High School, Gold Keys and a ‘Banksy’

This has been the week of brilliant high school students. On Thursday we held our first workshop with students at the Urban Assembly Harbor School on Governors Island. In the Oyster City themed workshops, spearheaded by my terrific collaborator Meredith Drum, we are working with students to design 3D, virtual “monuments” to mark sites on the island that we might add to the treasure hunt node of Oyster City. The super bright and engaged on-the-ground experts who come to the island every day to study ocean engineering, scientific diving, aquaculture and other projects centered around marine stewardship are a pleasure to work with. A special thanks goes to Sam Janis, who has helped us organized the after-school workshops and who is deeply involved in the Billion Oyster Project .

On Friday I was a juror for the digital art category of the Scholastic National Art and Writing Awards. Top award winners get a gold key and artists and writers like Andy Warhol and Truman Capote got their start with early accolades from Scholastic. Since we finished a little early I sat in on some of the “Future New” panel and was truly blown away by the interdisciplinary work high school students are doing. Conceptual performance video, mapping tap water sample collection in different parts of San Francisco, an algorithmic system that generates bright abstract animations, a beautiful, intricate interactive shape game inspired by oragami and realized with a 3D printer and elegant string installation in public space drawing attention to spaces where people live on the street were only a handful of the amazing projects.

Afterwards I bought a fake Banksy on the street from a vendor in Soho, just to remind myself to keep it light.