Considering technology's role...

On Saturday, I participated in the most terrifying and exhilarating acting experience of my life: Bricolage Urban Scrawl (BUS). Bricolage is a Pittsburgh-based theater company, and its annual BUS project is a spin on the play-in-a-day concept. Six playwrights gathered on Friday evening, rode city buses for two hours as inspiration, then spent the night writing 15-minute plays. The following day, a slew of actors, including myself, met at Bricolage's space, were handed our scripts and started rehearsing for that evening's performance. These were full productions... not readings. No scripts, no calling for line. Horrifying.

And what was even more horrifying for me was the fact that I had to learn 12 pages of singing and monologues in a matter of hours. Not to mention the fact that the script called for my character to be in his underwear the entire play. It was like a double-nightmare come true: Standing naked in front of people and forgetting all your lines.

But my point is not that I tore off my clothes or nailed every line of my monologues (which I totally did); rather, my point is that interesting and engaging projects like BUS are made much simpler through technology.

The playwrights were able to write from home and email their scripts to the artistic director, rather than hand delivering them after a sleepless night. Also, the production team was able to send each rehearsal party (director and actors) off to different rehearsal spaces around the city and stay coordinated through mobile text messaging.

Yes, this type of theater has been happening since long before computers and cell phones, but I certainly wouldn't want to try and pull something like this off without them. Maybe I'm just spoiled.

Or maybe an event like this would be even better without all of this technology. Would the acting company grow closer? Would the playwrights gain something by sitting around the same space working out their plots?

Technology also has its limits. When 8 PM hit, it was curtain up and no technology could make me look any leaner in the buff. Also, as far as I know, the brain implant that lets an actor upload lines directly to his/her brain has yet to be invented.

Learn more about Bricolage.

Creative Commons: Not perfect but it works

Thought I'd give a little teaser on our upcoming podcast interview with independent musician Jonathan Coulton, known by millions of geeks as the guy who wrote the song Still Alive for the award-winning console game Portal.

Coulton will be featured in Technology in the Arts Podcast episode 38 (to be published Friday, March 14) talking about how he's used Creative Commons and other online practices to build a rabid and connected fan base.

Creative Commons, Coulton explains, allows an artist to apply a standard copyright and then scale back the restrictions. While many musicians and record executives are trying to find ways to lock down their songs, Coulton has found a way to make money giving his music away for free.*

Coulton, and others like him, understand that once you establish a fan community hundreds of thousands strong who are deeply connected to your work, you'll have no problem paying your bills. And Coulton certainly likes people to pay if they can... After all, he has a family to support.

Check out our upcoming podcast for the full Coulton interview, and check out Coulton's songs here.

So what do you think? Can free work for musicians? Should musicians run their own careers?

*Free is fine, but you can also support Coulton's work. Find out how.

Library of Congress Partners With Flickr

The U.S. Library of Congress has formed a partnership with the photo-sharing site Flickr to make more than 3,000 historical photographs from accessible to the public. As reported in a recent issue of Avisio from the American Association of Museums, "The photographs are from two of the Library of Congress's most popular collections, the George Gratham Bain News Service and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. They include high-resolution images—with no known copyright restrictions—of newsworthy events in the 1910s and color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s." The collection is housed in an area of Flickr called The Commons, wherein the site claims, "These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It's called 'no known copyright restrictions.' Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world."

It will certainly be interesting which cultural institutions choose to make their photo collections available through The Commons. As many institutions derive revenue from granting permission to use their photographs for a fee, I wonder to what degree this project will take off beyond the Library of Congress...

Shame on You, User!

Interesting little piece on AppScout.com today featuring highlights from Kyle Monson's interview with Google's user experience designer, Jon Wiley. The bit I found most intriguing is that Wiley discussed user feelings related to unintuitive Web user interfaces (UIs). According to Monson, Wiley mentioned that a frustrating UI can make a user feel bad about him/herself. Often in the design phase, there isn't much thought that goes into the psychological effects of a Web page or navigation, and I think this is another layer that deserves consideration.

This is especially true for arts organizations that typically have an aging constituent base. Do you really want to make someone feel ashamed that they can't figure out your online ticketing system?

An example Google UI:

All of my options are right in front of me and fairly clear.

An example of a bad UI:

No, I do NOT not wish to NOT unsubscribe... what?

Read the full AppScout entry.

CAMT to Attend Nonprofit Technology Conference

CAMT team members will attend NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, LA, March 19-21, 2008. The theme of this year's conference is "Building Community," and CAMT will be connecting with members of the arts community throughout the week. If you are planning to attend the NTC and wish to meet with a CAMT team member in New Orleans, please email us.

Quick Random Tip

I am a big proponent of having an empty email inbox. There is just something Zen about a clean slate. But what do you do with those items that require follow-up work? I recently set up a free Gmail account along the lines of followup@gmail.com (that's just an example, so don't try to be clever and spam it!). Any time an email requires a lengthy, thoughtful response, I reply with, "I'll let you know by XXXX," and BCC my follow-up account.

