Ready to have a sustainable money-making business that deeply serves the world and your life?
Learn more from Alexis Neely at http://www.alexismartinneely.com/
At FIGMENT, anything is possible!
“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” Had photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand been alive today, he might have found the ever-expanding creative realm of FIGMENT to be right outside his door. With events in seven cities this year, and more to come in 2013, FIGMENT is bringing art, creativity and collaborative culture ever closer to your doorstep, too. This weekend, expand your world at FIGMENT Boston on Rose Kennedy Greenway; and next weekend (yep, that’s in 10 days!) come stretch your boundaries on Governors Island at FIGMENT NYC. If writer Gilbert K. Chesterton was right when he said “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere,” FIGMENT invites you to step outside your door, draw that line… and then bend it, expand it, transform it, sing to it, write about it, dance around it, picture it and run with it. At FIGMENT, anything is possible!
(c) 2012 Dane Carney
Bring your project to FIGMENT NYC June 9-10!
Haven’t registered your project for FIGMENT, but still want to share your wondrous idea with the world? We invite you bring it to Governors Island on June 9-10! You can bring a game, an experiment, a request, a challenge, a guided meditation, a performance based on audience input, a sculpture that moves or responds, a heart-stopping technological innovation that changes the way we see the world… Anything that you can hand-carry onto the ferry, and that gets people working and playing and creating together. When you have something you want to share with the world, FIGMENT is the perfect place to start doing just that! For more information on bringing an (unregistered) project to FIGMENT NYC, please see these Artist FAQ and What to Bring pages.
(c) 2012 Dane Carney
June 2-3: FIGMENT Boston!
This weekend our second FIGMENT event of 2012 will transform Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway into a place where art, creativity, community, music and culture stretch the imagination, get you moving and make you dream! Official submissions are closed… but we still invite you to bring your projects to FIGMENT! Please note that any project that is not registered must be hand-carried, and will not be mapped, scheduled, or have access to power. But we invite everyone to bring their art projects, social experiments, games, toys, dancing feet, picnic lunches, friends, robots, creative energy, gnomes, unicorns, and anything else you might love and want to share with the world! So, what are you bringing? For more information on bringing your project to FIGMENT Boston, please see the Artist FAQ and What to Bringpages.
What: FIGMENT Boston 2012
When: Saturday, June 2, 11AM – 11PM / Sunday, June 3, 11AM – 6PM
Where: The Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston
Tickets: FREE!
(c) 2011 Eraj Asadi
Submit your project for FIGMENT DETROIT and DC
Did you know that Colon, Michigan, boasts the world’s largest manufacture of magic supplies? FIGMENT invites you to bring your creative wizardry to Michigan’s other magical city. You can still submit your enchanted idea to FIGMENT Detroit (July 21-22) on Belle Isle!Submissions for DETROIT close by 11:59PM ET on Friday June 15, 2012.
And why limit the magic to Michigan? Stretch the boundaries of the sublime and submit your fantastical project for FIGMENT Washington, D.C. (September 29) today! Submissions for DC close by 11:59PM ET on Wednesday August 15, 2012.
June 10: Superfront pavilion competition at FIGMENT NYC
On Sunday, June 10 Superfont will host a 2-hour design charrette for PUBLIC SUMMER: LIBRARY OF IMMEDIACY, in partnership with FIGMENT. On the day of the competition, participants will be handed a detailed brief for the LIBRARY OF IMMEDIACY, a semi-outdoor space to support a curated set of public activities on Governors Island. The selected team will have the opportunity to construct their design on Governors Island, in collaboration with SUPERFRONT and FIGMENT. To register, click here. Registration closes on June 8, 2012!
What: Superfront design charrette for PUBLIC SUMMER: LIBRARY OF IMMEDIACY
When: Sunday June 10, 2012, 11AM-1PM
Where: Location TBA
Registration fee: $5 per person
More information and to register: click here!
Join the FIGMENT Peace Parade on June 10
We are delighted to share, from the United States Peace Index for 2012, that within the U.S., the Northeast is found to be the most peaceful region! New York, alas, ranks only #31 on the list… Join The Peace Parade at FIGMENT NYC on June 10 and show this country that if peace can be realized in New York, it can be realized anywhere! Presented by Creation Nation (a project of the Barat Foundation) andPEACE MUSEUM NY, Peace Parade 2012 celebrates the power of art and community as peace building tools and supports the vision of Governors Island as a peaceful and public space for all.
