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Best Halloween Costume Idea of 2010 Goes To

Christopher — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 06:06:04 +0000

Last year it was the amazing 8bit girl costume which I was eagerly awaiting to see what she would do this year and the costume seemed to be closing down her site so in it’s place the Best Halloween Costume idea of 2010 goes to the Amazing Banksy “Flower Thrower”.

George Schnakenberg has taken the iconic 2d graffiti work and turned it in to a living breathing (through a handkerchief) 3d person. You can see via his flickr stream his night out partying and either his proposal or attack of Raggedy Ann.

The costume is quite well done and best of all comfortable and versatile. Hope everyone had a great Halloween this year.

Bad at Sports on the Social Media Strategy Panel at Art Chicago

Christopher — Sun, 02 May 2010 08:07:38 +0000

Thanks to everyone for coming out to the “Social Media Strategies in Chicago’s Art Community” panel hosted by Art Critic Alicia Eler and Chicago Gallery News’ Ginny Berg at Art Chicago today. I loved talking with Karla Loring, Museum of Contemporary Art; Crystal Pernell, Hyde Park Art Center; and Carrie Heinonen, Art Institute of Chicago about all things tech & strategy and hope that it was useful or atleast entertaining for those of you in attendance. Every group on that dais has my upmost respect for the work they do in the Arts day in and out and it is an honor to have Bad at Sports counted among them.

As promised in the talk there is a program that is quite useful in Twitter to let you know who starts following you and more importantly who drops your account. At the time I was trying to think of Chirpstats and couldn’t get the word out but the great Crystal Pernell was kind enough to remind me of Qwitter which does more then Chirpstats by working to tie the drop to a specific tweet. This can be extremely useful if at times a bit misleading but a great alternative to Chirpstats which is only a weekly update but less taxing on an email account.

The net is a wonderful place to meet, share, promote and wallow in all the things you love or cherish and social media for me is a great tool to help accomplish & magnify those desires. I still say though the most important thing is to service the end users like they are your boss, anything less is putting the cart before the horse. Feed them data, facts, images & yes even sugar and rumors some days but remember that twitter, facebook, digg, stumbleupon, and whatever is next are only a means to that end. It’s something that even we have to be vigilant to keep in perspective and doesn’t come easy for anyone especially when you have to answer to a comittee; I have deep sympathy there. I look forward to the next time we can get everyone together and have honest and open talks about how we go about trying to promote and grow this thing we love called Art.

Thanks again for coming out!

BaS ArtChicago Coverage: Tuesday – The Cost of Doing Business

Christopher — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:58:43 +0000

Well it’s almost that time of the year again, High Holy week in Chicago where we all pilgrimage to the Merchandise Mart and endlessly complain how much we don’t want to be there. Which is kind of a shame really? The doors haven’t even opened, exhibitors are still unloading their wares (oh I’m sorry is that word verboten? and there is already a collective shrug/ennui working it’s way from gallerists to collectors to The Tribune. I am not suprised, unaware as to why or in disagreement really. The only thing less exciting then spending money on a show during a depression (oh those words again) that is collectivly expected to be poorly attended, poorly reviewed, have low sales and be generally as exciting, sharp & sexy as a slightly used chew toy is to not have one at all and instead we all stay home cleaning our patio decks/yards. It’s not that I don’t get it, I do. Make the best of it, stay together for the kids, you go to war with the army you have not the army you want (yea don’t like the taste of that phrase do you lol).

In a little bit here I am going to lay into the Mart over something and I am sure it will not be the first or last time that either I, Meg, Claudine, The Tribune, Rhona Hoffman or some prairie dog on the net uninformed or unfairly chimes off but before I do does anyone remember the word “Fun”?

If you work in the Art world in any capacity right now you could be easily making a better salary in say Print on mean average so if you’re still here it’s because you love it, chose it & in fact tell everyone else it chose you. So if we are not going to make a fortune, redefine art for the hundredth time this Century, rock the culture with something new or even agree what is the new Deer, Squid or Skull for this year can we at least agree to have some fun? I’m not saying fiddle while Rome burns. Do your due diligence and once that is done, share a laugh, have a meal with a large group, drink, dance, greet old friends from out of town or even Continent but cut the emo angst and smile (Even you Scott Speh).

Arts a joyful struggle, it never becomes a breeze & it is never the way we want it to be 100% so in the gap between perfection & worthlessness lets remember why we got into this and have some fun cause everyone from the unpaid gallery interns to Chris Kennedy is working hard believe it or not, I know.

Having now said that, there are reports coming in that the Merchandise Mart is looking to charge the exhibitors $49.99 a day for wifi access. Now I have personally worked to provide wifi access for over 100 exhibitors in a large space and can say it is a thankless task that is readily abused by 10% of the users, requires constant oversight if you have power fluctuations of any sort, is consistently reported down when in reality it works and the problem is exhibitor’s laptops running Chinese drivers, or Macs with more warez then actual programs.

