Social Networking Technology and Arts Organizations

Recently in the Artful Manager blog, Andrew Taylor discussed how social networking technology evident in popular user-driven sites (MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Dandelife, etc.) is rapidly changing the nature of the web and how we use it by enabling individuals to share their voice, vision and story with the wider world. For many months now, I have been ruminating over how to (a) strategically integrate the use of social networking technology into my programs and services, and (b) convince my organization's leaders that we need to move in this direction.

I know many artists are finding ways to utilize this technology as a tool for furthering their artistic endeavors. Comedian Dane Cook has used his MySpace network to catapult himself into the national spotlight as today's top-selling comedian on tour; Boston painter Jeff Hayes produces a successful painting-a-day blog to sell his work on a daily basis; hundreds of filmmakers post their trailers and short films on YouTube to promote awareness and generate buzz for their work.

So what can social networking technology do for arts organizations?

• Given the current trend in the field for arts organizations to market the "artistic experience" coupled with contemporary audiences' desire for greater interactivity, social networking technology has great potential to assist arts organizations in deepening their audience's experience by providing more avenues for engaging with the art, the artists, the organization, and each other. For example, check out Chicago Classical Music (CCM). Founded by nine classical music organizations, CCM launched in March 2006 as a six-month pilot program under the auspices of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago. This online community is dedicated to connecting its 11 current membership organizations with classical music enthusiasts through a blog, interactive forums, a chat room, a ticket swap feature, an events calendar, and more.
• Due to the "tell your friends, who will tell their friends, etc." nature of this technology, another benefit for arts organizations is the viral expansion of their reach and awareness. Earlier this fall, I started a weblog for our Southern Circuit - Tour of Independent Filmmakers program wherein touring filmmakers post about their experiences on the road in the South. Even in its nascent phase, the blog has been viewed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America; thereby providing our program with a reach and awareness we could never afford to garner through another channel.
• A third potential function for social network technology is to galvanize a virtual community around a mission, goal or issue to spur positive change in the real world. Take a look at how the New Orleans Video Access Center has been using YouTube to answer the question "Why should New Orleans be rebuilt?"

These are just a few ways in which these sites and online services can benefit arts organizations. With every passing day, further innovative uses are realized. So why stay behind the curve? What could social networking technology do for your organization?

Making art from the internet

I recently had the opportunity to attend one of the Artist Lecture Series here at CMU hosted by the College of Fine Arts. Because they joined forces with the Human Computer Interaction Institute, a lot of the guest speakers were amazingly innovative technology artists. Martin Wattenberg, who leads the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research, creates visualizations based on content from the internet and other data sources. Check out some of his research projects. I also came across an interesting article today that strikes me as really relevant- especially as I sift through the hordes of spam I receive everyday. Alex Dragulescu, an alumnus of UC San Diego, develops algorithms to process his spam emails to create botanical and architectural looking digital structures. He likens his process to a contemporary version of found art.

Sexiest Geeks of 2006

I just wanted to remind everyone to enter your nominations for the sexiest geeks of 2006. Any one of us here at CAMT would make an excellent choice. ;) Just kidding. We aren't that conceited... and our humility is a large part of our sex appeal.

Pittsburgh Podcamp: Nov. 10-12

If you caught the podcasting bug at our conference last month, join Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Three Rivers Film Festival this weekend for an "un-conference" and participate workshops on blogs, vlogs, audio podcasts, web video, content networks and new media monetization. In addition to the broad range of sessions, the schedule includes several social events, including a networking event at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh on Friday night, and a Saturday night dinner at Bossa Nova. If you can't make it to Pittsburgh this weekend, check out upcoming podcamps planned for Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, and New York.

Interpreting Culture, Part 2

As the shelf life of “new” continues to be defined by smaller and smaller time increments, how do we as arts administrators help artists to do their jobs – ask the timeless questions – in a timely fashion? I’m a big fan of John Seabrook’s 2001 book NoBrow: the Culture of Marketing and the Marketing of Culture, a series of essays that illustrate how these two phenomena work in contemporary American society. In one essay, Seabrook compares his own life to that of his father’s, noting the evolution of high-brow/low-brow distinctions are made through clothes: his father had a suit for every occasion, whereas “a Chemical Brothers T-shirt will get me further in many places than my father’s suit.”

