Art & Blogging: Recap

Special to Rhizome: Art & Blogging: Recap
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 09:46 AM in Panels + Roundtabels | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/05/art_blogging_re.html

[image] < L to R: Chris Ashley, Patrick May, and Liza Sabater.

Last night's Blogging and the Arts Part 2 at the New Museum was fun.
Nice to finally meet some veteran bloggers whom I admire, and good to
see old bloggy/art pals. I offered an abbreviated version of the talk
I gave in Sept '04 at Columbia (and later elsewhere) about that ol'
frivolous copyright dispute hurled at me last year. Since I usually
present this story in the context of open source culture, art and
appropriation, fair use and copyright, survival skills for artists
etc., it felt good to do so in light of the blog phenomenon–without
which I would have had nothing much to tell in the first place. I put
some nice screen shots together.

Liza followed with a condensed recap of her recent forays into the
realm of activist blogging, and invited us to check out her new sister
blogs and other new developments over at culturekitchen. She mentioned
a relatively new nonprofit org called CivicSpaceLabs.org that
proffers an interesting model for building open source community
software. She dashed in straight from their all-day Users Conference
at The Tank in mid-town. That Liza's a busy one.

Next came Patrick May, who described the logic behind his experimental
portfolio-cum-blog, hexane.org. He has written a program that
publishes one's portfolio–just as it is organized on one's hard
drive–as a blog while preserving things like categories. A clever
publishing tool specifically conceived for visual artists, that allows
them to avoid redundant tasks (like creating duplicate subdirectories
and folders to upload images…yuck). And one ends up with not yet
another static site, but a portfolio-blog that has feeds and can be
aggregated. Very cool. Patrick is part of the artists' community
OpenGround.

Last was Chris Ashley who took more time (it's nice being last), waxed
philosophical about weblogs and their potential, and commented on how
he (we) rely on weblogs as opposed to Art Mags for up-to-date
information. Frankly, he could have gone longer and I would have been
happy to keep listening. He also showed us some of his html work and
its precursors, and talked about the contrary notion of art as an
"open source" phenomenon. And yes, about how blogs function as test
beds for artists and are part of a process-oriented mindset.