This isn't really about an arts organization, but it has a lot of interesting examples that show the evolution of copyright law and music distribution over the last decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/technology/08pandora.html
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
How Community Arts Organizations Are Using Social Media
http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/community-arts-organizations/
"As more diverse organizations dive into web marketing, for-profit organizations can learn well from their indie counterparts about experimentation and innovation online. A few notable community and arts groups have been inventive in their use of social media and truly collaborative in their outreach in ways that even the most seasoned corporate marketer can appreciate.
Among the arts and community organizations using social media thoughtfully and in big ways (which aren’t necessarily representative of their limited budgets) are independent artists and companies in photography, film, modern art, radio and craft. They’ve capitalized on the audiovisual nature of the Web to showcase the storytelling and community-building aspects of their work, and the results are worth a pass-along."technologyinthearts.org
I'm sure everyone has used this or at least seen it, but I figured I would post it anyway, just in case!
http://www.technologyinthearts.org/
http://www.technologyinthearts.org/
From Pocket to Stage, Music in the Key of iPhone
Keeping with the same theme but in music instead of visual arts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/technology/05orchestra.html?_r=2&scp=6&sq=music&st=Search
"The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra’s performance on Thursday used the most unusual of instruments: Apple iPhones amplified by speakers attached to small fingerless gloves."
"While computer music composers once spent hours programming giant mainframes to synthesize a single sound, advances in hardware and software have brought powerful and easy-to-use music tools to personal computers and now, to smartphones."
This article is a fascinating statement about the era that we live in. The arguments, of course, are for the expressiveness, subtle, and response one can get out of a traditional instrument. "Nothing is better than a cello at playing the cello".
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/technology/05orchestra.html?_r=2&scp=6&sq=music&st=Search
"The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra’s performance on Thursday used the most unusual of instruments: Apple iPhones amplified by speakers attached to small fingerless gloves."
"While computer music composers once spent hours programming giant mainframes to synthesize a single sound, advances in hardware and software have brought powerful and easy-to-use music tools to personal computers and now, to smartphones."
This article is a fascinating statement about the era that we live in. The arguments, of course, are for the expressiveness, subtle, and response one can get out of a traditional instrument. "Nothing is better than a cello at playing the cello".
David Hockney turns the iPad into an art form
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/11/david-hockney-ipad-drawings/print
"David Hockney, one of the most influential British artists of the past century, has already been using the Brushes application on the device to draw pictures and email the results to friends.
"David Hockney, one of the most influential British artists of the past century, has already been using the Brushes application on the device to draw pictures and email the results to friends.
The 72-year-old, who lives in Bridlington, was a well-known user of the application on his iPhone, and would similarly create 'paintings' before emailing them to around 20 friends."
He sees the iPad as a way for drawing by hand to "make a comeback rather than an indication that the new technology would lead to the skill diminishing".
This is an interesting perspective, especially from an artist, in a time where there is so much controversy about how technology diminishes the value of art.
The Magic of Adobe’s Photoshop CS5
Adobe’s Photoshop CS5 recently became available, and as usual, there’s plenty of magic for photographers under.
The star of the new Photoshop is without a doubt Content-Aware Fill. This technology takes Content-Aware Scaling, which first appeared in CS4, to the next logical level by enabling you to select an object — a stranger who wandered into your photo shoot, for instance — and then delete him from the photo. Content-Aware Fill will then examine the background surroundings and fill in the white space where your object formerly resided. It’s fun and often amazingly accurate. Here’s a video that shows how it works.
Also in the realm of magic is the Puppet Warp feature. Puppet Warp lets you recompose part of an object to achieve specific design goals. For instance, you can select an elephant’s trunk and change the curve of the trunk. Puppet Warp isn’t as easy to use as Content-Aware Fill and you won’t use it as much, but it’s cool nonetheless.
Adobe also has made it easier to select and mask intricate images with improvements to its Refine Edge tool, an enhancement that is less fanciful that Puppet Warp but will certainly be much more widely used. The software enables you to more accurately isolate an object from its background, and it’s particularly helpful with complicated edges like human hair.