One implication of Seabrook’s message is that in order to communicate effectively in a time when identity is defined by taste, arts organizations must realize that an artist’s message will be read in the specific context of a highly customized, consumption-driven life. People filter “high art” messages through the same lens they use to see billboards, print advertising, television commercials, product placements, movie trailers, product jingles…

What tools can we use to deliver artists’ content quickly and effectively? What role do we play in making sure their voices are heard clearly, and on time (particularly on a day like today)? How do we “buy in” to all the exciting two-way communication technology tools available to us now without “selling out”?

Windows Vista: What does it mean for arts organizations?

Microsoft will soon be releasing the latest version of its operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft's marketing campaign touts that Vista, being released to the company's business customers on November 30 and everyone else in January, will help users be "connected, clear and confident." The "connected" part of this campaign refers to the ease of connecting to people and information, and the "clear" part is meant to infer that the product's user interface will be straightforward and simple to grasp.

However, it's the "confident" part that most people are interested in, because past versions of Windows have had numerous security flaws. Vista is supposed to feature more advanced methods of detecting and preventing spyware and other electronic threats to your computer. We'll see...

The Technology in the Arts podcast (new episode available now!) will feature interviews from the 2006 TitA conference for the next several weeks, but one of our first non-conference podcasts will examine what Windows Vista will mean for arts organizations: How much will it cost? Will my current computers run Vista? What do I need to know to upgrade?

Digital Time Capsule

On October 10, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Time Capsule project, a brainchild of the artist Jonathan Harris. For 30 days, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio files, and drawings to this innovative digital anthropology project. On November 8, the collected files will be entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington D.C., and the data will be preserved as historical artifacts.

The time capsule is organized around ten themes: Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You, each of which was chosen to encourage a broad range of submissions. In addition to creating a historical record, the time capsule's design is intended to foster online community building. Users can submit original content, view other submissions, and engage in conversation about submissions with other users.

Harris's recent work has focused on the exploration of humans through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web. His background as an artist/techie/anthropologist makes him an ideal candidate to mold the project's creative vision.

As he wrote in his artist's statement, " . . . the Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate. We hope to reach a truly global expression of life on earth – nuanced, diverse, beautiful and ugly, thrilling and terrifying, touching and rude, serious and absurd, frank, honest, human. The Time Capsule itself is realized digitally so that the maximum number of people can have access . . .

The aesthetic of the Time Capsule is that of a ball of thread, spinning like a globe, its shifting surface entirely composed of words and pictures submitted by people around the world. The thread ball concept relates to threads of memory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any continuous and self-consistent narrative strand. When the Time Capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it. Using a search interface, viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”. There are an infinite number of ways to slice the data, and each resulting slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed independently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip."

With only 6 days, 8 hours and counting, there's not much time for procrastinating. Go and contribute now.

A vision of our future

Conference presenter Erika Block shared this video during her session, which examines the future of media and information and a forecast of changes at Google, Amazon, and The New York Times.

How far we've come

Rob Brunskill (former CAMT Systems Administrator) sent me this video posted on YouTube -- it's a news report on computers from 1981... Amazing how prophetic much of it turned out to be, particularly an IBM spokesman who said that computers may turn into the "world's biggest backyard fence."

Visualizing musical structure

Students of music theory may be familiar with the principles of "voice-leading", rules which govern the way in which notes move from one chord to the next. (The rules say the steps should be fairly small.) To help music students understand these concepts, Princeton professor Dmitiri Tymoczko recently developed ChordGeometries, software that generates a 3D musical map in real-time and illustrates how far a piece of music diverges from these rules. Tymoczko's accompanying paper, "The Geometry of Musical Chords," was published earlier this year in Science and explores voice-leading from the perspectives of both musicology and mathematics. To see the program in action, download one of three demonstration movies or the software itself, available for Mac OSX and Windows XP.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your cellphones.

On Sunday, the Chicago Sinfonietta played a new work with unusual instrumentation: the world premiere of the Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra. During the performance, audience members were signaled to active phones by the illumination of colored lights — red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats. The Sinfonietta's Music Director, Paul Freeman, discussed the work in the context of music with random elements, including pieces by John Cage and Charles Ives. However, the October 1st premiere was highly organized; the orchestra provided directions via email and in the program, and the conductor held a practice session before the performance.

To get a flavor for the music, you can view the Chicago Sinfonietta's television commercial featuring the Concertino.

