Project Simultaneity preview

Here’s a sneak peak at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dzmfdbj_9gs8z98. The result is really quite moving – creating something alone to come together – or something like that.

Currarong Rock pool

Got back from a couple of internet free weeks on the south coast of NSW and have only just managed to get back in front of the warm glow of my monitor. more soon…….

Currarong Rock pool, originally uploaded by chess65.

Memories of London

Another thought provoking Museum of London  effort, MapMyLondon.com  is  a great idea, basically you can attach text, a photo, video and sound files to a google map of London to create a mosaic of London memories. The site sorts the content by themes such as “Love&Loss”, “Joy&Struggle”, “Fate&Coincidence” and you can add your own themes – how about “Broke&Australian”. The google map keeps crashing for me so I haven’t had a good look at the memories or added any of my own but hope to soon.

Brooklyn Museum Community

Have you noticed that the Brooklyn Museum has a Community section on their website? The first page says “The Brooklyn Museum believes in community. As we blog to keep you up-to-date, we’d love to hear from you too. Tell us about your visit by commenting on our posts.” The Community section identifies ways in which visitors can contribute to a conversation with BM, eg. photographs, videos, blogs. This Museum’s social (as opposed to scientific) approach to finding out how visitors interpret their space is so refreshing. Other museums, let’s say Tate online  and the Powerhouse Museum, have community building initiatives, ie. use of social software, they may even be developing their presence on flickr and myspace.com. Their sites do not have a clearly marked community section for visitor contributions and clear directions to their content out on the network,  is it time for them to do so?

Social networking as ‘artproject’

In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday He knows where you live  a short peice about a Canberra student using myspace profiles, in particular user pics, to create artwork.  On Reuben Ingall’s website at http://www.idiotslikemehaveyourpicture.tk he has three pages of back to back user profile pics and in this context they take on a whole new life. He also raises some interesting questions about perceptions of privacy in virtual spaces. We are taking more risks sharing information with strangers online than we would with strangers in the real world.

Time – prioritising UGC

…..and now it’s 2007. The new year always sends me into a low level panic about time and how the older I get the quicker it goes by and the less I have. My latest stress is how to keep up with all of the blogs I want to read let alone add content to my own. I know there are many time saving tricks, rss subscription etc, but they don’t really address the fact that at the moment I just can’t physically spend that much time at a desk in front of a computer, and any mobile device I have is now the property of my 2 year old . Of course it’s a matter of prioritising and these days if I have spare couple of hours to myself I’d like rush off to see an exhibition, see a friend or read a book but usually end up cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming the house etc etc and thinking of things I’d like to blog and then eventually sitting down to quickly type them out whilst the kid is watching Bob the Builder.  I suppose the crux of the matter is how to prioritise personal blogging in a busy schedule, for me paid work has to be done first then the toilet training and then the house work. How is user generated content valued? How should I value my blog in my day to day doings – I don’t really know the answer yet. How indeed should I value the content I create? I know that a blog’s measure is in the number of connections it makes with others, but it’s personal value is different for every blogger and for every reader, after all one woman’s cruft may be another woman’s pearl of wisdom.      

Virtual Grandad – thoughts on context

Recently I read a story in the New Yorker It should happen to you: The anxieties of YouTube fame. The article introduced me to Peter, a widower born in 1927 who has been uploading video snippets telling his life story.

“………He was wearing a beige V-neck sweater and glasses, and sat in front of nineteen-seventies-era wallpaper and a small painting of a motorcycle. “Oh, yes, and, incidentally, I really am as old as I look,” he said. “What I hope I’ll be able to do is just bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person who’s been there and done that.”

His video was highlighted by the YouTube team and now has a following of mainly young YouTube watchers. Touchingly he has become, if a little reluctantly, a virtual grandad to some of his fans who actually send him letters telling him so. At the time of writing geriatric1927’s latest video on YouTube is THE ROLE OF “GRANDAD” in which he tells an evocative story about his relationship with his own Victorian era grandparents.

Peter’s video’s would not be watched by the majority of under 20’s who belong to the YouTube community in other contexts, such as television. Programmers would not sell it as content for that age group, but judging from the comments and the amount of subscribers Peter has that demographic are actually pretty interested in knowing what he has to say. Museums as cultural and heritage custodians will no doubt collect these videos as historical documents? How will they display them to museum visitors? Should they be sending out content of their own into contexts such as YouTube, in some cases they already are but it is still at a novelty/experimental level. The possibilities seem huge for cultural institutions to connect in new ways with their public and also collect the knowledge that their public is creating en masse.

Project Simultaneity

Montage IIOriginally uploaded by Dani Tagen.Today I’m taking part in a Project Simultaneity initiated by artist Dani Tagen who is a member of my Flickr group Tate Online Learning Level 2 . Those taking part will take photographs of anything they find of interest during today, Tuesday the 5th of December 2006. Dani says she is

…….planing to tell a visual story about something that has never happened and will never happen, with the images I will collect from the volunteers. The images should be about the volunteers ordinary life, just shooting anything that feels interesting – doesn’t matter what and the quality. My goal is to emphasise our connection to the world. It’s going to be a visual story about everyone at the same time.

Great that Flickr makes it so easy to participate in something like this, how simple it is to contribute to an artists work that may be seen in a museum’s real space. I’m off to collect images now, wonder how they’ll end up in the final work?

Pay to exhibit

The Museum of London is auctioning exhibition space on eBay. The highest bidder gets one square metre of space in which to display something that relates to London life. Place your bid

Put anything you like in there so long as it tells us something about your London:
Your wedding dress
Something you saved from a fire
A memento from Live Aid at Wembley
A poem
A menu from the day your grandparents’ café opened
A trophy you won boxing at York Hall in Bethnal Green
Photographs of the day you waited in the rain at the premier of Star Wars
What you bought with your first pay cheque
The letter that finally granted you asylum
Video footage of an unforgettable day
A placard from a Trafalgar Square demo

An original Christmas present idea perhaps? Certainly an interesting use of web 2.0 by the Museum of London. I’ll be interested to see what ends up in the glass box and who puts it in there. This project bears a resemblance the V&A’s Every Object Tells a Story, an online project (no cost!) where visitors are asked to upload a picture of an object that is personally meaningful to them and write a short narrative around it. The V&A try to empower the museum visitor as co-creator of meaning, the Museum of London are doing the same thing – but at a price of course.

Finished the MA

I submitted my final research paper at the end of last week and have been absent from the computer since then. I’d like to publish it here but have to check that that does not contravene any rules of submission before I do so.