Dreamgrove.org Nominated for Webby Award

Our friends at LA and Athens based design collaborative Drifting City are proud to announce that Dreamgrove, its web page and interactive garden project, has been nominated for Best NetArt Site in the 13th Annual Webby Awards.

Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.

Dreamgrove is an experimental media art project, connecting a web page and an interactive garden. It features dream narrations, planted in a public, virtual field.

“Nominees like dreamgrove.org are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet,” said David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards.“It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the nearly 10,000 entries we received this year.”

“If you think about it, a web page and a garden are quite similar,” said Petros Babasikas, founding partner of Drifting City in Athens. “Both are essentially about mapping ideas and remembering sensations. We’re honored and excited for our Webby nomination, and hope we can soon plant a permanent version of the garden.”

As a nominee, Dreamgrove is also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community. From now until April 30th, Dreamgrove fans can cast their votes in The Webby People’s Voice Awards at http://pv.webbyawards.com.

Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Seth Meyers. Winners will be able to share one of the Webby’s famous five-word speeches with the world. Past Webby Award winners - and their speeches - include Al Gore (“Please don’t recount this vote.”), Beastie Boys (“Can anyone fix my computer?”), and Stephen Colbert (“Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.”).

The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpson’s” creator Matt Groening, Virgin Atlantic’s Chairman and Founder Richard Branson, musicians Beck and David Bowie, Arianna Huffington and Harvey Weinstein.

ABOUT DREAMGROVE
At www.dreamgrove.org you are invited to write your dreams—what you saw in your sleep—and plant them in a public, virtual field. There you can read others’ dreams. At the interactive garden dream texts become a soundscape: you can hear them through the trees. A beta-version of the garden was constructed and exhibited at the Athens Byzantine Museum main courtyard in November 2008, as part of the “Unbuilt: international architecture research events programme.” Dreamgrove was designed and produced by Petros Babasikas, Chrissou Voulgari and Farzad Moré, of Drifting City, a design collaborative based in Athens and Los Angeles, producing Architecture, Media, and Public Space.

Images: Dreamgrove