Art Meets Technology in New York City

For many of us in the arts community, especially in cities that feature a wide variety of art opportunities to explore, we are often tasked with a dilemma: what is the best way to find not only events that are close to me, but also events that my friends and I will enjoy the most? As is often the case, this is where technology comes in. The New York Times reported yesterday on a group of young arts professionals in New York City who are using social media to not only find those very events that are the most appealing to them, but also to organize like-minded individuals to join them at the newest buzz-worthy art gallery opening or museum exhibit. The tools and tactics these arts professionals are using can serve as an excellent model for artists and art lovers in any city where the arts are appreciated.

For those who are looking for more targeted art opportunities, there are a number of social media outlets where you can discover more information. The first is Meetup.com, a website where millions of people have created and found scheduled events in their communities. A good section of the site to bookmark is museums.meetup.com, where you will find dozens of groups and thousands of members all across the country who meet regularly and advertise upcoming arts events. For example, here in Pittsburgh one of the many great arts groups is the Pittsburgh Cultural Arts Group, home to 550 members who organize regular arts-related events and shows.

Organizing events and participating in MeetUp activities is not only a great way to find out about upcoming shows; it also serves as a place to meet fellow arts lovers and make contacts in the arts community. Especially for those young people who are either in school or new to a particular city, MeetUp can serve as a conduit to meeting others who share their unique interests. Instead of attending that upcoming exhibit you were looking forward to alone, you know have the opportunity to share the experience with people who share your passion and interests.

So meeting and befriending fellow arts lovers is the first step. Once you have found a group of people committed to discovering the latest and hottest events, what’s next? Instead of using more general platforms like Facebook or even text messages, the young professionals profiled in the NYT piece and many others have used Twitter to share news and events not only with their friends, but with the entire world as well. They use the hashtag #artstech to promote events, share tips and/or links to more information. The great thing about this technology is that it is completely open to everyone: searching for #artstech on Twitter will show you all recent postings by anyone who tweets using that hashtag, whether you follow them on Twitter or not.

The hashtag is one of the most important tools Twitter offers, and you can tailor it to your group’s interests. Are you involved with a small group of museum lovers in Cleveland? Start using the hashtag #ClevelandMuseumLovers when tweeting about local museum events, and as more and more people view the tweet and re-tweet, the more ubiquitous it will become, especially if you have a large Twitter following (for example, one of the hashtags we use here at Technology in the Arts on our Twitter page is #TechArtsReads to share interesting stories about the intersection of arts and technology with our thousands of followers).

But perhaps the best part about using technology and social media to discover new and exciting arts opportunities and events is the ability to use these tools to facilitate and improve the offline relationships that are so important to us. Social media is merely the first important step: meeting new people and developing new contacts is integral to our personal and professional lives, and is bound to open up exciting new opportunities that may not have been available before.

With many museums, arts organizations and galleries using social media to reach out to art lovers, there has never been a better time to use some of these technology tools to better organize and share the exciting new events and opportunities in your area.

What tools do you use to learn about art events in your community, and how do you share this information with fellow arts lovers?

(Photo: CC by Emilio Santacoloma)

The Future of Net Neutrality and What it Means for the Arts Community

Of all the public policy issues relating to the intersection of arts and technology, arguably none is more important and vital to our continued freedom and success than net neutrality. A slew of recent changes and lawsuits have the potential to fundamentally change the way we use the internet, and the arts community stands to be greatly impacted. The idea behind net neutrality is simple: keeping the internet open and treating all data equally. The word “neutrality” means strictly that: whether you are searching for information on Google, streaming video on Netflix or using social networking tools, all of those data “packets” are treated equally and allowed to proceed at the same speed. This is the very idea of the “open internet” that so many in the arts community advocate and support, and it has helped foster innovation and evolution in many different fields, including the arts.

Many of the projects we have highlighted here on the blog in the past week, including art.sy, the Google Art Project and the Tate Trumps iPhone app, are made possible in part because of the freedom that net neutrality provides. Whether it’s an artist finding new outlets for their creativity, using the internet to connect buyers and sellers, or arts organizations using social media to find new fans, the increasing merger between the arts and technology communities is absolutely dependent on the idea that the internet should be free, open and neutral. Doing away with the concept, or diminishing that freedom, would have a severe negative impact on the arts community.

Thankfully, some recent changes have been put into place to strengthen net neutrality. Recent regulations approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are set to take effect November 20, 2011. These regulations include prohibiting broadband providers from blocking lawful web traffic, requiring a greater deal of transparency from broadband providers regarding their network practices, and, most importantly, requiring that broadband providers not discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over consumers’ internet service. You can read more about the new regulations on the FCC’s openinternet.gov website.

