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Midweek News & Notes: @MayorEmanuel Tweeter Revealed; Illinois Art Council Grantees; Block Director Stepping Down

Claudine Isé — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:07:03 +0000

Just a few quick newsy items for this midweek:

*First up, the most significant story of the week (to my mind): Columbia College Journalism professor Dan Sinker – the founder of Punk Planet, no less — was revealed as the @MayorEmanuel Tweeter! Sinker’s fake mayor Twitter persona was the most brilliantly literary use of Twitter I’ve yet seen - punk rock to the core. For further background on the @MayorEmanuel saga, check out his (now defunct) Twitter feed, as well as this annotated, archivable version of those same Tweets on Snarkmarket, and listen to WBEZ Radio’s interview with Sinker on Eight Forty-Eight here.

*On to somewhat more relevant news: The Illinois Arts Council has announced its first round of FY2011 grants, awarding 725 grants totaling over $7,567,938. Click here to see the full rundown of awardees county-by-county. The big question is: how long will it take for awardees to receive their funds? See this July, 2010 article in Time Out to learn more about the IAC’s ongoing budget woes due to the state of Illinois’ economic crisis. Key ‘graph from Time Out’s piece:

“While the agency’s budget has crept back up to $8.5 million for fiscal 2011, [IAC Executive Director] Scrogum warns that Quinn probably will impose a “reserve” on grants, freezing recipients’ access to at least five percent of the money until the state’s finances improve. Fiscal 2011 applications were due in April; our sources’ pessimism about them appears justified. “We don’t know how much will be available to award,” Scrogum admits, “and even once that is known, [we still won’t be] able to predict how long it’s going to take for those grants to be paid.”

For further background, listen to Richard Holland’s interview with the IAC’s Executive Director Terry Scrogum about the funding crisis in Episode 205 of Bad at Sports’ podcast.

*Arts writers declare ‘strike’ against Huffington Post. Make sure to read the comments (there are surprisingly few – maybe that tells ya something), as they provide interesting points of view on the debate.

*David Alan Robertson, The Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, will step down effective December 31, 2011, as stated in a press release issued by Northwestern University.

*Interested in the idea of Community Supported Art? Want to know what the hell that even means? Check out two great, affordable examples here and here.

Meet Kate McGroarty,The Museum of Science & Industry’s Cute White Lab Rat

Christopher — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:34:13 +0000

Well the Museum of Science and Industry has announced their winner of the ~~Night~~ ”Month at the Museum” contest and it is Kate McGroarty. Kate is a Theater Artist/Customer Service Representative & recent graduate of Northwestern University. Kate starts her tour of duty in the museum on October 20th and leaves on November 18th. Kate seems to be meta aware of the entire point of this exercise and that is reflected in her lonelygirl15′esque video submission below.

You can follow Kate’s adventure via twitter and facebook (by the way MSI nice forcing the “I like” function as your public facebook link, that move should have it’s own chemical formula…….. let me think). There seems to be a very ironic website page on Miss McGroatry as well which I really hope is someone trying to capitalize on her 15 mins and not actually run by Kate herself since its a tad self congratulatory and disingenuous.

Also here is the video of the winner announcement which I have to admit whoever came up with the checmical reaction to signify the winner should get a bonus (or season 2 of “The Big Bang Theory” on DVD) since that has been the best move I have seen as of yet with this project. Also whoever missed or decided not to post the video of that announcement on the MSI website and is not capitalizing on the great PR value of that moment should get the reverse (and the season 1 DVD of Cavemen) no one should have to search for that video to find it.

I hope this is a success and will agree that having looked at the applicants that they picked the right person for the position (a arts student who admittedly knows little about science but knows PR, is cute and bubbly and gets it with a wink and a nod) Sorry Alex Dainis in a perfect and fair world you would have been the right choice since you have the looks, smarts, personality, background & non creepy factor but in the end this isn’t about Science it’s about marketing. It is going to be interesting to see how Kate takes the initiative on this and what she can do with it since the agenda seems pretty open for input. Good luck and no using the taxidermied animals as teddy bears

Hot (okay maybe only lukewarm at the moment) Topic Alert: the Crisis in Art Criticism

Claudine Isé — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:05:01 +0000

Jenny Holzer, Television Texts, 1990. © Video Data Bank Chicago.

