Deepfake autofiction, space mosaic, ancient snack bars

Creativity in action by the Blackbird Foundation - March 2022

Welcome, and thank you once again for being here. Meta is the Blackbird Foundation’s monthly newsletter exploring creativity. You may have noticed it’s been more than a month since our last one: small team, big dreams.

This month, we’re continuing our series of Creativity in Action, where we showcase examples of creativity (in people and projects) we find around the place. The purpose of this email is to offer a dose of inspiration for your week!

Before we dive in, you should know that we’ve launched Season 2 of our Protostars grants for passion projects. Poetry, robots, community gardens, code… if you’re passionate about it, you’re eligible—more info over on our website.

Creative People in Action

• Sophia’s animation creates tutorials showing how she makes her drawings and stop motion animations!

  

• The Sacramento History Museum has a dedicated Tiktok channel showcasing tidbits of the past for the whole world to see, including the printing press! 

  

• Max Randolph is a blacksmith artist, showing you the behind the scenes of his well-honed craft.

  

Creative Projects in Action

• An enormous mosaic spanning 1250 hours of exposure time captures the Milky Way in incredible detail. There are nearly 20 million visible stars in the expanse!

• Duckietown: where self-driving cars meet rubber ducks. The class’s goal was to create a fleet of 50 duckie-adorned robo-taxis that can navigate roads with a single onboard camera and no pre-programmed maps. 

• Amor Cringe: “Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created to be "as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.”

• An ancient snack bar lined with elaborate frescoes opens in Pompeii.

Explore your curiosity 

• “Why you’re not doing creative work” from Superorganisers.

• Sydney Opera House has just updated its program in the new Center for Creativity. 

• “The future is not only useless, but it’s also expensive” from Gawker. This one is a scathing critique of NFTs.

• Dropout DAO - “Creating the first decentralised university for a community of risk-takers, dreamers, and builders who thrive outside the classroom.”

• “How Architecture could help us adapt to the pandemic” from NYT via Why Is This Interesting.