While the regulations are not perfect, and do not go as far as many open internet advocates would have liked (for example, there is still some ambiguity regarding the regulations surrounding wireless networks, which the FCC claims is a newer technology and requires more time to appropriately measure how much regulation is required), they are a welcome step in the right direction.

Before we get to November 20 however, several lawsuits have been filed in the past few months, seeking to block these regulations. And to no one’s surprise, it has been the telecommunications companies that have sought to block the regulations from being put into place, while at the same time claiming that they are the true parties interested in keeping the internet “open.”

The most recent lawsuit comes from Verizon, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country, who are claiming that while they are committed to an open and secure internet, they object to what they call “sweeping” regulations that apply to the entire telecommunications industry. This is not the first time Verizon has filed suit against the new regulations; they also sought to remove the new regulations earlier this year, but the case was thrown out in April because the regulations were not published in the Federal Register until this past August.

The lawsuit is pending, and whatever decision is reached by the courts will have a lasting impact on the future of internet freedom. Even if the FCC and open internet advocates prevail, the fight by the telecom companies against the new regulations will surely continue, as they seek to continue their years-long crusade against the open internet and restrict whatever types of internet data they see fit.

We here at Technology for the Arts have long advocated for net neutrality and communicated why we feel the issue is of vital importance, and as the fight over the open internet heats up, it’s important that when we talk about issues of arts advocacy and what issues are at the top of our agenda, that we include net neutrality. While the recent regulations approved by the FCC are a welcome step forward, there is a still a lot of work to be done to make sure that the future of the internet remains open and neutral. You can find out more about net neutrality at openinternet.gov, and we encourage you to share the information with others in the arts community.

The arts community has long benefitted from net neutrality, and the continued innovation we have seen in recent years is dependent on it staying that way.

(Photo: CC by markrabo)

Playing with Art: Tate Trumps iPhone App

It’s no secret that there are apps for everything and art museums are no exception. The Mattress Factory lets you ask is this art and subsequently allows you to answer that question. The Andy Warhol Museum lets you put yourself into a painting with their D.I.Y. POP app. The Tate Modern has Tate Trumps to let you battle your friends with works of art. Yes, that’s right. Released in June of 2010, Tate Trumps is an application designed to increase viewer interaction with the works within the Tate Modern with a “bloody fight to the death”. Unlike the aforementioned apps, which allow users to interact with art anywhere, Tate Trumps only works within the confines of the Tate Modern.

Described as a “digital card game”, Tate Trumps is a free iPhone app for up to three players, which encourages users to travel the museum and collect points by looking at works of art. Players collect seven works of art and no work of art can be collected twice. A game of Tate Trumps has a minimum time requirement of a half hour, though there is no maximum time limit. Users meet up at the end of their adventure and play a game of trumps against each other, using the works of art they’ve accumulated.

Tate Trumps includes three modes. Battle Mode has users judge how useful a work of art would be in a fight, if it were to come to life. Players search for works of art that are exhilarating, menacing, or absurd in Mood Mode. The final mode, Collector, is for players that “wish they had a gallery of their own”, as they search for pieces that are famous, recently produced, or practical to house.

The viral video for Tate Trumps promises that “galleries will never be the same again”, which incites the question, do galleries need to change? Tate Trumps is a fun, light-hearted way to look at art with the intention of increasing viewer interactivity with the pieces. Does it accomplish this, or is this application trivializing the experience of the museum?

There aren’t any easy answers, and there may not be a right answer. I feel that Tate Trumps has strong potential to accomplish its goal of connecting the viewer with the works. The time limit and inability to repeat pieces in a game means that in a full game, players will spend at least a half hour looking at a minimum of twenty-one works of art. The different modes force the player into critically analyzing the works of art, on multiple levels. The idea of this application may not be appropriate for every museum setting, but could it work for you? Would you play an app game in an art museum?

(Photo: Screenshot from Tate Trumps)

Protecting Federal Funding for the Arts

In Washington, an era of budget austerity and renewed calls for less government spending have led to increased fears that the arts, long protected from budget cuts, will see its federal funding further decreased for the coming fiscal year.

While Congress has passed several temporary budget measures this year, the most recent continuing resolution ends on November 18th, when the government is set to run out of money. Under the terms of the recent debt-ceiling deal reached by both parties, Congress has committed to cutting $21 billion in spending from the Fiscal Year 2012 budget, and it is widely expected that the bulk of these cuts will come from what’s referred to as “non-defense discretionary spending,” which includes areas such as education, infrastructure, and most pertinent to our community, the arts.