This week New City published an essay by its arts editor Jason Foumberg on the state of art criticism amidst the rise of blogging, online websites, and other forms of interactive media titled The State of the (Visual) Art. I didn’t read this as a piece on the status of art criticism in Chicago per se, as I think some may have, but rather as about the difficulties of defining (much less practicing) this thing called ‘criticism’ at all in online, social-media driven contexts. Foumberg’s essay is part of a larger series of articles at New City that are exploring the state of criticism in the age of Yelp!, Amazon book reviews, and other online social feedback devices. The other pieces can be found here, here, and here (this last one is about Yolp!, a Jersey Shore parody of Yelp that’s really funny). The comments that ensue are interesting, but there aren’t a lot of them and there’s not too much back-and-forth…yet. But today Christopher sent me a link to Michael S. Thomas’ blog Stagnant Vowels, in which he’s posted a response, of a sort, to the New City article, which immediately bumped Mr. Foumberg’s piece up to “hot topic” status in my mind. (Thomas’ response might itself almost qualify as a good old-fashioned Rant, and as I’ve said before, I am to rants as a moth is to a flame….Jason, in contrast, doesn’t rant: he muses.).

In his post, Mr. Thomas, who was the director of the well-respected and now defunct Dogmatic Gallery in Chicago, calls us out over here at Bad at Sports for basically being slutty opinion mongers on a par with t.v. talk show pundits. He writes:

“The flux or crisis isn’t with experts or authority per say, its in the distribution of opinion as though it were reasoned discourse. It’s in the ongoing creation of model’s for the dissemination of hyperbole without rational checks or balances. Whether it’s Glenn Beck, or Jon Stewart, or Bad at Sports these models can do much to obfuscate legitimate dialogue if not entirely cripple its formation.”

I have to assume he’s talking about our blog in particular, as the podcast’s one-on-one interview format is pretty much the antithesis of opinion journalism. But I want to know — where is all this ‘legitimate dialogue’ (emphasis on the word ‘legitimate’) that we in particular are guilty of obfuscating? Tell me where it’s happening, and I’ll gladly get the hell out of its way!

In all seriousness, though, I don’t at all disagree with Thomas on his larger point. In fact I think most of his post hits it right on the mark, particularly in his assessment that lack of editorial oversight might be precisely what makes online art criticism so problematic (I’m paraphrasing his argument, but that’s what I took away from it). Thomas finds fault with the recently launched Chicago Art Magazine for precisely these reasons, and although I shall remain neutral on the matter of his specific target, I tend to agree with many of the larger arguments he’s making. Such as this one:

“But I would argue that without editorial oversight or a progressive long term vision for growth, an endeavor such as this one is hopelessly mired. After all criticism and opinion are not the same. Amateur criticism is little more than the ALL-CAPS and bold fonts version of a comment roll, and paying said amateur is in no way a transformation of this reality. So what makes a misinformed critic not, a knowledgeable and, or an opinionated amateur? Time, energy, condensed thoughts, research, an apishly large library surrounded by lovely black and white photographs of water fowl, and other bric-a-brac? No its constancy and persistence in the pursuit of understanding and conveying the qualities that define the arcane and metaphorical reality of objects and their surroundings.”

The fact is, art writers need editors. Scratch that — ALL writers need editors. Nowadays, due to all of those economic reasons of which we’re all well aware, writing for a publication that actually employs an editor to analyze your work before it’s posted/published has become a luxury that only the luckiest of us is afforded from time to time. On a purely pragmatic level, writers need editors to ensure quality of output. We need copy-editors to fact-check us and remind us about the proper usage of its and it’s. Editors to keep us from veering into self-indulgence and unsubstantiated argumentation. And yes, editors to help keep our word count to a reasonable, readerly length. On a content level, Thomas’ argument for having a progressive long-term vision is also relevant, although he’s a little too vague on this point – does a ‘progressive long term vision’ imply some sort of overarching ideological or political stance with regards to the art in question (i.e. ‘we are pro-social practices, suspicious of art objects for sale,’ or some such?)? Some form of group-think? Or does it simply mean establishing a set of critical guidelines and standards for approaching a work of art (guidelines which would, themselves, be inherently open to critique?).

