Stage is set for Technology in the Arts - Canada

Everything is ready for tomorrow's conference.  Brad starts off the conference with his podcasting workshop in the morning; Josh teaches an afternoon session on content management systems; and I bounce around throughout the day to make sure session leaders have everything they need.

If you are not able to join us in person, perhaps you can attend a virtual panel session in Second Life.

The image above shows the set for Saturday's panel being held in Second Life on "Virtual Concerts in the Park" which you can attend in Second Life on Saturday at 8:00AM SLT (Second Life Time = Pacific Time) by going to this SLURL - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sea%20Turtle%20Island/46/26/22/ - which will take you to the telehub behind the amphitheatre.  Hope to see you there!

Who wants to be a curator?

Many arts organization Web sites offer users the opportunity to contribute to their online programming in some way, but it's typically an artificial engagement practice. Rarely do users ever offer up anything truly artistic, and it's even rarer still for the organization to showcase the work in a meaningful way. However, the Brooklyn Museum is taking the idea of "you" as the online curator to a new level and letting Web visitors select the pieces for an upcoming exhibit in its physical space. Its upcoming photography show Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibit lets users register and adjudicate work that was accepted as part of a March 2008 open call. The submitting photographers were asked to "consider Brooklyn's transformation over the years, its past and its present, and submit a photograph that captured the 'changing face(s) of Brooklyn.'"

Now that the call for submissions has closed, the Museum has launched a Web interface that walks users through the registration and evaluation process. Rather than just showing images and asking users to vote for their favorites, though, the Brooklyn Museum offers evaluation guidelines. This is a real exhibit, and the Museum wants thoughtful consideration from its curators.

The Click! curator interface presents the image, its title and a description. Clicking the "Viewing Size" functions will increase or decrease the image size for those who wish to adjust for their screen resolutions or who wish to scrutinize the photo's detail. Users can also see thumbnails of the next images to be evaluated.

When the "curator" is ready to evaluate an image, he or she needs only to adjust the evaluation slider between "Most Effective" and "Least Effective" based on two questions presented by the Museum:

1. How well does the image illustrate or express the theme "The Changing Faces of Brooklyn"?
2. Do you consider this an exceptional image, given the technique and aesthetics?

"Curators" have until May 23, 2008, to submit their evaluations, and the exhibit will run from June 27-August 10, 2008, at the Brooklyn Museum.

While it's true that the crowd-curated approach doesn't work for all types of exhibits, the Brooklyn Museum has chosen a medium and theme that works well with an audience evaluation process. They ask about "technique and aesthetic," but the primary question is about Brooklyn's transformation.

So I guess my questions are:

1. Though it certainly isn't necessary to be an art expert to be qualified to evaluate the Click! submissions, should one at least be fairly familiar with Brooklyn?
2. Is this type of non-expert evaluation - as one recent blog reader mentioned - contributing to the dumbing down of art?
3. If enough people evaluate the work, does the group consensus validate that piece for a public show?

I'd be most interested to hear what formally educated curators have to say about the crowd-curated concept.

Some Wednesday morning humor...

Box.net, providers of free online file storage and collaboration services, recently released this humorous image that sums up the shift in perception many in the tech world have had toward Google. The piece of "art" is called Googolopoly. (Be sure to click the image for a full-size version, because reading the game board is the best part.)

"Guitar Hero" for Orchestral Music

Have you ever wondered, "Wouldn't it be great if someone created a 'Guitar Hero'-styled game for other forms of music?" Well, Immersion Music, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization located in the Boston area, has done just that with the game Virtual Maestro.

According to an April 13th article on PittsburghTrib.com, "Two 'Virtual Maestro' exhibits have been appearing in concert-hall lobbies across the [United States] since November as part of a project created by Swiss banking giant UBS, which often sponsors classical music events and organizations, to increase interest in classical music..."

Bravo!

Wikipedia's Credibility

A documentary by Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelenhat premiered recently at the Next Web conference has been posted on YouTube. Clocking in at about 45 minutes, it's not a quick clip, but it's definitely worth your time.

ASCII Stars Wars

In honor of the late Sir Alec Guinness, born 94 years ago today on April 2, 1914, I'm posting a link to a blog on LifeHacker.com that tells you how to view an ASCII (text-only) version of the first Star Wars movie - Episode IV. By the way, for those who need to know how to get to the command line that the instructions mention:� for Windows, go to Start -> Run and type "cmd" and hit enter; for Mac OS X, open "Terminal" located in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

Now if we can just convince the guy who did this (Simon Jansen) to turn other classic films in to ASCII art.� Blade Runner, perhaps?