The arts community went through a similar struggle last year, when the National Endowment for the Arts saw its Fiscal Year 2011 funding reduced to $155 million, a $13 million reduction from the year before. For the upcoming fiscal year, the numbers look even worse: a bill passed by the House of Representatives in July would further cut FY2012 NEA funding to $135 million, which would represent a 13 percent decrease and the deepest cut to the agency in 16 years.

Despite the FY2012 budget being due next month, there is still a long way to go. President Obama has requested in his FY2012 budget proposal that the NEA be funded at $146 million, which represents a cut from the FY2011 figures, but is less severe than the House version that was passed in July.

With Congress returning to session this week, it’s important for us in the arts community to use technology to reach out to our members of Congress and ask them to support funding for the arts. There are a number of easy ways you can do this:

• First, contact your member of Congress, either by letter, e-mail or by phone. The easiest way to do this is through the Americans for the Arts website, where you can send a personalized letter to your Congressman and U.S. Senators that includes several talking points about the impact that arts funding has on our communities and nation as a whole.
• Second, join the Arts Action Fund, which is at the forefront of advocating and lobbying for increased funding for arts programs and education. It’s free, and is an invaluable resource providing updates on the efforts in Congress and around the country.
• Third, share the news with a friend on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. One way to do this is by following the Arts Action Fund’s Arts Vote 2012 campaign, dedicated to including arts and arts education issues in the 2012 political campaign. Search for #artsvote on Twitter for recent updates.

This isn’t the first time you’ve heard from Technology in the Arts about lobbying Congress to protect arts funding, and given the current political climate, it certainly won’t be the last. This is not a partisan issue, but is instead an issue that unites all of us who are passionate about the arts community and protecting funding for the next generation of artists and performers.

While the long-term budget deficit is something that we can all agree needs to be dealt with, doing so on the backs of such groups as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities will only serve to further decimate arts education programs at the state and local levels that have already endured painful budget cuts in recent years.

In the newfound era of budget austerity in Washington, any assumptions we had about federal arts funding being kept at past levels are gone. In order to protect the future of arts funding, the fight starts now.

(Photo: CC by kevin dooley)

The Art of Participatory Culture - Learning to Play WITH Our Audiences

This article was originally a speech for TEDxMichiganAve delivered by David Dombrosky on May 7, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Confucius. He said, “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” This quote has become one of my touchstones because it reminds me that: life is experiential, and the most resonant experiences in my life were ones in which I was an active participant. The first time I sang a solo for a public audience. Writing and performing a solo theatrical performance in college. Learning how to tango earlier this year.

If the arts community agrees that we want audiences to have deeply resonant experiences with the arts, then the question arises, “How can artists and arts organizations go beyond telling their audiences about the work or showing the work to patrons and actually INVOLVE them in the work?”

Technological advances over the past decade have propelled us into a highly participatory culture, wherein individuals no longer simply consume culture, but they now actively produce and contribute to culture. In 2006, media scholar Henry Jenkins and his colleagues published a white paper entitled Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture in which they described five defining elements for participatory culture.

Jenkin's 5 Traits of Participatory Culture. Image from OpenParenthesis.org

With this article, I would like to address the question of how artists and arts organizations can involve audiences in their work by highlighting how a number of artists and organizations exemplify the defining elements of participatory culture.

#1 – “A participatory culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.”

We see evidence of this every day. The number of free web tools and mobile apps that have been released over the past decade is astronomical. With each successive release, the barrier to artistic expression and engagement is lowered that much more.

One recently released, free tool called Broadcastr allows people to record 3-minute audio segments and pin them to specific locations on a map that is available on their website as well as through their mobile application.

Many of you may know the Neo-Futurists, a theatre performance group originally established here in Chicago. Their New York City chapter has a show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind which contains 30 plays performed in 60 minutes. Earlier this year, they used Broadcastr to create 30 plays in 30 blocks. So if you go to Second Avenue in Manhattan, you can walk from Houston Street to 29th Street and experience 30 location-specific, interactive pieces of audio content. Some of them direct you to do things, some of them are little songs, some of them are plays with multiple voices, and some of them reference their locations very directly.

The technology required to do this? Either a computer with speakers and a microphone OR a smartphone. That’s it.