I think we also need to remember that art blogs — which are the context in which much of the ‘unsubstantiated commentary’ type of arts writing takes place — are an altogether different beast from newspapers, magazines, or art journals. From their inception blogs have always been about commentary derived from a personal standpoint (which is why Museum and institutional blogs are often so boring to read). It’s not really fair to criticize art bloggers for their lack of objectivity, or for not holding to certain journalistic or critical standards. Now, websites that self-consciously follow the model of a magazine or newspaper are a different story.

Oops. My own internal editor just told me it’s time to shut up now. Just go on over and read, and rant about (or maybe just muse on) the above-linked posts. ‘Nuff said.

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.

Off-Topic | Alicia Eler

Guest Blogger — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:50:09 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Alicia Eler as our latest guest with her post, “Where did all the Tweets go? A conversation lost on Twitter”. Alicia is a writer, critic, curator and the Arts & Culture Community Manager of ChicagoNow.com.

Where did all the Tweets go? A conversation lost on Twitter

GUEST POST BY ALICIA ELER

Is it easier and more efficient to host conversations on Twitter or Facebook? This was my only question when I began research for this blog post. Things changed when Twitter lost the conversation, which is ironic because the conversation is the entire point of Twitter.

I, @aliciaeler, organized what was to be my first of many conversations about lesbian movies on Twitter. The conversation would begin with tweets from Chicago celesbians @trishtype, the Afterellen.com Blog Editor; lesbian erotic fiction writer @deviantdyke; queer sex blogger @annapulley; freelance writer and bonafide lesbian @jennispinner; and ChicagoNow tattoo blogger/AfterEllen.com music blogger @chubbyjones. Later, we could move to Facebook and try it again. For the Twitter convo, @jennispinner and I came up with the idea to label tweets with hashtag #lezflix. The chat began promptly at 2pm on Tuesday, November 24, 2009, and lasted well over the 10 minutes we had originally planned. Lesbian twitterers from all over the country jumped in.

When I went back to find those tweets a few weeks later, however, they were gone. I even went to my saved search #lezflix on Twitter.com. Nothing.

With my original plan foiled, I realized that I needed to do two things:

1. Figure out how to prevent tweets from getting lost in the future, and

2. Retrieve tweets from the #lezflix conversation using search

For advice, I contacted my social media-savvy friends Leah Jones, founder of Natiiv Arts & Media, a social media coaching business for artists, musicians and writers; Craig Kanalley, Traffic and Trends Editor at Huffington Post and founder of BreakingTweets.com; and Daniel Honigman, Digital Supervisor at Weber Shandwick. I also tweeted and gchatted with Sachin Agarwal, the Operations Lead at OneForty.com, the Twitter App Store.

When I first approached Daniel Honigman with this problem the other month, he suggested two ways to avoid losing tweets: Export the tweets to an Excel spreadsheet post-conversation, or use BackUpIfy.com, a service that backs up your online life (free until January 31). Currently, you can back up Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket and WordPress. Services in Beta include Basecamp, Gmail (!), Facebook, FriendFeed, Blogger and Hotmail; soon users will be able to back-up YouTube, Xmarks, RssFeed and Tumblr accounts.

Another way to save tweets, says Leah Jones, is to “do a search on search.twitter.com for your hashtag, then subscribe to the results via RSS and Google Reader.” If you do this, says Jones, “Google will make a database of those tweets for you, and they’ll go onto your Google Reader.”

Unfortunately, it’s too late for the #lezflix conversation. The tweets are gone. What can I do now?

Sachin Agarwal, who spends his days immersed in Twitter at oneforty.com, says that searching for different terms was the only way to retrieve tweets. “You’re searching summize (Twitter search) for the hashtag, and that search index only has a week or so of data.” Instead, he suggests I search for both the hashtag—in this case, #lezflix—and some of the movies talked about during the conversation, rather than searching for the terms #lezflix and Twitter. “Bound,” “Better Than Chocolate” and “Desert Hearts” were the first ones that came to mind. Kanalley echoed that advice, suggesting I search using both Google and Bing.com.

