Trending Culture: You Can't Do it All
I was thinking about waves of expansion of creative discourse in parallel with the exponential increase of the production of information in media (Internet, etc). While I do not have quantitative data, my observations seem to sugggest we are undergoing another burst in the development of technological tools of production that challenges practitioners to keep up. Let me illustrate what I'm trying to get at through a historical observation.

“We choose to go, ... and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone...”
John F. Kennedy

What's a successful artist?

Ok, As someone who is considered one, and as one who knows a lot of others in this camp. I think there are a lot of criteria of “success”, and honestly, I think I’ve strayed from my core values a little bit. More on this in a minute.

On WIKI as Art

On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys' admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.

This is a response to Amy Wilson's recent discussion of the collision of cultures in virtual worlds in Second Life, "The Raw and the Cooked", http://amyfreelunch.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/the-raw-and-the-cooked/

In it, Amy considers the non-academic online artist as analogous to that of the "Outsider" which I challenge to place into a broader context. I reply:

Day Three: FEMA @ WalMart
We got up at 6:30 or so, and I said that I wanted to just go and get at it. Now, keep in mind that I am writing this on Day Six after landfall, and i dont' know whether I'm tired, hazy, or blanking it out. It's just that I feel like sweeping detail is dropping away, and if you're tired of my sprawling narrative, you might be thankful, although I probably still won't spare you by much...

Day Five: Exit Strategy/Holding One's Breath

Day Two: Leigh Arrives.
Addendum to Day One:

Day One Sept 4, 2008 – 48 hours after landfall

A quick proviso – I'm starting to write this on the night of my third day in Baton Rouge, and I'm exhausted from working on the house, and we're hemorrhaging money at the moment. We were so lucky, as our home just had huge amounts of debris and only a moderate size bough hitting the roof and a few broken shingles.

New Media was a genre based on a community in the 90's.
In the 2000's, it became a series of practices understood as a group of media arts
It is currently being historicized as a movement.

(However, it is also a meme used within the communications industry, which is a problem. Don't confuse them, or as little as possible.)