I also have a rule set up in my email software that moves all messages sent to the follow-up address to a 'Follow-Up' folder. A few times a day, I review that folder and clear my follow-up items. It saves me time, ink and Post-Its, and it also gives me a Zen-fully clean email inbox!

You Got Served... Digitally

We discussed DanceJam, MC Hammer's new online dance community, in episode 30 of our podcast. Well, the beta version of DanceJam is officially open, and users can start publishing videos of their killer moves.

DanceJam, which self-promotes as the "largest dance floor on the planet," allows users to seek out and learn a specific dance, share their own videos and even engage in online dance battles. Now you can make a fool of yourself to a much wider audience than just your parakeet and life-sized cutout of John Wayne.

While DanceJam is certainly aimed at the hip-hop dance crowd, this seems to be the first major dance community geared toward learning and sharing. This is another example of a site and concept to which arts organizations should be paying close attention.

Yes, DanceJam cost millions of dollars to design and develop, but there are affordable ways for arts organizations to collaborate, share and educate. For instance, a dance organization could offer tap lessons as an online series through YouTube and link to the videos from their Web site. Or a literary organization could offer online poetry slams and ask visitors to pick the winners, who could then be featured artists in a spotlight section of the organization's Web site. Just some thoughts...

The point is that arts organizations should continually be reviewing the online practices of for-profit ventures and creatively copying whenever possible.

Keeping It Real

For my final post on TitA, I want to highlight two projects by Brooklyn-based media artist Michael Mandiberg. Mandiberg has developed and is currently expanding a pair of Firefox plug-ins that highlight the true environmental costs of the global economy. He looks specifically at consumer products and transportation.

The first project is Oil Standard, a browser plug-in that converts the prices of goods for sale on any web site into their equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. Prices rise and fall in real-time based on the global market rate for oil. Oil Standard provides an interesting shift in vantage point and could be expanded in the future to show the actual fuel costs involved in manufacturing those goods and bringing them to market.

His second project is Real Costs, another plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel-related web sites. The first iteration adds CO2 emission information -- the US is the world's biggest producer -- to airfare websites such as Orbitz, United Airlines, etc. Future versions of the plug-in will interface with driving directions, car rental and shipping web sites. Mandiberg describes it, "think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions."

Food for thought, indeed.

The Good...& Just the Ugly

Online artist registries are ubiquitous nowadays. In lieu of or in addition to a personal web site, they are a great way to make your work as an artist available to the larger world. Some are open to all, while others are curated by discipline, geographic region, quality of work, etc. I participate in several registries as an artist, but my hands-down favorite is the Irving Sandler Artists File offered by Artists Space in NYC. Developed by artist/former staffer Letha Wilson and her colleagues, the registry went online a couple of years ago with great success. It is free, uncurated, and still fulfills its primary mission marvelously: to showcase artists, their work, and ideas. Plus, the user-friendly search interface enables you tag selected artists and add them to your online portfolio for further review.

Other registries, however, are far less successful. A perfect example of what not to do is Saatchi Online. It is poorly designed, an aesthetic disaster really, and attempts to do too many things for too many people. I question if this registry is even really for/about the artist community. Ambition can be good thing, but never mission creep.

Artists: Be selective about the context in which you show your work. Context always has a profound impact on how your work is perceived and understood. Weigh the pros and cons, and choose wisely.

Hazardous Sites

Good news: Alfred Jensen is now posted on Wikipedia. I worked on a new page for him last night. Creating a new "article", as Wikipedia terms it, however, is no easy feat. It took me a good 30 minutes just to figure out how to post new content. Wikipedia's interface could use a major ergonomic overhaul. Interface aside, I learned one critical thing from posting. It takes a lot of TLC to create an accurate, informative artist profile. After an hour, I barely had any content posted on Jensen. More work to come for sure.

Today's project of note is Superfund365, a web site conceived, designed, and produced by NYC digital media artist Brooke Singer. This project is total sensory overload, in the best possible way. Launched on September 1, 2007, it is part data mapping / part alert system and focuses on toxic sites currently active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Superfund365 profiles one site per day and is slowly making its way across the country from NYC to Hawaii. Today, for instance, the web site profiles MRI Corp (category: industrial waste), a former tin scrap operation based in Tampa, Florida. Information provided on the site includes geographic location, hazardous ranking relative to other sites, clean-up costs when available, site description, timeline, and a kind of interactive pinwheel of contaminants. This was one of the coolest visualizations. The information is thoroughly immersive and guaranteed to send chills up your spine.

Singer has also confronted other tough issues in previous projects, including post-9/11 clean-up in Lower Manhattan, oil consumption by the United States, and camera surveillance, among others. I admire her seamless merger of the socio-political, aesthetic, and technological. We need more artists like her fighting the good fight.