So let the search begin.

Search #1: Searching Google for Twitter #lezflix brought up these results.

These were the first and only tweets to come up:

reprizal #lezflix another old one, did anyone ever see the french movie “Entre Nous”? 24 Nov 2009 from Echofon

xanontl @aliciaeler re: #lezflix: bound, obviously 25 Nov 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to aliciaeler

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl
Followed by a link to Twitter user @msbutch84.

These three women all joined in the conversation after it began.

Here are the two #lezflix tweets I found on the November 24, 2009, archive of HelloChicago.com, a site that grabs Chicago tweets daily.

@AnnaPulley Is Bound a #lezflix by def? It’s made by two dudes. Can it be a les movie if it’s not written/directed by a female? Posted by jennispinner in Chicago, IL

i just couldn’t get into IBTC – too forced and i love jamie babbitt’s other work so i was so bummed! good soundtrack and effort tho #lezflix Posted by trishtype in Chicago, IL

Similarly, on the hyperlocal front, the site Localtwt.com discovered a #lezflix tweet from Elko, South Carolina.

#lezflix also showed up under the movie Spider Lilies on SeeandTweet.com, a site where users can find Twitter movie reviews, see movie trailers, get movie showtimes, and buy tickets. Unfortunately, when I went to the link that popped up on Google, I couldn’t find any mention of #lezflix.

Google found my @aliciaeler Twitter streams archived on MixTweet and Twaitter, which I didn’t know I had, and FriendFeed, a service that I set-up to stream my Twitter.

Japanese website Twimpact picked up and translated @annapulley’s tweet about the lesbian sex scene in the film Better Than Chocolate.

Search #2: Searching Bing for Twitter #lezflix

Bing does not compare to Google. Searching for Twitter #lezflix brought up a single tweet from @annapulley.

These two general searches helped uncover a few tweets, and if I wanted to get more specific I would take Sachin’s advice and do a search for #lezflix and the name of a movie (e.g. Bound, Desert Hearts, Better Than Chocolate), or just a search for Ilene Chaiken, creator of The L-Word. In fact, the first search for #lezflix Ilene Chaiken brings up every post on Tumblr that has been tagged with Ilene Chaiken.

Here’s the reality, though: Twitter kills off tweets after two weeks. The time period used to be four months or 1,000 tweets, reports ToThePC. If you want your tweets to stay alive after two weeks—the same time it takes bed bug eggs to hatch into nymphs—back them up before it’s too late.

Interested in learning more about how you can use Twitter? Check out my blog for posts about Twitter users’ reactions to the Health Care Reform Bill, how we won the Maine Question 1 vote on Twitter but lost it in real life, and sizing up Chicago LGBT publications’ Twitter feeds.

About the poster:

Alicia Eler is a writer, art critic and new media art curator. Her work has been published in Artforum.com, Art Papers, Time Out Chicago, Chicago Tribune, Newcity Newspaper, Flavorpill, Kansas City Review magazine, the Windy City Times, and Curve Magazine, among others. She is the Arts & Culture Community Manager of ChicagoNow.com, a network of hyperlocal blogs sponsored by the Chicago Tribune Media Group, and a frequent Tweeter.

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 posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

My water just broke. Hang on–gotta Tweet that!

Claudine Isé — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:22:34 +0000

Last Monday, a woman Tweeted that her water broke moments after the event occurred. And it was a long Tweet too – close to the 140 character limit. I guess it was bound to happen. Now, to be fair, she’s not just any woman, she’s Sara Morishige Williams, the spouse of Twitter founder Ev Williams–probably the only person one would expect to Tweet at such a moment–and it was very early on in her labor. But still. I’m not one of Williams’ Twitter followers, but upon learning of this news of course I had to know how far into the labor she got whilst hanging on to her iPhone (wow–you’ve gotta be pretty good with that thing if you’re able to type on it with clenched fists).

Turns out, not too far. Her last Tweet before officially becoming a mother read: “Epidural, yes please.” I can’t help but think she kinda punked out by not Tweeting throughout the delivery. I mean, she’s the wife of Twitter’s CEO, for God’s sake, shouldn’t she feel some sort of cultural responsibility when it comes to this sort of thing?

