Scott Beale (born May 30, 1968) is an American cultural curator, photographer, documentarian and social media expert who founded

Laughing Squid Laughing Squid is a blog featuring art, culture, and technology, as well as a web hosting company based out of New York City, New York. History Laughing Squid was founded on November 16, 1995 in San Francisco, California as a film and video pro ...

, a

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

about art, culture and technology and a

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web ho ...

company. He is

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

based.

Projects

Documentary Films

Beale produced two documentary films, ''Alonso G. Smith, A Half Century of Social Surrealism'' (1995) about

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

surrealist painter Alonso Smith and ''You’d Better Watch Out: Portland Santacon ’96'' (1997) about the SantaCon event in

Portland, OR Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...

organized by the San Francisco Cacophony Society in 1996.

Laughing Squid

In 1995, Beale started Laughing Squid in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

as a film and video company. In 1996 he launched The Squid List, an art and culture list for the

, that was inspired by experiences he had with the

Cacophony Society The Cacophony Society is a US-based organization that consists of individuals "united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society." In 1986, the organization was created by the surviving members of the defunct Suicide Cl ...

and

Burning Man Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the Western United States. The event's name comes from its ceremony on the penultimate night of the event: the ...

. In 1998 he launched the web hosting company Laughing Squid Web Hosting followed by the launch of the Laughing Squid blog in 2003. In 2013 he became a member of the Executive Academy of judges for

The Webby Awards The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts an ...

Photography

Beginning in the 1990s, Beale has been actively documenting a variety of underground and countercultural activities and tech events in the Bay Area and all over the world. Examples are images and videos of art groups and events like SantaCon, Survival Research Labs,

RE/Search RE/Search Publications is an American magazine and book publisher, based in San Francisco, founded by its editor V. Vale in 1980. In several issues, Andrea Juno was also credited as an editor. It was the successor to Vale's earlier punk rock fa ...

monochrom Monochrom (stylised as monochrom) is an international art-technology-philosophy group, publishing house and film production company. It was founded in 1993, and defines itself as "an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop att ...

XOXO Hugs and kisses, abbreviated in the Anglosphere as XO or XOXO, is an informal term used for expressing sincerity, faith, love, or good friendship at the end of a written letter, email or text message. Origins The earliest attestation of the u ...

ROFLcon ROFLCon was a biennial Convention (meeting), convention of internet memes that took place in 2008, 2010 and 2012, featuring various internet celebrities. All three events were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ROFLCon was first organi ...

FooCamp Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media. Event O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be re ...

and

Maker Faire Maker Faire is a convention of do it yourself (DIY) enthusiasts established by '' Make'' magazine in 2006. Participants come from a wide variety of interests, such as robotics, 3D printing, computers, arts and crafts, and hacker culture. Hist ...

References

External links

Laughing Squid

Scott Beale's Personal site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beale, Scott American male bloggers American bloggers American art curators 1968 births Living people Writers from the San Francisco Bay Area