We were so honored to have won the audience vote at the three day Summer of Smart hackathon with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts! The weekend in August was billed as Urban Innovation Weekend 3: Public Health, Food, Nutrition, and Urban Agriculture.
The Gray Area organizers conducted an unexpected behind maneuver to choose another project to provide funding, resources and support to work with city agencies and meet with the 2011 mayoral candidates, even though we’d won the vote. Our project pushes the dialog around food scarcity and distributed networks of human and non-human hyper-local care. In our opinion, an arts agency should support this kind of conversation and be able to navigate the awkwardness that might emerge within institutions around difficult topics about power and sharing – otherwise they shouldn’t use the words “Gray Area” or “Arts” in their title!
