Liverpool Cathedral was last night announced as the first winner of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce Arts Award.

The award is designed to stimulate Liverpool’s tradition of patronage by rewarding the company or organisation who funded the best publicly available art in Liverpool in the last five years.

The piece, titled ‘For You’ by Tracy Emin, RA takes the form of a pink neon wall mounted sign in Tracey’s own handwriting carrying the message ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me’ The judges were impressed with this dual personal and spiritual message in such a sacred space.

The judging panel made up of the crème of the Liverpool arts establishment ; Lewis Biggs Director of  Liverpool Biennial, Brenda Parkerson, Business Development Manager of Arts & Business, John Entwistle, sponsor and Christoph Grunenberg Director of Tate Gallery Liverpool felt that the Cathedral’s on-going work with such a cutting edge contemporary artist had produced a very bold and courageous piece.

The award sponsor, John Entwistle commented: “I’m very keen that this competition encourages the tradition of patronage of the arts in Liverpool and I’m delighted that work of this calibre is being commissioned in Liverpool.”

How Those Pesky Kids Use The Interwebs

The Digital Youth Project, an American, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has  published its results. The project is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples’ internet use ever undertaken in the US.

The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the “serious” stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of “hanging out, messing around and geeking out.” That is to say, all the “time-wasting” social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

Ito and her team establish a taxonomy of social activity, dividing it first into “peer-driven” and “interest-driven” — the former being what kids do with their real-world friends, the latter being the niche interests that drive them to locate other people who are as fascinated as they are by whatever brand of esoterica they fancy.

Within these two categories, the researchers break things down further into “hanging out” (undirected, social activities), “messing around” (tinkering with media, networks and technologies) and “geeking out” (delving deep into subjects based on global communities of interest) and for each one, they describe the successful and unsuccessful techniques deployed by parents and educators to direct kids’ activities.

See the report’s website here.

Download the 2-page summary [PDF]

Download the full report [PDF]

The above copy / post has been shamelessly lifted from Boing Boing