown, and following the screening I will be joining Jaime Lerner on stage to discuss his approach and visionary techniques.

The talk will be hosted by Peter Jenkinson OBE, an exceptional individual himself for his work with creative solutions in the face of limited resources. For those of you in London Wednesday 4 November, please come join us at the BFI for this exceptional opportunity. More information on the evening can be found here. For those unable to attend, please watch the trailer above and go see the film as soon as you can. It is a game-changer for urban strategies.

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Discouraged by all the talk of economic crisis? Well, with this plugin enabled, your news will now be brimming with with tales of optimism:

The plugin is only available for Firefox, and is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish. It can be downloaded directly from the Firefox add-ons page here. (Of course, once you install the plugin, this post will make no sense whatsoever. Oh, the irony…)

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Google Creative Labs’ Creative Director Ji Lee emailed me the other day to tell me about Chrome Experiments, a new product Google Creative Labs has just launched. Now that I’ve had time to play with the site and many of the experiments, I have to report out that not only is it all good, but there’s also something particularly worthy about creative catalysts such as Chrome Experiments, as I’ll explain.

Chrome is, of course, a new open source web browser from Google. I’m a new tech addict, so when it first came out last year I fired up the old PC (the Mac version is “coming soon” says Ji), and after taking Chrome out for a ride, looking under the hood and kicking the tires, I dig Chrome.

Browsers are quickly becoming the OS of our computing lives. When I first log on early in the morning, I open the browser, work on projects with partners all over the world, email, chat, video conference, review designs and tweak images and documents, and never once leave my browser. It’s the platform for my work and global connectivity. And with Chrome Experiments, Google is extending it as a platform for creativity.

While Ji recommends “Browser Ball” and “Video Puzzle” as experiments to get things going, personally, I’d like to highlight the Monster experiment as a model of the Chrome Experiment’s creative potential. There are other experiments that are more dynamic and vibrant, but as Monster is a demonstration “of what can be done with browser web standards (without Flash)” it provides a window into another key element of creativity that is obsessing me at the moment: the creativity of constraints.

When you begin playing around with Monster, its functionality feels so much like you’re inside a Flash movie, run through the Flash plug-in. But this is straight-up Java, baby – toggle the background colour, rotate it, pan it, get right inside the creative process, with nothing but you, your keyboard, and the given functionality of the browser itself.

There’s a harmony here between experiments such as Monster, and many others within Chrome Experiments, that use only the given functionality of Java and browser standards, and the recent Wired feature Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity. From magazine design’s constraints of a fixed page size and its 2D platform, to designing album covers for minuscule display on digital gadgets, across the board, constraints have always been a defining aspect of creativity. Today, however, as the general zeitgeist and the financial collapse turns all thoughts to one of constraints, those creatives who look at constraints, standards and fixed limitations as catalysts for expanding creative dialogue instead of choke points are well placed for a long ride upward through the downward economic cycle.

I recommend spending some time with Chrome Experiments and viewing your browser not only as a functional app, but as a platform for creativity. And for those of you who want to dig a bit deeper into Google’s platform philosophy, I recommend the book What Would Google Do?

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The reason is that largely, the old model is still at work – huge, expensive institutions are being built as vehicles for regeneration and as catalysts for the ‘creative economy’, but with very little attention being paid to the integration of these institutions into the creative fibre of the city or indeed to the business plans for the years to come. In short: a lot of hardware, and very little software. This isn’t a sustainable approach for the long-term, nor wise in the short-term in light of the global financial slowdown. So my approach, for both good times and bad, is to look in the opposite direction:

Focus on the Micro-Entrepreneur

Famed entrepreneur Mark Cuban said a very interesting thing when asked what his advice would be to President Elect Obama in steering the US out of its financial turmoil:

“Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business…Entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. Talk to them.”

The same principles apply to cities and their cultural and creative strategies. This isn’t the time to be investing in the urban macro, when the urban micro, specifically, the urban micro-entrepreneurs, are collectively a far more valid and adaptive force for change and revival in this climate. They are the software that’s needed to run the city’s hardware.

A prime example of how this hardware and software can combine to support the micro-entrepreneur is Sao Paulo’s Endossa.

Endossa is a collaborative store which caters to craftspeople, designers, independent musicians, inventors, foodmakers, and a wide cross-section of creatives “who devote their time to tactile ideas and need assistance to ‘publish’ them.” The principles of Endossa are as follows:

• Rent empty shelf boxes to every micro-entrepreneur who wants some space to sell products, without asking for sales commission.
• Any product can be sold in Endossa from bottles of chilies to handmade notebooks and its time on the shelf depends on demand: high sales means high visibility.
• Create a micro-community of young entrepreneurs and curious people who visit Endossa to get fresh inspiration from the creative pieces inside the store.

In addition to its “real world” benefits, an interesting side effect of the store is its ability to cross-over with online culture.

As shown in A Cor do Brasil’s flickr photo above, people have begun to promote not only their work, but their physical positioning in Endossa online, promoting both their work and the store, and enabling a comments thread online that feeds back to the physical store. The integration with Web 2.0 philosophies is intentional, as Endossa explains:

“Endossa works more like blogger or digg than as a search engine. The store allows everyone to “publish” their products and then lets customers “sort and rank” them through sales… There´s an algorithm. We call it the ‘Every Purchase is an endorsement’ mechanism. Basically it compares the size and location of a rented space with its revenue, and decides if the space can be rented again by the same brand next month.”

Cementing Endossa as a model of a software sensibility within the Sao Paulo creative economy is the reality that within their retail system, “new modules are being added all the time, depending upon the necessities identified by the user.”

Endossa is an exceptional example of the Focus on the Micro-Entrepreneur strategy. Stay tuned or get in touch for more.

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