Drop Serious Knowledge

First off, many thanks to David Dombrosky and the fantastic crew at CAMT for inviting me to guest blog on Technology in the Arts. What a luxury to share my thoughts with you! Lately, I've been thinking about individual artists and how they're often the first to step forward and serve the community of artists. This, of course, is not a new phenomenon, but I've recently seen some compelling projects, some web-based, others enabled by technology, that deserve highlighting. This will be my focus through the end of February.

Artist Steve Lambert

Here's a cool lead off project. On January 26, 2008, visual artist Steve Lambert (b. 1976, Los Angeles) initiated the first Art WikiMarathon. His goal was to "drop serious knowledge in Wikipedia about art", including information on artists, exhibitions, organizations, etc. For eight straight hours, volunteer collaborators from around the globe sat at their laptops and collectively fed their knowledge into this public resource. More than 90 new entries were posted. Some personal favorites among the new additions include Karen Finley, Paul McCarthy, and John McCracken.

This is a great start, but just the beginning. There are thousands of other artists, especially living ones, that still need to be added. I encourage each of you to continue what Lambert started and add just one more artist to Wikipedia. Who do you find most compelling? I wrote my graduate thesis in art history on painter Alfred Jensen (b. 1903, Guatemala; d. 1981, New Jersey) and his work has captivated me for more than a decade. I just did a search for him on Wikipedia and guess what? He's not in there. And I'm going to get on it asap. We only have two choices here: either drop serious knowledge, or serious knowledge will be dropped.

Let me know if you add anybody to Wikipedia.

Introducing Spotlight Blogger - Matthew Deleget

While I know how much you love reading posts from the Technology in the Arts team, we decided to expand and deepen the dialogue around technology and the arts by inviting colleagues from the arts administration field to share their technology-related thoughts, tips, and discoveries as spotlight bloggers. To kick things off, we are delighted to introduce this month's spotlight blogger -- Matthew Deleget. In his capacity as the Managing Officer of the Information and Research Department at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Matthew oversees all of NYFA's information programs, including the NYFA Web site, online classified listings, online artist gallery, biweekly arts magazine, and NYFA Source - the nation's most comprehensive database of programs for artists.

You may remember Matthew from the session he presented at the 2006 Technology in the Arts Conference on "Redefining an Artist Community via the Web," where he discussed MINUS SPACE, an online curatorial/critical project he co-founded with Rossana Martinez to present reductive, concept-based art by international artists.

In addition to his work as an arts administrator, Matthew is a working visual artist who has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters as well as the Brooklyn Arts Council. In 2004, he was elected to membership with the American Abstract Artists, and in 2005, to the Artists Advisory Committee of the Marie Walsh Sharp Art Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Flash Art Magazine, Artnet Magazine, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Basler Zeitung, and New York Arts Magazine. His work is included in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Fidelity Investments, Brown Rudnick and Pratt Institute, and others.

Please, join us in welcoming Matthew to the Technology in the Arts blog!

The Digital Museum - A New Book and Upcoming Webinar Series

Recently, the American Association of Museums published The Digital Museum: A Think Guide, in which twenty-five leading thinkers in the fields of technology and museums explore the impact of new technology on all aspects of museum operations, from interpretation to conservation. Topics range from the use of handheld devices, websites and digital games to open source technology and real-time learning. Beginning on Tuesday, February 12, AAM will launch "The Digital Museum: Transforming the Future Now" - a four-part series of monthly webinars further exploring areas identified in the publication and facilitated by leading practioners in the field. According to AAM, "The Digital Museum webinar series will help you explore how recent innovations in technology are transforming museum operations of every kind, from exhibitions and content delivery to education, audience evaluation, and institutional planning."

For more information on each webinar and to register for the series

Stanford Lively Arts Strikes a Deal with iTunes

Stanford Lively Arts, Stanford on iTunes U and iTunes have launched a new promotion that will allow Stanford University's faculty, staff, students and Lively Arts patrons to download music by artists featured in the upcoming Lively Arts season using free iTunes gift cards. From now through March 15, the cards will be made available to patrons at all Lively Arts performances and to customers at the Stanford Bookstore, Tresidder Express, the Track House Sport Shop, the Cantor Arts Center Gift Shop and the Stanford Shop at Stanford Shopping Center. Lively Arts plans to mail the cards to Stanford students, faculty and staff in early February and will make the cards available to its community partners, including the Palo Alto Unified School District and East Palo Alto's educational program College Track.

The first Lively Arts event where patrons received the iTunes gift cards was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's performance on Friday, Jan. 25, which featured a new work with music by composer Mikel Rouse titled eyeSpace. During the performance, the audience used iPods distributed at the theater to select and personalize the music that accompanies the dance. Rouse's music is also on the gift card.