Just kidding. Mostly.

(Via Gawker via XX Factor)

Wednesday Clips 6/17/09

Claudine Isé — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:19:30 +0000

Special Art PrOn Edition!!

*Visitors to the Art Institute have a jaywalking problem (Chicago Tribune).

*Getty Research Institute to close Bibliography on the History of Art (BHA, IBA) (via CAA news).

*NEA Survey indicates arts audiences getting older, scarcer (er, more scarce) (CAA News).

* Top ten best Star Wars architecture. The comparisons to real-life buildings are fascinating. (via Culture Monster).

*The history of Jewish punk.

*Shady deal: Orange County Museum of Art sells much of its plein air painting collection to a private collector. Read about it at Culture Monster and Modern Art Notes.

*I like to watch: Robbie Cooper’s Immersion: Porn (via boingboing).

*More pr0n: Russian Art Collective Voina (WAR) stages controversial exhibition (via boingboing).

*Even more pr0n!!: Highlights from the World Air Sex Championships (The XX Factor).

*Students design exhibitions that get people to talk to each other (talk! as in, ‘in person’!) (via Tomorrow Museum).

*The drawings of Chicago artist Deb Sokolow featured on Beautiful/Decay.

*You are what you Tweet: Twitter Psychology Profiling (via Avant Chicago).

*Writer Dave Eggers tells those bummed about loss of print to buck up.

*Justin Wolfe at songsaboutbuildingsandfood covers Freebird, and it’s lovely. (Thanks to Art Fag City for linking to this blog a few weeks back — I’ve been hooked ever since).

**(Image Credit: Robbie Cooper’s Immersion: Porn).

Wednesday Clips 5/27/09

Claudine Isé — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:34:23 +0000

A webchat with Andy Warhol, Oliver Laric (http://oliverlaric.com/webchat.htm)

Here’s what’s got my attention, web-wise, so far this week:

*San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick R. Cartwright appointed director of the Seattle Art Museum.

*Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno hopes to initiate massive fundraising drive for free Museum admission.

*No Boys Allowed: yearlong exhibition at the Pompidou Center is for women-only.

*Barack Obama: The Freshman.

*Now on Vimeo: watch the NYFA Panel Discussion on ‘How the Recession Has Impacted the Art World’ (featuring Edward Winkleman, Sean Elwood, Stephanie Howe, Kay Takeda; via Edward_Winkleman).

*Scope Basil is only three weeks ago away, and still ‘aint got no permit.

*”I spent a year asking why the contemporary art bubble was the biggest, bubbliest bubble of them all”: Ben Lewis’ The Great Contemporary Art Bubble preview clip on YouTube ( ART21′s Ben Street has a funny post on the film too).

*Boing Boing writer Joel Johnson chides Wired Online for being clueless about the importance of online media–a great post, but look to the comments for the real dirt. (via ArtFagCity’s Twitter).

*Speaking of Twitter, it could be coming to a t.v. near you.

*Grrr. Argh: Monster Kid Home Movies (via Boing Boing).

*Pierogi’s famed flat files now searchable online. (via Art Fag City).

*A live conversation with a dead Andy Warhol, via psychic via webchat (via Rhizome.org).

*Beautiful/Decay needs YOU to help pick the theme for its next limited-edition publication. Winner gets a copy of the book. For free!

*Applications for the 2009 William H. Johnson Prize are now available. Due date is July 31st. (Via Artipedia).

Searching for Bruce Sterling

Claudine Isé — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:57:26 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I read Virginia Heffernan’s essay, “Let Them Eat Tweets: Why Twitter is a trap,” in the New York Times Magazine, and so interesting did I find it that for a good part of this morning and afternoon I bounced around the internet trying to find a podcast or YouTube video or any other web-style recording of Bruce Sterling’s speech at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference so I could listen to his words in context–to no freakin’ avail, I might add.

Heffernan wrote about feeling a certain sense of personal status anxiety ever since she heard Sterling (whose rants are an annual highlight of SXSW Interactive) declare at this year’s conference that, as Heffernan paraphrased it,

“the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting. ‘Poor folk love their cellphones!’ (Sterling) said.”