To watch the ASCII Star Wars without having to use your command line or to learn more about Simon Jansen's other projects (like a life-size, beer brewing version of Futurama's Bender) visit http://www.asciimation.co.nz.

Photoshop Express: Browser-Based Photo Manipulation

Adobe recently released a slimmed down, browser-based version of its king-of-all-photo-editing software Photoshop, so I decided to take it for a test drive. Photoshop Express features a very simple interface, and upon signing in, the user is immediately presented with a clear set of options.

PS Express also provides a nice photo library so you can easily edit uploaded photos, create albums and email your best shots to friends.

A very nice feature of the library (see the left column of the above screenshot) is the ability to add photos from PS Express directly to your Facebook, Photobucket and/or Picasa account(s). You can also instantly create HTML links to the images so they can be easily embedded into Web pages.

Hovering over an image displays a list of options for that photo. For instance, you can edit, rotate, email, link and download images directly from this list.One of the better aspects of PS Express is the fact that there are multiple ways to accomplish a particular task. For example, if I simply want to rotate an image, I can simply select "Rotate" from the initial drop down list of choices, and I don't have to navigate all the way into the editing area.

But the editing area is, of course, the best part of PS Express. Though the options are definitely not as robust as those in the desktop version of Photoshop, there are more than enough editing tools for novice photographers or anyone wanting to make quick touch-ups. Some of the tools include cropping, exposure adjustment, red-eye removal, saturation settings, white balance and color manipulation.

Yes, that is me standing beside a toilet in a prison cell. No, I did not get arrested. I was visiting the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA.

Editing an image is incredible easy, and any changes you make are reversible. When you select an editing tool, you're presented with a menu of possible results. In the image below, I've selected "Saturation," and PS Express has shown me all of the variations I can achieve.

Photoshop Express is currently in beta (public testing), and the service is completely free. I strongly recommend this online tool for both its basic photo editing and image management tools.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Deadline Approaching for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration

An announcement from the Mellon Foundation: The deadline for nominations for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards) is April 14, 2008. The MATC Awards consist of up to ten $50,000 or $100,000 prizes, which a receiving institution can use in a variety of ways to continue its technology leadership. The awards honor not-for-profit institutions that have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the development of open source software for one or more of the constituencies served by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the arts and humanities in higher education; research libraries, museums; performing arts organizations; and conservation biology.

An online nomination form and more information may be found at http://matc.mellon.org. The nominations are public: the community is invited to visit the site and comment.

CAMT to Attend Museums and the Web 2008

CAMT team members will attend Museums and the Web 2008 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 9-12, 2008. The annual conference explores "the on-line presentation of cultural, scientific and heritage content across institutions and around the world." If you are planning to attend MW '08, please email CAMT, as we'd love to connect with you.

Wired.com's Semi-Monthly Photo Contests

The folks at Wired.com have decided to host a series of semi-monthly photo contests for reader-submitted photography. I have been really impressed with the photography that has been submitted. Check out submissions for their current photo contest "Show Us Your Best Night Photo." Maybe I should submit this photo from the 2008 Toronto Winter Festival?

They just wrapped up a contest for reader self-portraits and posted the top photos as determined by Wired.com's photo department as well as the readers' picks for best self-portrait.

Wired.com is using a Reddit widget as the upload mechanism for their readers' photo submissions. Of course, Conde Nast Publications (Wired's parent company) owns Reddit - so they got to use the widget for free; but other organizations could use a simple contact form wherein the applicant places information and a link to their photo on Flickr or Photobucket .

What a great way for magazines, museums, galleries, art centers, and other organizations with a visual art connection to engage their audience and acquire user-generated content!

2008 NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference

Today kicked off the 2008 NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. On my way toward downtown, I took this photo of Jackson Square on my cell phone.

I spent about three hours in the Science Fair (normally called an "exhibit hall" at other conferences) absorbing as much as I possible could about the various technology product and service providers who work with nonprofit organizations. I met some people doing really wonderful work, and I hope to introduce them to you as sponsors for our 2008 Technology in the Arts Conference in October! Click here for a list of companies in residence at this year's Science Fair.

After the Science Fair, I went to dinner with my fellow CAMT teammates Haebin and Guillermo, who wanted to find a place to get seafood and alligator. We ended up at the Cajun Cabin on Bourbon Street. Check out Haebin playing the spoons with the restaurants cajun/zydeco band!

After dinner, we ventured further into the wilds of the French Quarter. It turns out the Haebin has an fun-loving inner rock star who just had to get up onstage at the Cat's Meow to do a karaoke rendition of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Cyndi Lauper would have been proud.

On my walk back to the hotel, I passed an interesting gallery on Royal Street and took a photo of this large scale facial sculpture.

Day One - Thumbs up for me.

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.