Featuring a combination of workshops, lectures, mixers and parties, INSTINT (from the makers of eyeo) brings together some of the most influential and exciting creatives dealing with interactive architecture, art, design and technology from around the world. With less than 60 tickets left, you would be wise to register as soon as possible and if you will be coming to Minneapolis from out of state (or country), be sure to start making travel plans today.

Attending the event last year, WebUrbanist’s founder and lead technologist were stunned by the high caliber not only of the presenters but the 300 attendees as well, all of whom had stories to share about their work in and beyond the realm of interaction design.

This year, WU is once again a proud official media partner of this amazing gathering. In addition to selected talks from last year (embedded above), more videos from INSTINT 2014 can be found on Vimeo – but keep in mind: at least half of the experience is simply interacting with others in attendance during and beyond the event, so the talks themselves tell only part of the story.

Frequently found at the bleeding edge of their intersecting fields, INSTINT’s various compelling presenters manage to show off a combination of stunning completed works while also sharing behind-the-scenes lessons for others looking to create responsive environments, interactive art or smart objects. Attendees will be inspired by the finished projects but also learn a great deal from the trials, errors and iterations described in honest detail as well.

Over three days and in addition to multiple workshops, lunches and mixers, this year’s 14 outstanding speakers include Rachel Wingfield from London, whose experiments with future scenarios combine biology with technology to create living architecture, as well as Nataly Gattengo of San Francisco’s Future Cities Lab who has won awards for robotics, responsive building systems and other developments around the Internet of Things.

More from the organizers: “Great ideas and technology create ever-new opportunities to bring projects to life everywhere and anywhere imaginable. Along with this opportunity comes the inevitable trials and challenges of physical and site specific work. One-off projects made for one-off locations can make you pull your hair out, and/or go broke in the process. The volume of variables, old and new, can be overwhelming: unpredictable environments, bleeding edge technology, custom fabrication, code, bugs, insects, greasy fingers, hackers, crashers, crashes, caches, spoilers, laws, landlords, curators, committees, workers, shippers, solder, electricity, sunlight, moonlight, fluorescent light, reflections, bad ideas, egos, feasibility, durability, production planning, scope, scale, budgets, and on, and on. What knowledge can be applied from previous experiences and what has to be learned on-the-fly, on a per project basis? INSTINT aims to arm you with insights and inspiration, and expand your ability to execute projects in this exciting, but complex, sometimes harrowing, and ever-shifting field.” Register today!

280,000 pounds of glass, steel and concrete spanning over 80 feet, this remarkable structure was built to span city streets and sidewalks in Minneapolis but has storied history that goes well beyond its original usage. Today, this historic wonder can be yours for a remarkable sum of negative $5,000 – indeed, its owners will pay you to take it away (and hopefully put it to good use).

An incredibly robust work of engineering, the structure originally connected two downtown buildings in Minnesota’s biggest city, but when one of the pair it bridged was demolished it became a kind of “skyway to nowhere” that was more liability than asset.

Ideas to turn it into a bridge or use it again as a skyway in another location all failed to materialize, but many others have been dreamed up since – a mobile nightclub, kiosk for Nicollet Mall and other concepts both urban and rural.

It was subsequently listed for sale and bought for $1 by the University of Minnesota, which then sold it at blind auction by CityDeskStudio for $5,000. Plans to turn it into a modern cabin overlooking Lake Superior have since fallen through, hence its being once again up for grabs.

CDS originally relisted the bridge in the early 2000s for close to $100,000 – the price was dropped repeatedly before the company decided to not only give away the behemoth but to pay for its relocation.

Over the past decade, over 1,000 artists and 60,000 visitors have taken part in this incredible seasonal arts event, coming together to create an annual temporary community-on-ice in one of the nation’s coldest states.

Known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” but also as a center for the arts, Minnesota seems the perfect place for the Art Shanty Projects – a temporary autonomous zone where two disparate concepts to come together: the tradition of ice shacks built for fishing and the idea of public, interactive, community-built art on those same iced surfaces.

Comparisons have been made to Burning Man, but those sell short the unique local nature of this undertaking. One thing they do share, however, is a harsh (if opposite) environmental context that makes serious demands on buildings and shapes their form and function. The resulting structures are a mixture of wooden stick-framed shacks, metal geodesic domes, triangular tipis and other proven engineering approaches mixed with creative touches and unusual applications.

In years past, first on Medicine Lake and later White Bear Lake, the spaces these shape have featured a little bit of everything, from interactive games and dance floors to indoor and outdoor theatrical and musical performances. Sometimes a wild art car or two can be spotted patrolling the streets of the the shanty village as well and strange sculptures have been known to crop up in between buildings as well. While some things are scheduled, visitors learn to expect the unexpected.

This winter, the Art Shanty Projects is taking a break from the On-Ice Program to celebrate 10 years of success and complete a pivotal transition into an official non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. However, the organization is hosting a fundraising retrospective featuring some of the best shanties of years past as well as a custom-brewed beer specifically created for the event, taking place on February 28th at the Fulton Brewery in Minneapolis (more details can be found on ArtShantyProjects.org). Anyone wishing to donate to next year’s program can also do so online at Give.MN. This year, ASP is also a finalist for an Art Place America grant and is competing for a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant.

More about ASP: “Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which relatively unregulated public spaces can be used as new and challenging artistic environments to expand notions of what art can be. Our organization values artists, art in all communities, and the importance of interaction between the two. Through an array of artists receiving fair wages for their work, we broaden perceptions of art while maintaining respect for the environment and communities in which we work.” Note: the writer of this article serves as on the Board of Directors for the Art Shanty Projects, an unpaid position.