What: FIGMENT NYC Peace Parade
When: Sunday, June 10, 2012 from 2PM
Where: FIGMENT Roving start point on Governors Island
Sign up: Right here!
Pre-Peace Parade WORKSHOP: On Monday June 4 from 3-9 PM at ABC NO RIO (156 Rivington Street between Suffolk & Clinton Sts.) special guest artist Antonio Alonso will be guiding us to make mop/masks for the Parade out of recycled materials.
(c) 2011 Anna Kadysheva
Support Projects for FIGMENT on Kickstarter!
FIGMENT’s Kickstarter “curated page” is up! Every day, more FIGMENT 2012 artists are presenting their project on Kickstarter in the hopes of getting funded and fully realize their abundant visions at FIGMENT this year. Check it out! On FIGMENT Kickstarter, we list allFIGMENT-related projects from all cities that are looking for funding on Kickstarter. To list your Kickstarter campaign for your FIGMENTproject on our curated page, email us at info@figmentproject.org.
To make a donation to any specific project or artist for FIGMENT 2012, visit http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/figment and help bring these amazingly creative ideas come to life!
(c) 2012 Dane Carney
Be a FIGMENT volunteer
Do you love FIGMENT? Always wanted to be part of the extraordinary group of visionaries who manage to make stages and shade structures out of wishes; those dreamers who manage to capture the spirit of FIGMENT in their pictures, articles and videos? There was a way to be part of the magic (oh, and the dogged, grinding, strangely uplifting physical labor) that makes FIGMENT happen: Sign up to be a volunteer for any upcoming FIGMENT events this year!
To volunteer for Boston, click here.
To volunteer for NYC, click here.
To volunteer for Detroit, click here.
To volunteer for DC, click here.
Are you spirited? Skilled? Adventurous? Fun-loving? Friendly? Then you have what it takes to be part of the Moxie Crew, FIGMENTNYC’s newest band of roving volunteers who will spread the spirit of FIGMENT during our NYC Weekend on Governors Island. To sign up for the Moxie Crew, visit the volunteer page on our website, and fill out a brief form.
Please Make a Donation to Support FIGMENT as we grow!
FIGMENT is able to exist and grow because of your support. Please make a tax-deductible contribution to FIGMENT, and support free participatory arts events and exhibitions that are open to everyone. You can give a single one-time donation, or sign up to give a contribution each month. You’ll be added to our new 2012 supporters list, and we’ll keep you informed about how your contribution is helping to create positive change in our communities. 
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FIGMENT catalyzes and celebrates an abundance of creativity and passion, challenging artists and our communities to find new ways to create, share, think, and dream. FIGMENT’s annual participatory arts event began in New York City in 2007 and has expanded to include events in Boston, Detroit, Washington, DC, and Jackson, Mississippi. In New York, FIGMENT hosts an annual summer-long exhibition on Governors Island that includes an interactive sculpture garden, an artist-designed minigolf course, and an architectural pavilion co-presented with ENYA and SEAoNY.
FIGMENT is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization entirely funded by grants and individual donations FIGMENT accepts no corporate sponsorship of any kind.FIGMENT is supported by public funds from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, as well as by the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. FIGMENT Boston is produced with support from the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, the designated stewards of the Rose Kennedy Greenway and site of FIGMENT Boston. FIGMENT Jackson is produced with support from the Greater Jackson Arts Council.
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Named “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award” by Metropolis Magazine, it attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.
Learn more @ http://challenge.bfi.org/
Be there for the most Unreasonable of initiations and culminations!
On June 15 at our 2012 Opening Reception, 25 entrepreneurs hailing from 16 countries will stand before the Boulder community and unveil their visions for defining progress in our time. 5 weeks later at the Unreasonable Climax, they’ll again take the stage before an audience of at least 800 people in Boulder and demonstrate how they’ve grown through a summer of working with 50 mentors and 25 investors before returning home with skills, resources, and connections to improve the reach and impact of their companies.
Why are we telling you this? To convince you that if you have plans on the nights of June 15 and July 21, cancel them. Join us and hear the stories of 25 entrepreneurs willing to do whatever it takes to take down some of the world’s greatest challenges. Here are a few of the entrepreneurs you’ll meet:
- Narcisse Mbunzama is a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His company connects farmers (who represent 80% of Congo’s population) to information that enables them to make more money from farming via mobile phone. He’s currently reaching 500 farmers and has built this company despite living in the midst of what has been the called the bloodiest civil war of our time.
