“When people say, ‘I don’t get art. I don’t get it all,’ that means art is working,” says John Maeda, design speaker and President of the Rhode Island School of Design in his latest TED Talk. “Art is supposed to be enigmatic…art is about asking questions — questions that might not be answerable.”

One of the best Internet/Art/Branding/Storytelling projects in recent years is coming out in book form: Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, by Joshua Glenn and Lavin speaker Rob Walker is due this summer. We can’t wait!

#Occupy Art: Immigration, Nation and the Art of Occupation is a sprawling ten-week course at Stanford University, featuring performances and lectures open to the public. Lavin speaker Jeff Chang—the executive director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, one of the event’s co-sponsors—will deliver the opening talk, along with H. Sami Alim, on April 4. It’s called “Introduction to the Art of Occupation.” More details here.  

Here’s NBC’s Brian Williams talking about Candy Chang’s ‘Before I Die‘—”an interactive public art project that transforms neglected spaces into a constructive place where we can discover the hopes and dreams of the people around us.”

For Toronto’s all-night public art party next month, Lavin speaker Natalie Jeremijenko will help citizens reclaim public space—and public airspace!—by lifting hundreds of citizens into the air to provide them with a pigeon’s-eye view of our city hall. A radical lesson in urban infrastructure! From Nuit Blanche:

Inspired by the birds of Nathan Phillips Square, Flightpath Toronto is a participatory spectacle inviting the public to rediscover the possibilities and wonder of urban flight. For Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011, the square hosts an urban flightschool, an interactive visual airscape, and fly-lines that enable hundreds of people, enwinged, to re-imagine the city and the way we move through it.

By exploring the square through the eyes of its primary inhabitants, urban birds, can we reinvent our relationship to the city we build together? By reclaiming airspace as public space, can we consider other forms of transit, rediscover the ‘sport’ in ‘transport’, and excite imaginative possibilities for our urban infrastructure? Are we game to experience, through flight, a city that is fluid and three-dimensional?

Flightpath Toronto’s swarms of flying people experiment with an urban-scale participatory proposition: one that demonstrates the pleasures of emissionless urban mobility and creates a shared memory of a possible future.

Flightpath Toronto is a collaboration between Usman Haque, architect/artist and Natalie Jeremijenko, engineer/artist, uniting his expertise in participatory urban spectacle with her expertise in bird flight and urban natural systems.

The music video for Patti Smith’s amazing banjo-inflected remake of Nirvana’s roaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Chris Guillebeau, the blogger behind The Art of Non-Conformity, in US News and World Report, talking about a new wave of entrepreneurs, of which he is a member, that has sprung up in the wake of a faltering economy. Entrepreneurism, a recent study shows, is at a 15-year high.

MIT designer, architect, and polymath Neri Oxman takes us into her lab to talk about the future of design: it won’t be about how materials look, but how they behave. Via SEED magazine: “Rather than try to solve a design problem through some abstract notion of how that building should look according to the ways we traditionally think about buildings, I’m trying to see if new forms can emerge out of incorporating new scientific processes into design.”