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Those of you who actually visit TechnologyInTheArts.org rather than simply subscribing to our RSS feeds may have noticed a change to the site earlier today. We just completed the first phase of a graphics and content overhaul to bring the Center for Arts Management and Technology’s various services together in one convenient location. We welcome you to explore the site and provide us with feedback by clicking here or using the Contact Us button on the main menu at any time.

Next week, I'll describe in detail the changes we've made and how we've tapped into the full potential of WordPress.

By the way, subscribing to our blog and/or podcast feeds is a good thing and not at all vile like I made it seem earlier in this post. Find out how to subscribe and have all of our content sent directly to you!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.