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COLAB Interview

I was recently invited to give a talk on socially conscious design & my Skull-A-Day project at COLAB at Syracuse University. COLAB is a wonderfully creative collaborative design program run by my friend Chris McCray which "was created to bring together students and faculty from various disciplines, with diverse skills and experiences, to learn how to approach problems collaboratively and share multiple perspectives while working toward creative solutions." Good stuff. As part of my visit I was interviewed by a student and the end result has just been posted online...


Noah Scalin for COLAB from COLAB on Vimeo.

I was also asked some more fun questions for their Off The Cuff series, and the answers are here...


Off the Cuff: Noah Scalin from COLAB on Vimeo.

The Power of Theater

Epic Theatre Ensemble, one of my clients, created this moving video to talk about their recent productions & honors and shows how theater can be a powerful tool for changing lives...

Groundswell Journal #1: Crisis Folklore

Our friends at Groundswell Collective have just released the first issue of their printed journal! It focuses on what they call "Crisis Folklore"...

How we imagine future stories that describe our current time period can give us an alternative glimpse of the cultures we are shaping in the here-and-now. To get outside of the modes of analysis we typically offer, we look for the future storytellers, asking what are the tales of resistance in the post-crash era? Crisis being a daily reality, where do we locate our collective daydreams? Can we accurately envision these future stories for ourselves and for others?
Topics include:

• Counter-cultural or resistant reworkings of contemporary problems
• Shifts in the language of dissent, movement, and movements
• Sociological mis/understandings of shifts in folklore in response to crisis
• Possibilities for subversion, especially via art
• Imagined criticisms, counter-hegemonic creation myths, forecasted histories, pre-emptive sense-making, etc.

Including offerings from Real Estate for Ransom, Team Colors, Basekamp, Chris Kennedy, and other influential authors yet to be announced.

Get your issue directly from Groundswell or find out where to buy a copy in person HERE.

Pennies in Protest: Turning Hate Into Change

The hate group Westboro Baptist Church (Wikipedia article on WBC) is visiting my hometown of Richmond, Virginia and some clever locals (including my good friend Sara) have decided to use the group's negative energy to make something positive happen. They developed Pennies in Protest as a non-violent peaceful anti-protest. Rather than just go down to the locations where they will be protesting and shouting back at them (as amusing as that can be), they're encouraging folks to donate for each minute the Westboro bigots will be in town to the causes that they are against!
Pennies in Protest has already collected over $4,000 and the donations will be split evenly between The Virginia Holocaust Museum, The Weinstein Jewish Community Center, the Jerusalem Connection, and the Hermitage High School Gay-Straight Student Alliance (GSA). The anti-protest was inspired by a synagogue that was targeted by the group in New York City that raised $10,000 in 50 minutes!

You can add your own pennies to the cause by visiting the Pennies in Protest website HERE.
You can also join them on Facebook HERE.

Image made with Absurd Sign Generator.

Recent Work - Websites

Just finishing up the process of adding new work to the portfolio section of my site and I wanted to share some websites we designed that have recently gone live...

EpicTheatreEnsemble.org

StellinaSport.com

OandMco.com

And my personal art portfolio website: NoahScalin.com

Special credit should go to my friends at Top Dead Center Design who provided the programming on all of these sites.