#2 - A participatory culture has strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

Over the past two years, choral composer Eric Whitacre has worked with singers from around the world to create “virtual choirs” for the performance of his compositions. Participating singers download a PDF version of the sheet music for their vocal part. They watch a YouTube video of Whitacre conducting the music, record their vocal tracks, then send the tracks to Whitacre for final editing. Whitacre and his producer then combine all of the vocal tracks together into a single audio composition and syncs it with a video featuring a virtual riser with the floating faces of each of the singers performing the piece.

His most recent virtual choir composition entitled “Sleep” features 2052 singers from 58 different countries. As of today, the video has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube. His 2009 virtual choir composition “Lux Aurumque” has had over 2.4 million views.

#3 - A participatory culture has some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

One organization which exemplifies this element is the San Francisco Symphony. With their Community of Music Makers program, the symphony serves amateur adult musicians and promotes active participation in music-making and lifelong learning. Community of Music Makers includes workshops and events for amateur vocalists and instrumentalists in symphony’s performance hall, where participants are able to improve their skills. They also receive live and online coaching sessions from the symphony’s musicians and artistic staff. A chamber music convening service serves as a clearinghouse to help individual players and ensembles connect each other and identify performance opportunities in the local community.

The lesson here? Learn to love amateurs as they are likely to be a strong core from which to further develop your audience.

#4 – In a participatory culture, members believe that their contributions matter.

The Brooklyn Museum pioneered crowd-curation in 2008 with its photography exhibition Click! First launched through an open call for artists to submit photos related to the theme of “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” the artwork was then made available online for anyone to curate. This year, they are taking another spin on this concept with the exhibition Split Second: Indian Paintings, which invited the Brooklyn Museum’s online community to participate in a project that will result in a small installation of Indian paintings from the Museum’s permanent collection in July 2011.

The first stage of the project explores split-second reactions: in a timed trial, participants were asked to select which painting they prefer from a randomly generated pair of images. Next, participants were asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a scale. In the final stage, participants were asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside typical interpretive text. Each part of the exercise aims to examine how a different type of information—or a lack thereof—might affect a person's reaction to a work of art.

Once the exhibit opens in July 2011, visitors will be able to view a small selection of the paintings that generated the most controversial and dynamic responses during the evaluation process, accompanied by a visualization and analysis of the data collected.

With both of these experiments from the museum, the online participants had a clear understanding of how their contributions would matter to the overall project.

In April of this year, choreographer Jonah Boaker debuted FILTER at the Ferst Center for the Performing Arts at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. FILTER explores how the audience can serve as a collaborative filter for the performance through the use of a mobile application.

Interview eith Jonah Bokaer about FILTER.

Boaker worked closely with students from the university’s Music Technology Program to develop MassMobile, a smartphone app that acts as an interactive platform for audience members to participate by affecting the stage in different ways. Boaker’s approach to participation actually allows the audience to co-create the artistic experience in real-time.

#5 - In a participatory culture, members feel some degree of social connection with one another

Okay, so my absolute favorite exemplar of this element is the MP3 Experiment created and hosted by Improv Everywhere in New York City. Begun in 2003, the concept is quite simple. Improv Everywhere puts an original mp3 file online (usually around 45 minutes long) that people download and transfer to their iPods. Participants then: synchronize their watches to a clock on the organization's website, venture out to the same public location, and blend in with the crowd. At the predetermined time, everyone presses play. Participants then carry out coordinated instructions delivered to their headphones via narrator “Steve,” and everyone around them tries to figure out what in the world is going on.

In 2010, over 3,000 people participated in a MP3 Experiment in Midtown Manhattan. The event started in retail stores and progressed to Bryant Park for the narrator’s surprise birthday. The event ended with a massive toilet-paper-mummy dance party.

The next Mp3 Experiment in New York is scheduled for July 16, 2011. Stay tuned to the Improv Everywhere site if you're in New York and wish to participate.

Something to consider about all of the artists and arts organizations that I’ve mentioned here is that they all invite the audience to play.

As an industry, we have spent so much of our time playing FOR the audience or playing TO the audience. In order for our sector to thrive in this participatory culture, we must now invest a significant amount of time and energy exploring ways to play WITH the audience.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 1

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy? This is part 1 of our three-part series on social media analytics tools.

This is your brain on social media. Image from Your Social Move.

Social media marketing is an artistic endeavor as well as a scientific one. We use the right side of our brains to create the perfect message that will engage our audience and the left brain to crunch numbers on views, comments, etc. We know instinctively how to talk to our audiences, but we don’t always know how they are reacting to that message beyond a peripheral “feel” of the importance and sentiment behind the comment or action. There is often not an obvious way to categorize or quantify reactions to gain insights into your audience’s thoughts and feelings and to chart your own impact.