Fans of high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will appreciate the HDR enhancements. The HDR Pro tool enables you to merge identical images taken at different exposures and combine the exposures to create a single shot with a very wide dynamic range. The tool also includes a Remove Ghosts feature that automatically removes artifacts that often occur when merging overlapping shots.
If you’re working with a single shot, however, the HDR filter is a fun addition that enables you to easily adjust the toning of the image to mimic the effects of HDR photos.
The Camera Raw 6 plug-in, which ships with CS5, has been updated to support new camera models; in all, 275 models are supported. Camera Raw 6 also has improved sharpening and noise removal, and lets you apply film grain when editing a RAW image.
Adobe also added a lens-correction feature that corrects the three most common lens-based errors: geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. You can also create custom profiles of your lenses.
As usual, Photoshop doesn’t come cheap. CS5 is $699 for the full version, or $199 for an upgrade from previous versions.
from http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/the-magic-of-adobes-photoshop-cs5/?scp=2&sq=adobe&st=cse
The star of the new Photoshop is without a doubt Content-Aware Fill. This technology takes Content-Aware Scaling, which first appeared in CS4, to the next logical level by enabling you to select an object — a stranger who wandered into your photo shoot, for instance — and then delete him from the photo. Content-Aware Fill will then examine the background surroundings and fill in the white space where your object formerly resided. It’s fun and often amazingly accurate. Here’s a video that shows how it works.
Also in the realm of magic is the Puppet Warp feature. Puppet Warp lets you recompose part of an object to achieve specific design goals. For instance, you can select an elephant’s trunk and change the curve of the trunk. Puppet Warp isn’t as easy to use as Content-Aware Fill and you won’t use it as much, but it’s cool nonetheless.
Adobe also has made it easier to select and mask intricate images with improvements to its Refine Edge tool, an enhancement that is less fanciful that Puppet Warp but will certainly be much more widely used. The software enables you to more accurately isolate an object from its background, and it’s particularly helpful with complicated edges like human hair.
Fans of high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will appreciate the HDR enhancements. The HDR Pro tool enables you to merge identical images taken at different exposures and combine the exposures to create a single shot with a very wide dynamic range. The tool also includes a Remove Ghosts feature that automatically removes artifacts that often occur when merging overlapping shots.
If you’re working with a single shot, however, the HDR filter is a fun addition that enables you to easily adjust the toning of the image to mimic the effects of HDR photos.
The Camera Raw 6 plug-in, which ships with CS5, has been updated to support new camera models; in all, 275 models are supported. Camera Raw 6 also has improved sharpening and noise removal, and lets you apply film grain when editing a RAW image.
Adobe also added a lens-correction feature that corrects the three most common lens-based errors: geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. You can also create custom profiles of your lenses.
As usual, Photoshop doesn’t come cheap. CS5 is $699 for the full version, or $199 for an upgrade from previous versions.
from http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/the-magic-of-adobes-photoshop-cs5/?scp=2&sq=adobe&st=cse
Firefox Add-Ons Double as Art, Pranks and Fun
The Internet doesn’t always have to be serious business. Just ask Tobias Leingruber and Jamie Wilkinson, co-founders of Artzilla, an online repository for plug-ins to Mozilla’s Web browser, Firefox. The extensions found on Artzilla won’t help you organize bookmarks or add nifty features. They’re more likely to scramble Web interfaces, inject misspellings or teleport your browser back to the dark ages of the Internet, you know, circa 1996.
Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber are members of Free Art and Technology or F.A.T. Lab, a loose-knit group of hackers who tinker with art and technology. “Our mission statement is to pair pop culture with open source,” Mr. Wilkinson said.
The duo created Artzilla at the end of November after noticing that their particular brand of Firefox add-ons weren’t making it into the official directory of Firefox extensions.
Unlike the standard fare available in the official Firefox extension list, most of the Artzilla extensions dabble in media culture and experimental design: Take, for example, two of Mr. Leingruber’s contributions, the China Channel, a plug-in that mimics the Web experience for Internet browsers in China, and Pirates of the Amazon, an extension that made it easy for people who were browsing on Amazon.com to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.
“That’s when we decided to make a place to put these things,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “They were missing out on the fun.”