Forms of funding are fast evolving in the digital age, and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture 2012 Leading Creatively conference provided a window into how different artists, organizations and institutions are adapting to new models of making communities as well as money. For anyone interested in either funding the arts or raising funds for their own artistic projects, there were good lessons to be taken from this event. Discussions became most compelling when speakers and panelists talked slightly outside their own primary areas of professional experience, but more on that below.

Of particular interest was a panel titled Pennies from Heaven: Crowdfunding and Community-Supported Media/Arts, led by moderator Nathaniel James of Adventures in New Giving and founder of the Seattle chapter of the Awesome Foundation. The latter, while not his primary project, follows a wonderful giving-circle style model: each month, ten board members toss $100 each into a paper bag, then choose whose awesome idea to fund from the communal kitty. As he pointed out in conversation, the result is ordinary people acting like serious arts board members, tackling tough questions of feasibility and the like – consumption replaced with conspicuous participation.

Stephanie Pereira, Art Program Director of Kickstarter came out from New York City as a representative of one of the most powerful and impressive platforms for crowdfunding in the United States (soon to expand to the UK and beyond). There is hardly a good way to sum up Kickstarter, save to say it has been a remarkable democratizing force in raising money for everything from art and photography to music and film. A veteran of community-generated art scenes, Pereira also mentioned projects outside of her own direct purview such as Sunday Soup that grants funding through the vehicle of semi-informal community meals.

Local Scott Stulen, Project Director of MNartists.org, part of The Walker Center, was on hand to talk about another form of small-scale artistic funding that has huge potential (already being activated in dozens of states): the CSA, or Community Supported Art, modeled on Community Supported Agriculture where people sign up to receive a mixed basket of produce from local farmers. In this case, of course, the box is filled with the work of regional artists, who submit their work for review, and, if successful, are funded from ‘shares’ sold to 50 participants, each of whom gets a grab bag of all kinds of art (everything from ceramics, sculptures and photographs to concept art, vinyl records and performance tickets). But like his fellow panelists, Stulen went beyond his primary project of discussion to mention the role of crowdfunding in bringing cat video creators to the recent (and hugely successful) CatVidFest at the Walker – basically, producers leveraged their followers to raise money to travel to the event.

A Soap Factory tour during the conference served as prelude to an opening-night introduction to a new installation that also served as an apt closing-night gathering for conference-goers. Why We Do This by Andy DuCett was not the product of crowdfunding, but the overnight transformation from Friday to the opening on Saturday was a testament to a dedicated community of the volunteers putting in hard work to finish everything off on time. The results are impressive, and anyone in the area would be well advised to see the series of vignettes that will span the whole main floor of The Soap Factory for the next two months. And speaking of collaboration: the most fun part for this particular visitor was seeing how people reacted to and interacted with the installation, suspending disbelief and laying down in the fake grass to stare at flat clouds, or gathering around to spot bigfoot lurking outside a faux cabin. Thanks again to Josh Wilson of NAMAC for arranging press passes and other connections for the event.

Hot on the heels of this year’s Eyeo Festival comes Leading Creatively 2012 with panels, workshops, films and tours exploring visual culture and digital technologies across various local Twin Cities venues from September 6th through the 8th. Two of WebUrbanist’s regional core creatives have requested and been issued press passes for this National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture event. While by no means exhaustive (see the full schedule on the NAMAC website) here are some of the highlights, followed by information on getting discounts and scholarships to attend.

Venues: For those not yet in the know, the Hack Factory and Soap Factory are, respectively, premier community-oriented maker and art spaces. The first will play host to a mobile Hacker Space at the conference itself, while the second is a stop on the must-see Twin Cities tour on Friday and exhibition opening on Saturday. And no arts event in the community would be complete, of course, with participation of the Walker Arts Center, site of last night’s epic CatVidFest.

Panels: Open Space Documentaries on Thursday tackles the evolution of traditional documentary formats to new forms of transmedia storytelling. Creators looking for funding will need to make a tough decision on Friday afternoon between theory and practice: Pennies from Heaven: Crowdfunding and Community-Supported Media/Arts and Grantmaker Speed Dating. Public Art: Engaging Communities, Claiming Space on Saturday will go beyond the classic notion of public art as abstract, large-scale, office-plaza sculpture, tackling less scripted (and sometimes un-permitted) creations.

People: The last panel mentioned above is where you will find the first person mentioned here: Steve Dietz, President and Artistic Director of Northern Lights/Northern Spark.  And those who chose the ‘theory’ over ‘practice’ option in the previous paragraph will get to see Stephanie Pereira, the Art Program Director of Kickstarter.com out from New York City (WebUrbanist is aiming to interview both, so stay tuned for updates!).

Films: With everything else going on, it would be easy (but a shame) to miss the two-day Film Festival with documentary screenings and associated pre-conference masterclass with day passes for just $15. Click here for more information and a full lineup of features.

Discounts: As conferences go, even the regular-priced, full-access tickets are reasonable, but for creatives on an even stricter budget: “NAMAC is offering incentives for Minnesota residents and organizations, including hotel and conference-registration scholarships, complimentary memberships to NAMAC, and discounted registration rates.” Visit NAMAC.org for more information on these and other options and opportunities, and feel free to say hello if you see a WebUrbanist editor or photographer at the event!