In addition, the card will include music of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Blind Boys of Alabama, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Academy of Ancient Music, Turtle Island Quartet, Rosanne Cash, Kronos Quartet, Rob Kapilow and the Pacifica Quartet. Recipients of the cards will be able to download complete tracks from the artists at no charge until they expire on March 31.

This is iTunes' second such promotion with the performing arts at an educational institution. The first was with the University of Illinois' Krannert Center in September 2007. With all of the performing arts centers located at colleges and universities throughout the nation, I wonder if this is beginning of a new trend in the presenting and touring industry. It strikes me as a great way to use iTunes as an audience development tool.

Sundance: Art Meets Tech in Park City

Brad and I are in Toronto working with our colleagues in the Great North on developing the content for the Technology in the Arts - Canada conference for May 9 & 10 in Waterloo. During a few moments yesterday when I hit the streets with my Visa (aka shopping), Teresa Hollingsworth from the Southern Arts Federation called me to give me her celebrity sightings report from the Sundance Film Festival. Once my petty jealousy cooled down, I wondered what interesting intersections of art and technology were taking place at Sundance this year. Here's what I've learned:

• Last year, Sundance opened a screening room in Second Life with the indie film Four Eyed Monsters. The festival continued using its SL screening room this year with the premiere of Lynn Hershman's new movie Strange Culture featuring Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan portraying the true story of Steve Kurtz.Synopsis: In 2004 artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a MASS MoCA exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife's body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison. Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia. � Click here for Variety's review of the film
• Continuing in the Second Life vein, this year the festival premiered "Invisible Threads" by Stephanie Rothenberg, a new media performance artist, and her collaborator, Jeff Crouse, a digital artist and programmer. "Invisible Threads" is a virtual sweat shop that produces real-life, custom-ordered, personalized blue jeans. The project is intended as art, but the creators see it as a window into so-called "telemetric manufacturing methods of the future."“What I think is fascinating about her work is that it is a step towards what our future is going to be,” said Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer for the Sundance Festival who focuses on media, art and technology. “It’s called art now, but in the future it’s going to be how you get your jeans. It will be daily life. So often what you call art is just people who see the future before the rest of us do.”
• Sundance also premiered a landmark in DIY cinema -- the first solo computer-generated animated feature. M Dot Strange (nee Michael Belmont) -- writer, director, editor, producer and animator of We Are the Strange -- is the first YouTube filmmaker to hit Sundance's big screen.Synopsis: Blue is a young girl navigating the streets of a terrifying, sinister fantasy world all alone. When she meets Emmm, a fellow lost soul, she joins him on a quest for some ice cream. Upon arriving, they realize the ice cream shop has been taken over by dark forces, and the whole city is teeming with evil. Bizarre monsters surround Blue and Emmm on all sides until Rain, a sadistic hero, arrives to rescue them and exterminate the source of the evil. More about the film and filmmaker

Okay, now I am more jealous. Next year, Teresa definitely has to take me with her to Park City!

When href="Links, Links, and More Links"

I stumbled on a great collection of links of artist using technology, hosted by the San Francisco State's Conceptual Information Arts (CIA) program.  There's over 4,000 links to artists whose arts melds with disciplines as various as computer media, robotics, virtual reality, and even microbiology. However, after clicking around and encountering some broken links, I started to wonder, "How the heck do they keep track of so many links?  How does anyone who has an extensive list of external links avoid frustrating, broken links?"  After some searching, I found something interesting.  And free.  And simple.

There's an add-on for the FireFox browser called LinkChecker that you can use to verify the links on any Web page you browse to.  Links are highlighted different colors based on status (green is a valid link, red is a broken link, yellow is a link with an error, and gray is a link that times out before responding).  I installed this add-on and put the page of links at the SFS CIA program to the test.

For the 4,238 links on the page, LinkChecker took about an hour to go through them all, but I just minimized the page and let it run in the background.  Once it was done, I knew that I could click with confidence.  This is a great tool for the end user, especially someone doing research (on artists using technology, perhaps?).  Run the LinkChecker, go have a cup of cocoa, and come back and know exactly which links are valid. 

From a site manager's perspective, the add-on is helpful as well.  You can test your own site's link pages, see what links are broken, and then clean up your code to remove them.  The main downside of this add-on is that it is completely manual.  The link checking isn't done automatically or at a regularly scheduled time, and LinkChecker only flags a link as broken (placing the burden of maintenance on the site manager).