Oh do I have sympathy but $49.99 a day let me say that again so that it sinks in $49.99 a day is “screw off” pricing that you do to chase away clients so that you don’t have to provide the service to many & the ones that you do it’s crazy profit. So is that where the business model is right now with the Mart? Are things so tight that we are looking to cut costs and services or gouge to bridge the gap? If so I am sorry for your troubles but if not this is beyond the pale pricing and even I am going to call bunk on that.

Change it before you open, it’s the best PR you can have with exhibitors stuck in one place for hours on end when you can provide reasonably priced internet. Trust me many would rather surf and email then sell, you think I’m joking but I’m not. There is no excuse for that price point unless we’re talking 10MBs up and down which I almost know we are not.

Lets do some good sales, make some good connections & remember have some fun. I’ve seen accountants smile more lately.

MoMA’s Live Streaming Marina-Cam Invites Everyone To Be Present

Claudine Isé — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:09:07 +0000

Screen grab from Live-Streaming Video of "The Artist Is Present"

Does the Museum of Modern Art’s live feed of Marina Abramović’s performance “The Artist is Present” defeat the purpose of the piece, or enhance it? “The Artist is Present” is the title of both Abramović’s retrospective, which opened at MoMA on March 14th, as well as her new live performance, which takes place in MoMA’s Marron Atrium throughout the run of the exhibition. In her performance, Abramović sits on a wooden chair in front of a wooden table. The chair across from her is occupied by different museum visitors, who are invited to take a seat across from the artist and gaze at her while she gazes at them. Visitors are allowed to sit in the chair for as long as they want. (One man stayed for seven hours). MoMA’s exhibition website notes that the retrospective as a whole endeavors to “transmit the presence of the artist” by including “live re-performances” of Abramović’s works by other people, along with this new durational performance by the artist herself.

I couldn’t find any mention of how live streaming the performance fits into the exhibition’s overall attempts to “transmit the artist’s presence,” however. Ideally, of course, viewers will experience Abramović’s performance in a more direct fashion, either by sitting across from her or watching from the audience as other people share her gaze. But the existence of MoMA’s live streaming “marina-cam” (my nickname, not theirs) is downright puzzling. What’s the purpose of streaming a performance–one which purportedly explores what it means to “be present” in this particular historical moment — for the benefit of anonymous internet users who can engage with it only by staring at their computer screens for a few seconds at a time?

For a work of art that necessitates ‘presence’ in all the multivalent meanings of the term, I find it curious that Abramović agreed to the livecam broadcast in the first place. I wish her thoughts on the subject had been included somewhere on MoMA’s website (if they are, I wasn’t able to find them). Although I can certainly see how the presence of audience/viewers standing in a ring around the performance area heightens the sense that this is also a form of spectacle — a fact which adds further layers of complexity to the piece– I can’t quite work out what the Marina-cam adds other than to further amplify the spectacular element via its broadcast to anonymous thousands. On the MoMA/PS1′s staff-written blog Inside/Out, a post written by David Hart, the Museum’s Associate Media Producer of Digital Media, provides a bit of background on the idea:

“when the Marina Abramović exhibition was starting to come together,” Hart writes, “the staff in all the departments here struggled with how best to communicate the ideas in the exhibition online—since so much of the point of performance art has to do with being in a location, in a moment in time, live. Honestly, I don’t know much about performance. A line from a funny little video made by a friend came to mind: ‘Here lies the sea captain, many men wondered whether he was crazy or brave.’ I thought this live stream might be more of the former. And I knew that anything that seemed this simple technically would inevitably be more complicated than just turning on a laptop and connecting a webcam.’”

I hope that future posts on MoMA’s blog go into further detail about the conceptual ideas underlying the decision to broadcast Abramović’s work in this way, including some sense of the artist’s take on the matter. Right now, the livecam feels more like a gimmick than anything else, not the least because the feed times out after just a few seconds. Viewing it online is anything but an absorbing experience. I can’t imagine anyone watching for more than a minute or two, which makes the Marina-cam little more than an online advertisement for the show itself. Indeed, the Marina-cam seems customized for Twitter-based commentary of the ‘haven’t been there, haven’t done that, but will compose a few pithy one-liners that encapsulates the experience anyway’ variety.

To be sure, I haven’t been there or done that either. I’m watching from my computer screen like everyone else who can’t make it to New York to see the show in person. But the livestream broadcast has been conceived specifically with me in mind, and on that score, at least, I feel qualified to comment. I might find the decision to stream the performance more convincing if the live streaming technology wasn’t so frustratingly inadequate for the task. Perhaps if I could sit and stare at Abramović and her rotating partners for hours on end myself, I might find some unexpected payoff in terms of understanding the impact that the internet, social media, and online interactive technologies have on our notions of “presence” nowadays. But if MoMA really wanted to figure out a way to “communicate the ideas in the exhibition online,” as Hart noted in his blog post, it might have instead experimented with face-to-face internet technologies (like Skype video) that could allow Ms. Abramović to share her gaze with random strangers online, if only for a few select hours of the overall performance time. You’d lose the fiction that “anyone,” potentially, could sit with the artist, but would retain some degree of live intimacy while complicating that very “liveness” with the notion of a gaze shared in cyberspace. But as it stands now, MoMA’s livestreaming of Abramović’s performance merely confuses access with insight, visibility with presence. Sometimes it’s okay to say you just had to be there, and leave it at that.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our entries in future blog posts.

