The Great American Pixel

Virtual Layers Wanted For Entertainment Fundraising

Please get in touch if you are or know any game-y interactive-y programmers who like working on cool, small side projects ♥

Part of what LOVELAND is experimenting towards is a system for “entertainment fundraising”. That is, inviting people to chip in online with small (or large) amounts of money that fund real things while also providing them a fun interactive experience. Sort of like if Kickstarter and Nintendo had a baby. 

In June we started bundling inch sales with fundraising on Kickstarter and raised $1,500 for a sculpture in Detroit called Monumental Kitty. Right now we’ve got 12 more days to raise $1,100 ($2,000 total) towards the rehabbing of Spaulding Court (—> GO HERE AND DO DAT NOW PLEASE! THX! <—).

Here’s the little video we cut together for Spaulding Court:

“Rehab Spaulding Court In Detroit” LOVELAND micro grant On Kickstarter from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

You can see the video ends with a teaser saying that, after the work is done, it’s time to add the unicorn farm. Now, that’s probably not physically possible, but it’s definitely virtually possible.

I’ve registered both monumentalkitty.com and spauldingcourtunicornfarm.com and would like to get simple Flash or whatever kind of interactive environments up on those sites.

For example, on monumentalkitty.com — Monumental Kitty being based in part on the mythical Sphinx creature who eats you if you can’t answer his questions (see the video interview with artist Jerome Ferretti for background)— the kitty will ask you things and if you get them wrong he’ll mess with your browser window Rick Roll style.

And on spauldingcourtunicornfarm.com you’ll see the real life Spaulding Court building as the backdrop, with interactive unicorns running around and some simple tasks to perform. Forgive my cheesy photoshoppings, they’re how I think out loud. ;-)

What the heck? I know… They’re pretty goofy, but also pretty awesome, and that’s how the internet is fond of rolling. A lot of people wouldn’t care about Spaulding Court, but they’ll click on and share Spaulding Court Unicorn Farm. Add a button to donate in exchange for something experiential through the site (sponsor a unicorn?), and you’ve got a trickly pipeline of donations and a new channel to spread the word about the project.

Mary and I just met up with LOVELAND’s next micro-grant recipient and brainstormed a way to add this type of layer to their fundraising in realtime, where every donation unlocks a small experience on the site. I hope we can pull it off. It’s going to take more work on top of everything we already have to do, but if we can find a programmer-artist with the chops, time, and interest to pull it off, I think we can experiment our way towards something very cool and useful indeed.

Any takers out there who could help program some simple Flash pages (or your weapon of choice)? Please let us know. We’ve been thinking about this for a while, are fun to work with, have detailed specs, and and would love to get something up. ♥