I would bet good money that there are link validation software and monitoring services out there that are more robust than LinkChecker, but I've never used or investigated them.  Still, LinkChecker is simple, free, and a great resource to have when dealing with loads of links.

Anyone out there struggling to keep their collection of links clean and tidy?  Know of any other tools or resources to verify links?  Want me to do a little more digging on this subject?  Give us some comments!

Related Links: W3.org Link Checker - http://validator.w3.org/checklink FireFox Add-Ons - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

2008 AAM MUSE Awards - Applications due Jan. 11th

The American Association of Museums (AAM) Media and Technology Committee is accepting online applications for the 2008 AAM MUSE Awards until Friday, January 11, 2008. The cost is $25 per entry. The 2007 Muse Awards competition received nearly 200 applications from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Entries included audio, cell phone and interactive handheld tours, interactive kiosks and multimedia installations, podcasts, blogs, games, websites, online collection and image databases, videos and e-mail marketing campaigns. This year AAM is expecting another exciting round of projects that reflect innovation in the museum media community.

Entry categories include:

• Audio and Visual Tours
• Extended Experience
• Games
• Interactive Kiosks
• Interpretive Interactive Installations
• Multimedia Installations
• Online Presence
• PR and Development
• Teaching and Outreach
• Video

MUSE award winners demonstrate outstanding achievement in the following areas:

1. Success in meeting the stated educational goals
2. Visual design
3. Production quality
4. Functionality
5. Appropriate use of technology
6. Overall appeal

Click here for more information and to apply online.

Let's Take a Moment to Mourn DRM

According to an article in Business Week, Sony BMG Music Entertainment will start selling songs without copyright protection sometime this quarter, a move that will essentially kill the much-loathed digital rights management, or DRM. Basically, this means that songs you download through iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, or any other service will be completely unprotected.

Naturally, the catalyst for this move is money. A company would never do anything out of the goodness of its collective corporate heart. Sony and other labels realized that DRM was not only restricting the illegal distribution of music; it was also restricting the LEGAL distribution of music. With the canning of DRM, we should begin to see a plethora of new platforms for online music sales.

The irony in this story? Well, apparently the music industry is frustrated by Apple's pricing structure and wants a larger piece of the pie from music sales. The funny thing is that DRM was really what led to Apple's domination in the legal download market. When online music sales started to take off, the iPod was the dominant MP3 player on the marketplace (and still is, really, though there are more options now), and the only way you could buy and play protected music for the iPod was from Apple.

The only way for the music industry to cut into Apple's iTunes dominance is to offer unrestricted mp3 sales to retailers like Amazon.com, as MP3s can be played on any digital audio device.

What does this mean for the arts community? In my opinion, it won't make it less likely that an orchestra's performance will be shared illegally. However, it does level the playing field. If music executives - the people with money - have to deal with unrestricted audio being freely distributed, perhaps the strategies they devise to curb illegal activity will help to inform the nonprofit world.

In other words, we're all in the same boat, so the rowing should get a little easier for us artists.

Read the full Business Week article.

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End of Year Tech Lists

As we head into the final stretch of 2007, the time has come for a barrage of "end-of-the-year" lists.  Here are a few tech-related lists worth checking out: The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 (PC World)

30 Most Popular Stories of 2007 (PC World)

• Okay, this list contains a plethora of other lists.  I apologize for going all "meta" on you.

The Year in Online Video (Wired)

2007 Foot in Mouth Awards (Wired)

Have a safe and happy New Year!

Holiday Guilt Gifts with a Techie Twist

We hope you are having a happy Christmahannukwanzika.  This post is for all of you out there who need the dreaded "guilt gift".  You know who you are -- you received an unexpected gift from someone and now feel the need to get something for them in return.  Here are four holiday "guilt gift" ideas with a techie twist from our friends at ThinkGeek.com. USB Plasma Ball - Remember the plasma balls that used to be sold in the mall at Spencer Gifts?  Now, they have one that plugs into your computer.  The perfect desk accessory for that eccentric friend.

USB Memory Watch - In addition to displaying the time, this watch helps you carry your valuable data with you at all times.  With 2GB of capacity, it has more than ample storage.

USB Drink Warmer and Chiller - It's perfect and it's simple - a hotplate powered by USB keeps your coffee warm. Flip a switch, and it can keep a cold drink cool.  Great for bipolar caffeine addicts.

Driving LED Emoticon - The Driving LED Emoticon is a battery powered, wirelessly controlled message sign that can be attached to the rear window of your car via the included suction cup.  It can display any one of five different messages - smiling face, frowning face, "Thanks", "Back Off" and "Idiot". Isn't it great that technology allows us to communicate more clearly than finger gestures?