My recent past has been full of transition and I’m very excited to announce the recent changes in my life. Recently… I participated in the Twin Cities Maker Minne-Faire; I stayed up for more than 24 hours straight with a group of talented friends building a website for Child Protection International (new site not up as of time of writing this) during my second year taking part of the Overnight Website Challenge, and the very next day I started my new career.

On March 22nd, I began my new role as the Director of Creative Development at Y Worlds. It doesn’t look like much yet, but it will, I promise. We are a lean team on a highly-aspirational objective, more on that at a later date. To boil it down, I am in charge of the creative direction of our company, our goal is to aid in the transference of knowledge through interactivity and the development of knowledge visualization systems. Their have been a lot of bad decisions made in the world, decisions that don’t express equality or nurturing for self and others, we want to change that by educating people in a way that is easier to understand and entertaining, for an intelligently-derived future for all.

Below is an image of yworlds.com as it exists now. It will be interesting to look back at this in the future. I look forward to sharing more with everyone soon, our first visibility will come in the summer.

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It was announced on Friday, December 18th that I am one of five recipients of the Northern Lights organization’s Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship funded by the Jerome Foundation. Art(ists) on the Verge is administered by Steve Dietz, the founding director of Zero1 San Jose Artists Bienalle and previously the founding director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center. This fellowship is aimed towards those working at the edge of art and technology, predominantly in a public space and this year there is an additional emphasis on networks.

I am looking forward to being a part of such a great program and am very excited to have received this opportunity. For the next nine months, I will be focused on working towards my goal of creating an installation space that encompasses a sense of memory and identity. The fellowship culminates in opportunities to present work at this years SparkFest in October.

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A couple weeks ago, Yearbook Yourself was awarded the Webby’s “People’s Voice Award.” Online users voted for our project as their favorite online viral campaign of 2008. This win showed us that budget is not necessarily a determining factor of success. We were up against some big competition, including The Dark Knight’s, “Why So Serious?” campaign. I look forward to seeing our August launch of Yearbook Yourself 2009.

.Net Magazine has selected Snowdin.com as the “Hottest Website of the Month.” I received an email today with a link to a picture of the spread, posted by Tom O’Neill of Sierra Bravo on his TwitPic. I’m happy to see such appreciation for the work that I have been apart of at Colle+McVoy. In a medium where you don’t tend to hear much from your audience, it is always refreshing to hear a response.

This holiday season, Colle + McVoy created an internal project called Snowdin. Snowdin.com is a website created in Anaglyph 3D (red + blue 3d glasses):

To help relieve the stresses of the holiday season, we created a winter retreat at snowdin.com. There you can frolic with a yeti, pilot a blimp or deliver the evening post to the town folk. No need for long johns or an electric blanket. All you’ll need is your 3-D glasses.

I developed the main site, the shell that holds all of the content. My friend / co-worker Andrew Charon developed the awesome Mount FrostBite Q*Bert game and we had some help from PopLife with some other games. The whole site is sprinkled with downloads and activities.

On December 25th, Snowdin.com received an FWA Site of the Day award, so we are all very pleased with the sites success.

Well its actually been more than a week now, I’m still waiting for the intended slower pace to kick in. On December 12th I graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interactive Media. And look, to welcome me as an alumni I got a slick 1GB USB Drive. My project What Matters Most went off very well, I managed to get some good documentation and hope to have its content posted soon.

In May of 2007 I participated in an experiment titled Vormator: The Elements of Design. The brief was to build an artwork using only the 8 vector shapes that they provide you with. My concept was to use these eight shapes in the development of my Generative Compositional Engine, an application that algorithmically creates artwork based on compositional rules.

After 18 months the book, featuring the work of 80 artists, is now officially released. You can view sample pages and order online at vormator.com.