After the mind-blowing experience that was 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin, last December (they are calling for submissions of lectures for this year's edition btw), i've been looking at how the world of artists and hackers could mingle. A combination of such different approaches might not always be easy to achieve but the work of Michael Frumin at Eyebeam demonstrates that when it does, it can take some fun, thought-provoking and unforeseen forms.

After his studies at Stanford University, Michael was a founding member of a team of hackers who were using their quantitative skills to find proprietary, novel real-time sources of qualitative information for hedge fund managers. Since he arrived at Eyebeam --a NYc based organization that fosters cultural dialogue at the intersection of the arts and sciences-- in 2003, Michael has been key to developing a surprising high number of interesting projects FundRace, a website that raised the debate about how the political process works by measuring and showing political donations across the USA; ForwardTrack which promotes on-line activism by tracking and mapping the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and online petitions; VGMap (Vectorized Google Maps) that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system; OGLE, a software package to capture and re-use 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications; Pizza Party to order pizza with only a few keystrokes; and one of the favourite source of information for many readers: the reBlog (also an OS project: reBlog.org).

Today is Michael's last day as Eyebeam's R&D; Technical Director as he's moving on to new experiences.

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