Proximity Magazine Names BaS “Best Website for Local Arts Coverage”

Christopher — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:38:33 +0000

Proximity Magazine Names BaS “Best Website for Local Arts Coverage” and says some very kind words:

Bad at Sports should have received a a grant from the XYZ foundation last year to help them make their art podcast website a real day job. But the powers that be often sleep on what is engaging, innovative and important in favor of the familiar, lame and business as usual. Bad At Sports was our top local art resource of the year. Thank you guys.

No thank you Ed, Rachael & everyone at Proximity and the Public Media Institute. We really apriciate the kind words and look forward to 2010 and what Proximity Magazine has in the works.

Also we have taken your advice and hired a few free interns to track down this XYZ foundation and get that grant asap. I can only assume that the Xavier Young Ziebold award is biennial so maybe next year

The Beatles Never Broke Up, Listen To Secret Recordings [hoax but still great]

Christopher — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:00:11 +0000

I could present this in the form it should be experenced in which is one of:

On Sept. 9, 2009 I experienced something that I still am having trouble believing happened to me. I came into the possession of a cassette tape containing a Beatles album that was never released. I dont expect you to believe what happened to me, I sure wouldn’t, but thats why I grabbed the tape as proof that my experience was real.

But I know someone will complain so in the end just listen to the best mix album since the Grey Album by Danger Mouse. Check it out, share it while you can cause like the Grey Album this will be on the ghost net in short order al a Grey Tuesday.

The Beatles Never Broke Up

Author insert a music with WS Audio Player.
(Download) this music.

Best Halloween Costume Idea of 2009 Goes To

Christopher — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:50:05 +0000

Why goes as yourself for Halloween when you can go as the 8-bit low resolution version of yourself? I don’t know the girls name but the work speaks for itself. The photos were posted on her blog kindacarsick and I look forward to what she comes up with next year.

Entire City Rendered In 3D Using Nothing But Flickr Photos

Christopher — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:09:22 +0000

What was Archimedes famous quote? “Give me a place to stand to take enough photos and I can map the world” no but he might have

University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory, the researchers who built a lot of the code that went into the original Microsoft Photosynth software, have devised new algorithms that take the existing ability to create a rough 3d map from multiple photos up by a order of magnitude. Now it not only can do basic depth perception and skinning with photos but create pinpoint 3d skeletons if given enough data to pull from. The uses and implications of this are vast.

We just need to use the v1.0 and start rendering gallery openings in 3d

Personas: Visualizing Your Digital Footprint

Christopher — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:39:52 +0000

Over the years many people have created data scrapers to collect and display in an interesting way the data that matches your name or search terms on the net. Year after year they get more cleaver and better. The latest of which and 2nd that I know of to come from M.I.T is Personas. Personas takes the data that it collects about you and parses and categorizes the data it finds to create a kind of Karyotype Taxonomy (somewhere in the world Duncan’s ears are burning) of where your influence or activities lie.

So have fun check it out and share your results.

Add-Art & AFC

Meg Onli — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:03:52 +0000

Jessica Slaven’s untitled exhibition via Art Fag City

Last night as I was readying myself to listen to this weeks podcast (I heart Paddy Johnson) I was trolling Art Fag City to see what I might have missed while being distracted by my day job. What I found was Jonson’s curated online show with Add-Art titled The Future of Online Advertising. Add-Art (developed by Eyebeam) replaces the advertisements found on websites with art from a database that is curated regularly. Unfortunately, I had a few problems. Instead of seeing art my advertisements were blacked out (which was still nice) and it made Firefox crash. Especially when i was visiting the BAS website. It seems though that these problems have been fixed so I will give it another shot.

A little bit about this show via Add Art

“The Future of Online Advertising, a group exhibition featuring the work of Ben Coonley, Jason Corace, Charles Gute, Brian Kennon, Elke Lehmann, Jessica Slaven, Maya Schindler, and Sheila Wilson appropriates a familiar turn of phrase in the same way the participating artists in this show draw upon pre-existing cultural material. Taken from the similarly named annual New York online advertising conference, the title means to broadly describe a utopic form of advertising; which is to say, in the future, all advertising is art. It is aesthetically challenging and engaging, it is inventive and it is smart.” Read the rest of the statement here.

If you are interested in trying it out for yourself download it here

Bad at Sports » Internet

Best Halloween Costume Idea of 2010 Goes To

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Best Halloween Costume Idea of 2009 Goes To

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