Scott Beale (born May 30, 1968 in

Dayton, OH Dayton () is the sixth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County. A small part of the city extends into Greene County. The 2020 U.S. census estimate put the city population at 137,644, while Greater Day ...

) is a

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

based cultural curator, photographer, documentarian and social media expert who founded

Laughing Squid Laughing Squid is a blog featuring items of 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 an ...

, a

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

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 h ...

company.

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, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

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

Portland, OR Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous cou ...

organized by the San Francisco Cacophony Society in 1996.

Laughing Squid

In 1995, Beale started Laughing Squid in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

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 randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society." It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco. C ...

and

Burning Man Burning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred ...

. 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 are List of web awards, awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. ...

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 Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) is an American performance art group that pioneered the genre of large-scale machine performance. Founded in 1978 by Mark Pauline, the group is known in particular for their performances where custom-built mac ...

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 fanz ...

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, ROFLcon, FooCamp,

and

Maker Faire Maker Faire is a convention of do it yourself aka-DIY enthusiasts started 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. History ...

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