In addition to the 10 or so plug-ins listed on their site, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber also created an Artzilla Wiki, with tutorials on installing and creating various types of Firefox extensions.
The main purpose behind Artzilla, Mr. Wilkinson says, is to “make the Web a more interesting experience.” In many ways, he said, the “Web browser replaced the television set as the main way we get content.” Artzilla is an experimental way to “hack the Web and change our experience online.”
Here are some of Mr. Wilkinson’s favorites from the Artzilla collection:
Add-Art: Add-Art takes ad-blocking software one step further. After removing all the advertisements from a Web page, Add-Art replaces them with a spattering of images from an up-and-coming artist, who is vetted by a team of curators. Every two weeks, there’s a new “show” or series of artwork presented through the extension. Previous artists featured include an M.I.T. Media Lab graduate, Ayah Bdeir, who showed a series of photographs depicting a woman undergoing a Transportation Security Administration search and a cheeky group show that imagined the future of online advertising. According to Mr. Wilkinson, there are currently more than 25,000 active users of the patch.
Time Machine: In case you have a hankering for early Web design, replete with animated GIFs, clunky fonts and slow-loading wallpapers, this Firefox Add-on will refresh your memory by warping any Web page back to 1996.
Rolltube: On the off chance you haven’t yet been rickrolled, or duped into watching the YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” RollTube will cure you of that. This Firefox extension switches every YouTube video with Astley’s masterpiece.
Tourette Machine: This Firefox plug-in will sporadically plant curse words and inappropriate phrases while typing. The extension comes in two flavors: Moderate, which inserts swear words every three to five words and extreme, which injects foul language every other word.
from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/firefox-add-ons-double-as-art-pranks-fun/
Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber are members of Free Art and Technology or F.A.T. Lab, a loose-knit group of hackers who tinker with art and technology. “Our mission statement is to pair pop culture with open source,” Mr. Wilkinson said.
The duo created Artzilla at the end of November after noticing that their particular brand of Firefox add-ons weren’t making it into the official directory of Firefox extensions.
Unlike the standard fare available in the official Firefox extension list, most of the Artzilla extensions dabble in media culture and experimental design: Take, for example, two of Mr. Leingruber’s contributions, the China Channel, a plug-in that mimics the Web experience for Internet browsers in China, and Pirates of the Amazon, an extension that made it easy for people who were browsing on Amazon.com to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.
“That’s when we decided to make a place to put these things,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “They were missing out on the fun.”
In addition to the 10 or so plug-ins listed on their site, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber also created an Artzilla Wiki, with tutorials on installing and creating various types of Firefox extensions.
The main purpose behind Artzilla, Mr. Wilkinson says, is to “make the Web a more interesting experience.” In many ways, he said, the “Web browser replaced the television set as the main way we get content.” Artzilla is an experimental way to “hack the Web and change our experience online.”
Here are some of Mr. Wilkinson’s favorites from the Artzilla collection:
Add-Art: Add-Art takes ad-blocking software one step further. After removing all the advertisements from a Web page, Add-Art replaces them with a spattering of images from an up-and-coming artist, who is vetted by a team of curators. Every two weeks, there’s a new “show” or series of artwork presented through the extension. Previous artists featured include an M.I.T. Media Lab graduate, Ayah Bdeir, who showed a series of photographs depicting a woman undergoing a Transportation Security Administration search and a cheeky group show that imagined the future of online advertising. According to Mr. Wilkinson, there are currently more than 25,000 active users of the patch.
Time Machine: In case you have a hankering for early Web design, replete with animated GIFs, clunky fonts and slow-loading wallpapers, this Firefox Add-on will refresh your memory by warping any Web page back to 1996.
Rolltube: On the off chance you haven’t yet been rickrolled, or duped into watching the YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” RollTube will cure you of that. This Firefox extension switches every YouTube video with Astley’s masterpiece.
Tourette Machine: This Firefox plug-in will sporadically plant curse words and inappropriate phrases while typing. The extension comes in two flavors: Moderate, which inserts swear words every three to five words and extreme, which injects foul language every other word.
from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/firefox-add-ons-double-as-art-pranks-fun/
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