- Ashley Murray buys poop and turns it into profit. Instead of relying on households in Ghana to pay for waste collection and processing, she buys it from them, turns it into carbon-neutral fuel and biodiesel, and sells both to make income. Thus far, she’s raised $250,000 from the Gates Foundation and the EU.
- Moushine Serrar hails from India, where, like other countries in the world, a leading killer of children under 5 is acute respiratory infection caused by inhaling the toxic smoke form charcoal-burning stoves. His company Prakti Design, whose clean charcoal stove currently provides meals for over 250,000 people per day in Haiti, India and Nepal, was just named fastest and most efficient charcoal stove by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
We are humbled to provide these entrepreneurs a stage to share their inspiring visions for the future. Now it’s up to you to provide an audience. On June 15th and July 21st, we invite you to join us for two events you won’t soon forget. Join us.
The Yawanawa Project presents an innovative approach to preserve an indigenous culture and the Amazonian rain forests it depends on. The project was started by a group of people who look at indigenous entheogenic medicines with diverse neurobiological, pharmacological, anthropological or spiritual interests but who share the conviction that the knowledge of how to safely provide for entheogenic experiences ought to be regarded as world cultural heritage. This shared appreciation allows participants with very different backgrounds, indigenous or urban and from various countries, to find common ground in working together towards the preservation of this heritage. We have the hope that this expertise can be monetized and form a revenue stream for the Yawanawa in a way that will allow the tribe to continue a lifestyle that sustains their environment. In part we arrived at this approach by studying various alternative models of aid that have been tried before but that failed. An important aspect of this project will be to entice at least a few members of the tribe’s younger generation to devote themselves to learn the “profession” of a shaman because otherwise the tribe will lose this living tradition that has survived millennia. More here.
COMMON is a collaborative brand and creative community for accelerating social change. Founded in January of 2011 by Alex and Ana Bogusky, John Bielenberg and Rob Schuham, COMMON supports, connects and celebrates those designing a new era of socially-minded enterprise.
We’re busy building our new website, which we hope will enable the millions of individuals passionate about building a fresh form of capitalism to connect, collaborate - and get to work.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to say hello, get involved, or talk to us about the ways we’re helping emerging and existing businesses drive positive change through enterprise, please shoot us a note, find us onFacebook or follow us on Twitter. We can’t wait to meet you!
Learn more at http://www.common.is/
Redefining Education. Creating Entrepreneurs. Designing Change.
Breaker’s mission is to drive social innovation and alternative learning by mobilizing interdisciplinary teams of young creative collaborators to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. We connect our teams of 18-24 year olds with global thought leaders and industry experts to answer major challenges like, for example, literacy and urban agriculture. We facilitate a creative problem-solving design process and teach the entrepreneurial skills necessary to transform ideas into businesses.
Each unique Breaker project is a twelve-week collaboration between the talented Breaker team, the visionaries who pose their challenge, and the industry experts who support their process. We work with multiple partner organizations across New York City to ideate, build, and test real solutions with real market value.
Participants leave Breaker with new perspectives and abilities. Products result from Breaker ready to be stress-tested and developed.
Learn more @ http://www.projectbreaker.org/
Charge : Create the Future (a workshop not to be missed)
A MYCELIUM & FUTURE PROJECT MASHUP
Mycelium’s action-based approach mixed with Future
Project’s disruptive thinking process, will help you
challenge the status quo to create a better future. In this
environment of inspiration and innovation, we will design
and create something that, each of us alone, could not
imagine. We have no idea what it will be, nor would we
want to. This is your project.
Three leading thinkers and doers in design, education
and social entrepreneurship will guide an experiment for
disruptive innovation by employing such techniques as
Shit Storm, Thinking Wrong, XYZ, and Dream Fierce,
proven exercises to imagine new possibilities to design
and launch this co-creation. The result could be a social
enterprise, a short viral documentary, a social experiment
- what really matters is that we come together, have an
amazing time and create something meaningful. To see
what past participants have created, check out the links
under past engagements.
Join the fun here!
Raising investment capital is becoming much easier! Welcome crowdfunder.com!
crowdfunder is a Business Crowdfunding platform that will enable U.S. startups and small businesses to raise funds through public offerings of equity, debt and revenue based securities sold to individual investors.
Interested? http://crowdfunder.com/
Please support this incredible project by the uber-talented Leo Villareal. Get inspired @ http://thebaylights.org/.
