This photo was snapped just this morning down in 100 Acres by Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Lisa Freiman and promptly tweeted by CEO Max Anderson:

Steel workers gather for a photo opp. on top of Free Basket by Los Carpinteros

Take for instance how social media has reshaped the world of journalism. “Citizen journalism” is the concept of members of the public “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.” Examples of this can be seen through blogs, twitter, and camera phone images.

As a museum, we can employ this same idea. Staff, artists and visitors can capture events as they happen with their iPhone or a Flip Video. The following images were captured on artist duo Type A’s cell phones and then uploaded to Facebook:

The top ring of "Team Building (Align)" casts a shadow

Astronomer Brian Murphy of Butler U. and Andrew of Type A work out some calculations to place the second ring for "Team Building (Align)"

So, budding art journalists, here are some tips from caffienatedtraveller.com to get you started:

• Acknowledge the artwork and museum in the photo credits. It is time for bloggers to step up and put on a professional face.
• Post great images and not the family snap shots on your blog. Why discredit a good art exhibit.
• Flash photography? Don’t go there unless you have explicit permission from the museum. Not even when you think you’re alone.
• Leave the fanatical blogger psyche at the entry door. Spend some zen time in the moment, with the art and the space and then shoot.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking for your tweets, status updates and image uploads. And let’s continue to blur the lines together, shall we?

I’ve always been into art in the streets. There is something special about the mysterious, obscure & dangerous methods it takes to create graffiti art. Wild Style is one of my favorite movies to this date. Some call it vandalism, others call it art. True graffiti writers don’t give a sh*t what you call it, so long as they “get up”.  In this ever changing world of technology and open networks of communication, it should be no surprise that graffiti has evolved along w/ the digital revolution (known as the ever-cliche “2.0″). The world wide web and it’s army of geeks are rising to the occasion.

I’ve noticed a big surge of digital tools, and open source networks of communication for graffiti artists. Lucky for you I have dug deep into my digital crate of delicious links and have compiled them into a… you guessed it, list!

• F.A.T.
  Every techno-savvy artist cutting the edge should have this site bookmarked.  “The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. Release early, often and with rap music. This is Notorious R&D.”
• EyeWriter Initiative
  It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.
• Hektor
  Hektor is a portable Spray-paint Output Device for laptop computers.
• ROBOTAGGER
  A labor-saving device for graffiti artists. An assistive tool or telematic proxy for taggers working in harsh environments. Long-needed relief for graffiti artists with RSI.
• Graffiti Analysis
  “A digital graffiti blackbook designed for documenting more than just ink.”
• DustTag (Graffiti Analysis iPhone Edition)
  A pocket sized digital graffiti blackbook designed for documenting more than just ink.
• LRPD Vandalsquad
  Be sure to check out the online graffiti tool, Graffiti Studio, here.
• The Exchange
  An international group of style writers trade sketches of each other’s moniker and it is documented here. Worth a look indeed.
• Stencil Revolution
  An online stencil art community resource.
• Projection Bombing
  One day, you will see this at the IMA. Mark my words, but dqmot.
• Wooster Collective
  This has been a go-to blog for the graffiti community since 2001. One of the best. “This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and as always feel free to share any good links I have left out. If you are incorporating technology in a new way into your art, please do tell!

Born mid-1995 in Southern California, GeoCities lived on the world wide web and worked it’s way into the lives of millions by introducing casual internet surfers to pop-ups, pop-unders, animated gifs, and broken html markup until it’s death in 2009.

Survivors include Yahoo, WebCrawler, AOL, Twitter, and countless others. GeoCities was preceded in death by Jeeves, Compuserve, Netscape (the browser), and Angelfire.

Memorial services will be held at http://web.archive.org. Burial will be at http://geocities.yahoo.com/. Relatives, friends, memes, trolls, and search bots are welcome.

There are several websites that made a splash via GeoCities. Kate confessed to having a fan page of some sort at one point in time… and I had a few pages lurking out there somewhere too, though I’m struggling to remember what they were. Without GeoCities, we wouldn’t have the Icy Hot Stuntaz. Thankfully, the content will never die. Find a nice collection of screen captures of classic GeoCities websites at Internet Archaeology.

OK, not so much a fight, as a discussion. And when I say ‘in public’ I mean on my Facebook wall.

It all started when I retweeted @anarchivist (see below) and then it ended up on my Facebook page too. Anyway, the ‘discussion’ played out like this:

ME: I agree. RT @anarchivist hates the phrase “social media.” all online media is inherently social even if you dont want it to be.

Ben: to be social is to have an understanding or acknowledgment between two or more people. so then simply watching a movie on line would not be considered social but definitely media.
Wed at 2:33pm

ME: but what if you can comment and/or share that video with your friends using FB, Twitter, etc?
Wed at 2:41pm

Ben: that is social. but watching the movie and commenting on it are two separate things. right?
Wed at 2:56pm

ME: but the fact that it exists online DOES mean that. The fact that it has potential to be shared makes it social.
Wed at 3:50pm

The argument ended there. But did I win it?

Let’s take a look at what good old Wikipedia has to say:

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

I agree with Ben that the simple act of watching a video online is not social. But because of the way the web had evolved,  now any media that exists online can be social media, whether it was intended to be used that way or not. An article, picture, or video is posted and you can share it numerous ways (email it, Facebook it, Twitter it, Digg it, etc.)

Or is my friend right? Are they two completely different things? Maybe the real question here is why are we so eager to label everything? The IMA is always on the look out for cutting edge ways to interact with with the public. Call them trends, call them buzzwords, call them The Next Big Thing… we’ve employed just about every ‘social media’ tactic that makes sense (and it’s working!)  So maybe it doesn’t matter and if it works, it works.

I’m not sure why anarchivist’s statement and the resulting debate got me so riled up, but maybe the ‘anythings possible’ sentiment of ‘all online media is social media’ simply gives me the warm-fuzzies.

Please comment below and help me prove my friend wrong, er… help us sort things out so we can look each other in the eye again.

Did you know 73% of Americans use the internet at least occasionally? That is a lot of people! So using texting, email, blogs, social networks, etc. for politics was an obvious and very smart decision.

One of the untold stories of our new President Elect, imho, is the fact that for the first time in 8 years, we have a leader who embraces and, more importantly, actually uses & understands the same technology as you and me.

Technology, specifically the Internet (not Internets!), has never played a more important role in the campaign for an American President. The list of internet technologies I could find which President Obama utilized were, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, MyBatanga, FaithBase and his very own social networking site MyBarackObama. And, I’m sure there are several more I’m missing!

More importantly, President Obama compiled an email list of over 10 million supporters according to Wired. And even more exciting, this list will live on beyond the campaign trail!

As part of the presidential transition, Obama officials are looking to add a significant “new media” component to the White House communications operation. The campaign employed 95 people in its Internet operation, building a user-friendly Web site that served as a platform for grass-roots activities and distributed statements, policy positions and footage of Obama events. The White House Web operation will follow a similar but probably more ambitious path, transition officials said. – Wired

I think the significance of using these new mediums to deliver a political message is that they have the ability to bypass traditional slanted media outlets and the message can be more pure as it can be delivered directly to the people, therefore bypassing the Sean Hannitys of the world. Trust me, that’s a win for both Republicans and Democrats.

Finally, Washington gets it. Can you imagine getting an important real-time text message from your government? Now if only I had an iPhone. This is way too good to be true… somebody pinch me.