Carnegie Museums have gone digital

Through the Art Collection Search, people can now browse the Carnegie Museums of Arts' collection online. I think this is a perfect segue to our Successful Digitization Projects Funded by the IMLS presented at the conference in October. After resolving some of their copyright issues, and following up on the statute of limitations for art (the artist's death + 70 years) the site is up!

No registration is required. Just go to the website and browse!

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And now for a battle of wits

British newspaper The Guardian is known for its famously difficult quizzes. Test your musical and historical knowledge with this pop quiz, written for a gala at London's Royal Opera House. After you submit your responses, the Guardian will display the correct answers. Study up and impress your friends with your newfound knowledge of obscure trivia.

Opera in the digital era

This week, the Metropolitan Opera announced it will broadcast live performances to movie theaters in the US, Canada, and Europe. The Met also plans to make more than 1,500 historical recordings available online through Rhapsody, a digital on-demand audio and video subscription service. Now that the Met has the rights to distribute both new productions and historic broadcasts on virtually all electronic formats, opera lovers can even watch streaming video of performances on the opera company's website. Read the full article here.

A growing number of opera companies are using technology to reach out to new audiences. According to DRoxy, a digital radio blog, the British opera company Hatstand Opera was the first to release opera podcasts, with its first edition of Podopera in the summer of 2005.

Pittsburgh in Top 25 Brainy Cities List...

Pittsburgh recently ranked 19th on a list of smart cities based on the percentage of its population age 25 and up with bachelor's degrees or higher. CNN.com featured a column today citing the recent U.S. Census Bureau rankings, released this month.

Read the full article.

Call us "blue collar" all you like, but this city has brains to go with its brawn.

Mood Affecting Artwork

This article, details how computer scientists from the U.S. and Britain have created an artwork whose palette will correspond to facial cues of an observer.

Oddly enough, the painting will turn somber when a frown is perceived or become playful when smiles are observed. I think they got it backwards; they should have made gruesome scenes when a face is observed to happy and vice versa... Just to keep the observers on the edge. Plus, do we always have to reinforce that happy is red and yellow, and sadness is blue and purple?

What I am waiting for is the ultimate marketing gimmick: the painting that changes all the time until it picks up on a smile, upon which time it stays stagnant. That way- the painting will be individually pleasant to everyone.

Music on the Brain...

I read a great article on Wired.com today about a new book by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin called This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. The book discusses our neurological reaction to music and examines why humans have loved music since cavemen were banging stones together. (Okay, I'm just assuming cavemen banged stones together for musical entertainment... that's not necessarily scientific fact.)

Read the full WIRED article.

Let us not forget the artists...

As we concentrate on the many ways arts managers are using technology innovatively, we should not ignore the fact that artists are also taking advantage of technology. A recent 'Wired' article features the Edgetone Music Summit, a four-day San Fransisco Bay event dedicated to experimental sound.

This might be my inner old man talking, but I'm wondering if a lot of technology-based "music" isn't just noise.

Read the full 'Wired' article.

Hexagram

I came across Hexagram while searching for arts and technology related material. Lucky them, they just won a fat grant from their mother state. Hexagram reaps rewards and recognition

Check out some of their projects. Hmmmm... Maybe they would be interested in presenting a session on technology based art???

Carnegie Museum of Art in New York Times

More great reasons to visit Pittsburgh this fall...the museums, pleasant autumn weather, and Technology in the Arts. For our out of town guests, sadly you'll miss the exhibition “Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900” featured in the New York Times this week, but you will have an amazing choice of exhibitions to explore if you so desire. The Carnegie Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History are less than a five minute walk away from the Carnegie Mellon University campus. You can read more about upcoming exhibitions by clicking one of these links:

Carnegie Museum of Art schedule of exhibitions

Carnegie Museum of Natural History schedule of exhibitions

Or if you prefer to sit in a quiet area and decompress, visit the main branch of the Carnegie Library, also within walking distance from the conference.

As an aside, I'm from Texas where there are only two seasons: "humid" and "hot". Fall is a great time to be in the 'Burgh, especially for those of us from warmer climates...who knew seasons actually changed?! Last October, I saw for the first time in my life the changing of seasons from summer to autumn. It was a truly amazing display of color and shape, and perhaps something taken for granted by people who have seen it many times. May this October in Pittsburgh also bring you unexpected beauty.