With the economic situation as it is right now, nonprofit employees are under more pressure than ever maximize their productivity and capacity. With technology, and social media in particular, as the most nebulous, mysterious, and constantly shifting elements of an organizations’ marketing/PR operation, it can be frustrating to track social media interactions and to gain resources from management for social media. Often initiatives face “death by delay” or end up being based on assumptions rather than data. At the Center for Arts Management and Technology, it’s one of the issues we talk about most often amongst ourselves and to clients.

It’s not just the arts, though.

In the non-profit arts world, we have the tendency to think that we are insulated and that our problems are due to a lack of time or resources. Some of these questions are ones that the social media field as a whole is trying to answer. While in the Masters of Arts Management program, I participated in a Social Media Analytics class where we had real-life clients. My team was working on the account of a major sportswear manufacturer. At first I thought that the questions that this company would have about social media would be very different than the ones that I worked on at the Center for Arts Management and Technology for our mostly non-profit arts clients. However, the more we worked with our client, the more similarities I noticed in the questions they asked about ROI, tracking, and analysis of social media initiatives.

Throughout the research that I’ve done and the conversations that I’ve had, I’ve heard social media right now described it as “the wild west”. Like web analytics was in its infancy, we are just now building the hallmarks and benchmarks for social media analytics. It’s an exciting time, and an extremely fast-paced one. If you have been keeping up with how businesses are using social media for the last five years or so, you’ve seen Facebook dominate MySpace, then Twitter edge its way in. As we moved to mobile, a slew of geo-location platforms arrived on the scene and now we’re trending toward game-based platforms.

As much as social media trends change, it is imperative to have a social media strategy, not just to spend your marketing dollars most effectively, but also to get to know your audience better. How do you get a social media strategy? You need information first. That’s where analytics come in. There is a wealth of information about your patrons hidden in their interactions on social media—like your own on-going focus group. But (A) how do you get to that information and (B) how do you draw conclusions from it?

A. As of today, what are your options for social media tracking? There are thousands of analytics tools out there and more being developed every day. Nonprofit arts organizations are faced with a dual bottom line: to serve the community and to create, present or preserve great art. Which tools are most useful to a nonprofit arts organization in gauging how they meeting the dual bottom line? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take a look at some popular analytics tools and how to evaluate the tools out there given your organization’s more specific goals.

B. How can you use analytics data to make management decisions? There are many ways to slice and dice the data you might get from those tools. What are some strategies for using the current tools available? How can you make a confident decision about what is essentially a moving target? Given the tools and tactics in the above questions, when is it worth it to pay for analytic tools? In Part 3, we’ll address the problem of structuring your social media tracking efforts to find information relevant to your day-to-day decisions.

Upcoming Webinar – Inspiring Online Audiences: Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

The word "engage" gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean? Our upcoming webinar takes a look at how arts organizations can inspire their audiences through online platforms by focusing on a case study from Jacob's Pillow, which recently launched their own online exhibit.

Inspiring Online Audiences: Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive May 9, 2011 2pm-3:30pm Eastern Register today ($25)

How can online engagement with arts audiences be meaningful, inspiring, and ultimately worth all the effort we put into the online space? Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival presents their recently launched online exhibit Dance Interactive, a collection of videos from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most visionary artists. Looking through the lens of crafting "inspiration", this webinar will help you define for your own organization what that catch-all term "engage" really means and the greater challenge of how to measure it.

Panelists:

Connie Chin is General Manager of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance festival, school, archives, community programs, and National Historic Landmark, which recently was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts. At the Pillow, Connie’s special projects have included Virtual Pillow, the Nonprofit Finance Fund's Leading for the Future initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation’s Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation initiative. She has consulted as a Peer Advisor for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and served on grants panels in Connecticut and Westchester. Prior to the Pillow, she was in brand management at Kraft and Ocean Spray; and has also worked at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and New York Foundation for the Arts. As a dancer she has performed with Bill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Muna Tseng, Sincha Hong, Ze'eva Cohen, and others. Connie holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.B.A from Yale School of Management.

Lisa Niedermeyer is an independent consultant currently managing digital projects for Jacob's Pillow, home to America's longest running international dance festival. Lisa also serves on the advisory board of Movement Media, a NYC-based organization that empowers dance artists as curators, creators, and strategists of media. Past project highlights include working with the online marketing team at Soundwalk, an international media firm specializing in sound art and iPhone audio tours, as well as collaborating with Jane Comfort and Company (with whom she performed for 7 years) as digital content director for the company's 30th anniversary rebuild of their website.