The XOXO festival (previously) is one of the best events I've ever attended; and this year's was the biggest, most inclusive one yet, but one of the things that makes XOXO so special is the cap on attendance, which means most of us can't attend; that's why it's such good news that the organizers have begin posting videos from all the presentations for your delectation. (via Kottke)
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Described as "an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet," Andy Baio and Andy McMillan's internet-fest baby XOXO will be back in early September.
And according to this tweet, they're making it bigger and more inclusive (be sure to check out their "living" inclusion policy):
We're moving to a new venue, and growing so we can offer significantly more free subsidized passes, prioritizing underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals.
The fun is happening in Portland, Oregon at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum from September 6 through 9. If this sounds like your jam, get on the horn and register before the deadline of June 29. Tickets (both paid and subsidized) are offered through a survey and lottery process, of which they write:
A first-come, first-serve system typically favors those with time and money, which ends up benefiting predominantly white men with well-paying jobs and disposable income.
Our survey system allows us to factor diversity into admission, which helps to counteract systemic biases and prioritize access to the festival for underrepresented folx and independent artists.
Check out the lineup! Read the rest
XOXO is the much-loved culture and tech conference in Portland, organized by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan; they took 2017 off and would not confirm when or if the conference would be back, but a year later, it's back!
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The brilliant, Portland-based festival is now a year-round phenomenon, housed in a 13,000 sqft refurbed WWII ship-building factory that will incubate and nurture independent art and technology and house events year round. Read the rest
Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk, in which he explains how he became a successful lottery player, is a brilliant send-up of the "how I succeeded as an artist" talk.
Kazemi's point is that most people who set out to earn a creative living fail, and that the thing that distinguishes the successes from the failures is a combination of luck (winning the lottery) and persistence (buying a lot of lottery tickets). This is a hugely important and vastly underappreciated point -- you can try and try and try and never succeed, through no fault of your own (but the more you try, the more chances at success you have).
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Glenn Fleishman reports from Portland's beloved arts and technology festival, where a darker sense of mission and meaning took hold in the event's third year.
Last month our friend Andy Baio, co-organizer of the incredible XOXO Festival in Portland, invited Xeni, David, Cory and me to be interviewed on stage by Glenn Fleishman. It was a blast! Here's the video.
In 1988, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair launched a print zine called bOING bOING, "the world's greatest neurozine." After migrating to the web in 1996, Mark added three talented writers to the mix — technology writer David Pescovitz, science-fiction author/free culture advocate Cory Doctorow, and journalist Xeni Jardin. This year is the 25th anniversary of bOING bOING's first issue, a quarter-century of sharing their "directory of wonderful things."
We brought all four of Boing Boing's original editors together for the first time on a single stage, interviewed by Glenn Fleishman, editor/publisher of The Magazine and host of The New Disruptors.
Recorded in September 2013 at XOXO, an arts and technology festival in Portland, Oregon celebrating independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love.
Boing Boing 25th Anniversary - XOXO Festival (2013) Read the rest
Glenn Fleishman heads to Portland for the second XOXO festival, where a maker's heart can leave the body, be shared among kindred spirits, and know that it will be cared for.
I have fallen in love with a building, hundreds of people, a MakerBot, a portable toilet trailer, food trucks, and two men each named Andy. Is it possible to fall in love with a conference? If so, I have. The organizers named the conference XOXO for hugs and kisses. This was presented without hipster irony or marketing-speak. They meant it. They delivered.
Every once in a while, a new project comes along that makes you go "Hmmmmmm." Like a horror movie in which the method of terror is social media. Good news! Such a movie is now in the works! George Nolfi, who wrote and directed The Adjustment Bureau, is on board to direct XOXO, and he'll be supervising the screenplay by Mark Heyman, who co-wrote Black Swan.
Billed as "Fatal Attraction for the digital age," XOXO will follow "an engaged executive who begins a virtual relationship with a mysterious woman on Facebook," whose interactions in real life turn deadly. It obviously won't be the first movie to turn social media into a monster (see: Catfish and Hard Candy), but when you think about how effectively Scream made us jump every time the phone rang late at night, I feel like we're ready for a straight-up horror movie that will elicit the same reactions when we get a Facebook notification. (Maybe we'll spend that much less time on Facebook when we could be doing something productive.)
I think on some level, we all think social media is a little scary. Suddenly, we live in a time when people, strangers, can see and read nearly everything we're doing, because we're (oddly) trusting enough to put it all out there voluntarily. And sometimes, horrible things happen as a result of being a little too trusting. To say nothing of the paranoia, mind games, and mixed messages involved with such a passive-agressive and often anonymous form of communication. Read the rest