Or in other words, as “a friend” quoted in Heffernan’s essay put it, “connectivity is poverty.” Heffernan elaborates on Sterling’s ideas as follows:

“Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”

Although I’ve yet to find a recording or even a transcript of Sterling’s talk, I did find one blog entry that provided some partial notes on the beginning of the speech (in which Sterling apparently munched on chips and cookies to mirror back what he saw as the inattentive twittering (m)asses in his audience), and that of another blogger named Jim Groom, whose Bavatuesdays blog was referenced in the print version of Heffernan’s article (I think he might have been the author of the “connectivity is poverty” quote, based on the header of his below-referenced blog post), and who summarized Sterling’s argument thusly:

Bruce Sterling’s rant was right on. I was hoping to listen to it again before I talked about it in more detail. In fact, I’ll have to do that cause I can only recall bits and pieces, but there was a point in his stream of thought that really impressed me (well, besides his discussion of the future of publishing as epitomized by survivalist bookstores like Brave New Books—which I loved). He went off about how much we had miscalculated the digital divide theories of the 90s that were to define the digital world of haves and have-nots by whether they were or weren’t connected. It seemed logical to assume that the impoverished would not be connected, whereas the rich would be decadently consuming all the bandwidth.

Well, as he pointed out, it didn’t quite work out that way, connectivity became cheap with cellphones, and he comically noted that “poor folk love their cellphones!” What’s happening is that this increased dependence upon connectivity, rather than being some kind of indicator of privilege, is actually a sign of our increased impoverishment. The fact is that the wealthy are those who can afford not to be connected, not to be pimping their “online brand” so shamelessly, not twittering their asses off at all hours of the day for a quick networking fix.

Note that Groom couldn’t get his hands on Sterling’s talk either, although at least he got to see it in person before writing about it.

Continuing my own search for the elusive Bruce talk brought me to the very, very cool sketchnotes of one Mike Rohde. Here is a page from Rohde’s sketchnotes on the talk in question:

Mike Rohde, Sketchnotes captured on-site and live in a Moleskine pocket sketchbook while attending SXSW Interactive, March 13-17, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas.

Cool, no? I like how he got all the good pull quotes from the speech. Note too that Rohde’s notes have Sterling saying, “connectivity will be an indicator of poverty rather than an indicator of wealth,” and not connectivity = poverty.

What Rohde is doing is partly a tweak on Twitter (he even live sketchnoted during one panel) but look at the difference — the drawing/handmade font aspect of Rohde’s notes make it seem so friendly and, well, readable, but also human and therefore subjective. (You can find all of Rohde’s sketchnotes on Sterling’s talk (they’re sketchnotes 51-56) here, and sketchnotes for the entire SXSW interactive conference here.)

So, from the high of discovering Rohde’s hand-written sketchnotes I descended to the low of Twitter itself, to see what would come up if I searched “Bruce Sterling.” Ooh, now this is kind of interesting. Lots of initial reaction to the Heffernan piece, many seem to be wrongly assuming that the article was written by Sterling himself. Here are a few examples of Tweets related specifically to the Heffernan piece and/or the talk itself (make sure to follow the link to Dan’s blog given in the first Tweet – it gets a comment that’s apparently from Sterling himself, criticizing the blogger for critiquing a talk he didn’t actually attend):

natdefreitas: Dan from @peekinc took on Bruce Sterling‘s comment that “poor people sure love talking on their cell phones” http://www.geekypeek.com/?p=305

jedibunny: good grief, tweeting makes me feel so impoverished now. darn you bruce sterling.

jtzl: great article about twitter is for poor people http://tr.im/poortwits – reeks of insecurity. bruce sterling is the ultimate troll.

marcad: “Futurists” like Bruce Sterling who live high on foppish universities, city budgets, & grand pronouncements are just another symbol.

Argh, I didn’t realize you can only search the past 7 days of Twitter, so recent chatter is all I get, that sucks. So no Tweet-notes on Sterling’s talk, just some quick (and often ill-informed) reactions to the “Poor folks love their cellphones!” quote from Heffernan’s piece.

