What is Web 2.0? The under-5 answer..

What is Web 2.0? How has this changed the way we interact with our computers, the Internet, and each other? This video, although a bit dated now, is a really great visual summary in less than 5 minutes..

The Machine is Us/ing Us
by Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
(posted February 2007)

Click! - Brooklyn Museum's Crowd Curated Exhibit

Inspired by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, the Brooklyn Museum decided to test this wisdom in exhibit curation last summer. Click! developed, a photography exhibition that invited Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. According to the museum, Click! meant to address this question; "Is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?"

Click! consisted of three consecutive parts:

1. The Open Call - Artists were asked to electronically submit a work of photography and artist statement that responded to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn.”
2. The Online Forum - The submitted works were displayed online for an open audience evaluation. As part of the evaluation, each visitor had to answer questions about his/her knowledge of/perceived expertise in art.
3. Click! The Exhibition - The artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from the online forum jury process.
   

389 images (one per person allowed) were submitted and displayed on the museum's website anonymously. 3,344 visitors to the site cast judgments as part of the online forum. The top 20% (78 images) were selected for display in the museum; the size of the print determined by the ranking received through the online forum.

In addressing the museum's question, "Is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?", Ken Johnson's review in the NY Times responds with his own:

"What if you favor exhibitions designed to appeal not to crowds but mainly to discerning, well-informed individuals? What if you go to museums to learn from experts who have devoted long, deep and careful study to certain subjects? What if one of the things you value most in contemporary art is its resistance to mainstream taste, its willingness to forgo popularity in pursuit of ideas and experiences that few have already had?"

And with art, how can you tell? How do you judge the success of an exhibit? How do you set boundaries for what 'wisdom in the evaluation of art' is? As Ken also writes, "How people arrive at consensus in the art world is worth studying. So is the tension between experts and nonexperts, which can extend to the highest reaches of the culture industry... The best you can say for “Click!” is that it’s a good conversation starter."

View the exhibition gallery online here:
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/gallery.php

Read the review in the NY Times here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/arts/design/04clic.html?ref=design

What are your thoughts on crowdsourcing for the curation of an exhibit?

Martha Graham: Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge

This spring, the Martha Graham Dance Company announced their newest project, the Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge. To correlate with the company's May performance of the 50th anniversary of Graham's full-evening piece, Clytemnestra, the Martha Graham Dance Company challenged participants to use video rehearsal footage made available by the company and 're-mash' it; reinvent each character through inspiration from modern events and material.

The deadline for this challenge was April 7th, with the winner announced on May 11th. The winner, John Blanchard, received $500 and his video will be shown during a performance of Clytemnestra this season.

What do you think the benefits are to engaging the audience in this manner? What might the challenges be?

Clytemnestra Re-Mash Challenge First-Place Winner - John Blanchard, 'Altered States Network'

Visit http://clytemnestraproject.com/ to see the second and third-place winners, as well as other entries.

"It's Time We Met" Campaign

This past February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City launched "It's Time We Met," a visitor-contributed photography contest. Visitors submitted almost one thousand photographs taken in the Museum's Main Building on the Upper East Side or at The Cloisters further uptown.

Of the almost one thousand submissions, the Museum's panel of judges selected two winning photographs and five runners-up. In addition to various prizes, the winners' photographs joined the 8 images selected from Flickr (including the image to the right, submitted by davidabroad via Flickr) for the citywide "It's Time We Met" marketing campaign.

The NY Times Arts Beat writer Carol Vogel wrote a brief description of this campaign on February 9th, 2009, and while the post was merely descriptive the commentary following was fierce, and divided among two general camps: the professional photographers and others who are upset by the launch of a major campaign utilizing amateur (and presumably free or very low cost) images, and those who are excited by this new level of engagement by a venerable arts institution. Quick excerpts from the comment postings listed below:

From Lars on 2/4/09: "well, as a photographer who is attempting to make a living from photography, this under cuts my living. the pat on the back the Met is giving to these photographers is an insult. as for “no one is losing money on the deal,” this is not true. the Met is saving money, as each image, if rights purchased from a working photographer, would be worth +/- $1,500.00 USD each. i wonder how many Met employees work for free? i mean, how generous of them this would be."

From Stretchphotography.com on 2/4/09: "Rather than the photo “languishing unseen” had the photographer reserved her/his federally protected copyrights as creator of the image, perhaps he/she might have actually been paid a nickel by the Met for usage of the image. Rather than “no one… losing money on the deal,” this is another example of how photography is being devalued not by the technology that allows the public to create and share images, but by large corporate interests which leverage that technology to make a buck off someone else’s creativity. Commercial photographers, artists, and independent creators everywhere lose money on this “deal,” and others like it. Heaven forbid that a creator would actually be paid proportionate to the benefit that [insert name of corporation here] gains from the appropriation of her/his image. If you think this is such a good deal, IP, tell your mortgage company you want to pay them with “exposure;” you may reconsider its value."

From Audrey Horn on 2/4/09: "Everyone complaining about how the Met isn’t generous because they’re not paying the photographers should also remember that the met is practically free for everyone to visit. In addition, all of the exhibitions are free as well as many of their educational programs. The Met is not a corporation, it’s a non-profit organization… a museum… it would be a different story if Carnival cruises did something like this but I see this campaign as an effort from the museum to develop a community."

From Andrew Slayman on 2/4/09: "As a photographer, I agree that photographers should be paid “proportionate[ly] to the benefit” their clients reap from the use of their photographs. (I also believe that elementary-school teachers should be paid three times as much as they are, because of the benefit to society as a whole of having well-educated citizens.) But as a student of economics, I can write with confidence that this is not how it works in any industry. In a competitive market, with many buyers and sellers, price will inevitably decline until it reaches the marginal cost of production–in this case, the cost to the photographer (having already purchased his or her equipment) of taking one more photograph. Thanks to digital technology, that cost is now effectively $0. The Met’s campaign, and all those like it, are only the beginning of this shift. Instead of lamenting the passing of the good old days, we photographers need to develop new business models that can sustain our creative art under radically different economic circumstances than those under which many of us grew up.

NOTE: All photographers whose images were used gave their permission to the Met and received credit; whether they received any sort of compensation is unknown to me at this time.

Click below to read the post and entire comment exchange:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/online-photos-become-part-of-mets-new-campaign/

What are your thoughts on the comment exchange listed above from the NY Times article?