And last, via Google, I come up with this little sketch, from what I think may be Bruce Sterling’s own flickr stream, though I’m not really sure. The caption under the photo reads: “In Austin, even the 12-year-olds get it about Twitter.”

So what does this all mean? Heck if I know. But I do find it incredibly ironic and stupid and maybe brilliant–but maybe not so much–that Sterling gave this talked-about talk at one of the biggest freaking INTERACTIVE conferences in the country, he’s one of the cultural cognoscenti whose opinion, on certain issues anyway, drives the discourse forward. He puts ideas on people’s agendas, makes writers like Heffernan rethink their assumptions and publicly question them, etc. But I can’t even find audio or video of his talk anywhere online that would allow me to form my *own* opinion about what he said firsthand (well, a recording would make it sorta second-hand, but you know what I mean). As a result I’m forced to depend on other people’s truncated versions, reliable though they may at first appear. Maybe SXSW will eventually post a podcast of Sterling’s 2009 talk, although the conference took place over a month ago, which is an eternity in internet time. Even I probably won’t care about it anymore by the time they post it. Who knows, maybe Sterling didn’t want to give them permission to reproduce his talk in the first place, in an effort to preserve some semblance of ‘the old days’ of which he is said to have spoken. From live talk to magazine editorializing to blogger’s notes to Tweets…social networking isn’t worth much if all it comes down to is gossip. I want access to the real stuff, not just everyone’s opinion, commentary and tweets about it. In other words, if anyone finds a link to Sterling’s speech at the 2009 SXSW Interactive conference, please let me know! Thank you.

Friday Clip Show

Claudine Isé — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:08:17 +0000

Are re-blogged links the blogger’s version of the sitcom flashback episode? Uh, maybe, but in any case, here’s a partial and purely subjective roundup of the past week in art, culture, etc. in Chicago and beyond, via a whole mess o’ handy links, of course….

*Artists selected for the 53rd Annual Venice Biennale have been announced; find the list here.

*New City art editor Jason Foumberg has a nice recap along with some thoughtful analysis of last week’s “The Invisible Artist: Creators from Chicago’s Southside” panel discussion at the School of the Art Institute. UPDATE 4/4: There is some very interesting, enlightening, and pretty damn sharp back-and-forth going on in the comments section of this article by panel participants and others who strongly disagree with (or have misunderstood) Foumberg’s assessment of the panel and the issues it addressed.

*The mass firings of adjunct fine art faculty at Parsons The New School for Design: blogger Hrag Vartanian’s coverage has been some of the most thorough thus far. Check out his posts here, here and here as a start.

*Time Out Chicago writer Lauren Weinberg has a piece this week on the ways in which Musuems in Chicago and elsewhere are using social media.

*Big yawn: on the Twitter front, an update on @platea’s Twitter happening I blogged about a few weeks ago. UPDATE 4/4: NewCity reported on what happened during the Twitter Island project discussed in that same blog post, here.

*A huge Pose slideshow available on The World’s Best Ever.

*Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes provides an excellent, two-part summary of a rare Robert Frank public talk this week with National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Greenough; part one and two.

*Via C-Monster: The Architecture of the Drug Trade. A fascinating look at the landscape of weed and the architecture of the grow house. Especially loved the comparison of the latter to Max’s bedroom in Where the Wild Things Are.

*Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City writes for The L Magazine on why Jenny Holzer is not the patron saint of Twitter in her review of Holzer’s Protect Protect Project, which originated at the MCA and is now at The Whitney.

*Via ArchitectureChicago: iTunes offering free download of the first movement of John Cage’s 4’33″.

* Get your art on at Chicago Artist’s Resource (CAR)’s Creative Chicago Expo tomorrow (Saturday) from 10-4. Workshops and Consult-a-thons galore for individuals and arts organizations.

*And finally, the hermeneutics of “pin diplomacy”: via Artnet Magazine, Madeleine Albright’s pin collection to be shown at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. Pins weren’t mere jewelry for Albright, they added a subtle layer to her diplomatic efforts. She wore a bee pin when talks were getting pointed, a balloon pin when she felt hopeful, and a snake pin after Sadaam Hussein’s people called her a serpent. I’m so there!

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