Last month, from October 18th through the 26th, my artpiece Tweeting Colors played host to Tweeting Pinks, a small campaign aimed to raise breast cancer awareness. (You can read more about Tweeting Pinks here.) I pledged to donate $5 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation for each qualifying tweet, up to $250. My rules were designed in hopes of achieving a higher number of distinct contributors to the color feed. While I fell short in meeting this rather arbitrary goal, most of the contributors to Tweeting Pinks actually participated more than I had anticipated, tweeting pinks multiple times over the course of the week. All told, there were over 75 pink tweets during the campaign, and they’ve been captured in the graphic above. (click for larger version)
Thanks to these compassionate users, I am happy to be making a donation in the full pledge amount of $250. But the giving doesn’t stop there! On top of that, @v_hopson is making a personal donation of $100!
That’s a funny story, really. Midweek, he accidentally tweeted a big fat Aquamarine bar into the pink field, setting off a mild riot by other contributors. (note: aquamarine bar has been removed in above graphic.) To make up for this, he graciously pledged a donation for every bar following the aquamarine one, which has brought the grand total for the Tweeting Pinks donation to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to $350!
As you might know, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the color pink has hopefully been a bit more prevalent in our daily lives. My wife and I both have members of our respective families that have battled this disease. It has been a trying year for many people, and the importance of giving has never been clearer in my eyes. Therefore, I am pledging a personal donation of up to $250 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, and I am asking for your participation to help me meet that goal.
Tweeting Pinks is a small campaign using my interactive Twitter-based artwork, Tweeting Colors, to raise breast cancer awareness. Of the 140 colors made available in Tweeting Colors, four are shades of pink. I will be asking Twitter users to “tweet pink” the week of October 19th, and I will make a donation based on the rules below:
From Monday, October 19th through Saturday, October 24th, I will donate $5 for every qualifying tweet that creates a pink color bar on Tweeting Colors.
The tweet must follow the Tweeting Colors guidelines and be of one of the following four colors: pink, hotpink, deeppink, and lightpink.
I will honor a maximum of two tweets from a single Twitter user (so get the word out!)
I will donate the earned amount from Tweeting Pinks (hopefully all $250) to the National Breast Cancer Foundation during the final week of October. Although I can only financially honor two tweets from a single user, please feel free to tweet as much pink as you would like. Seeing the screen “pink out” would be quite a show of support.
This campaign goes live next week, and I will need at the very least 50 participants to reach my goal. I hope you consider participating and also helping me get the word out.
The alarm clock is about to sound on this feverish dream, but before I get to the residency post-mortem, I have three more favicons to add to Favify. The project started with nine favicons back in June, and now boasts twenty. The newly inducted:
So, yes, technically Glasstire isn’t listed on Glasstire’s Links page as per my Favify rules, but they gave me the keys to this kingdom, so to speak. So they’re in.
‘Bout What I Sees is Salvador Castillo’s art blog out of Austin. I’ve been a follower of it ever since Castillo wrote of his “Ahhh!” moment after viewing my 2007 exhibition Lawndale Has Many Friends. Castillo recently added a favicon to the website and made a request to be part of Favify, and I am only happy to oblige.
Completing the new triumvirate is Rhizome.org, a website “dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” I am thrilled to have had two pieces from A Feverish Dream accepted into Rhizome’s ArtBase, and although they are not Texas-based, they are listed on Glasstire’s LInks page under –– appropriately enough –– Non-Texas stuff.
Click away at the “Favify” button in the right-hand column to see the compete Favify lineup.
Tweeting Colors is webpage comprised of vertical color bars created by special tweets from Twitter users. New bars are added from the left, pushing the existing arrangement to the right. Working with the Twitter feed is nothing new to A Feverish Dream, yet unlike Journal of the Collective Me or Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter, this piece allows the audience to directly manipulate the resulting visual. Anyone can view the piece, but a Twitter user can add bars by following these simple directions. The page auto-refreshes a few times a minute, so sit back and enjoy the Color Feed.
Tip of the hat once again to Donovan Buck for his awesome scripting abilities.
While I personally prefer tweeting over ‘booking, I do value certain elements unique to Facebook. Specifically, I’m a big fan of the "Like" feature. The only ways to express any level of approval (or acknowledgment, for that matter) in Twitter is to either re-tweet an awesome entry or send a reply to the original tweeter. In Facebook, you can readily comment on any post, but then you have to actually have something to say. The Like feature, however, allows you to acknowledge the post and send a quick, public mark of approval without having to say anything. Think of it as the silent head nod from across the room. What’s also great about this feature is how it lets you discover new people based on common interests or tastes. If I "like" something a friend has posted, for example, and a complete stranger also likes it, I know that there’s at least one thing that said stranger and I may have in common. (cue mid-90’s pop song).
People Like This is a playful take on Facebook’s Like feature. As with Facebook, the content of this piece will largely be user generated. The opportunity to "like" something remains, but any specific object to like is gone. Participants who "like" this are encouraged to submit a custom identifier and URL via the “Like” link. These identifiers and URLs can be anything a user wants, and any user can "like" this multiple times using different identities. My hope is that a large directory of random but useful and/or clever links will eventually be created, and that the exploration of these links becomes part of the overall activity for this piece.
Thanks to Donovan Buck for the database and scripting.
A Feverish Dream is going to be on hiatus next week, but here is a Favify update to tide you over. This time around we have three Houston-based entities, all conveniently found on Glasstire’s Links page.
Spacetaker and Wax by the Fire come to us from the "Artsites We Heart" section, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston finally qualified thanks to adding a favicon this summer. (There remain many more on this list that have yet brand themselves in 16 x 16 pixel form — hop to it!)
I like the favicon variety of this particular grouping. The MFAH went with the simple block "H" used in their logo brand, and it holds up very well at 16×16. Spacetaker, a non-profit that provides artists with resources and tools to help build their professional careers, also uses their logo as their favicon. The logo is fairly complex, so shrinking it down to 16×16 and then bringing it back up again essentially obliterates it. I find the resulting sculpture interesting and mysterious, even if it’s not recognizable. Finally, Wax by the Fire is an art blog by Rachel Hooper, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery. (In case you’re wondering: yes they’re on the list; no they do not have a favicon.) Since her blog has no official logo, per se, Rachel has used a fragment of a painting by Houston artist Jonathan Leach as her favicon. (Yes, I’m sure she received the artist’s permission.)
This brings our favicon count to 17! So feel free to click away at the “Favify” button in the right-hand column to see the expanded Favify lineup.
Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter is a real-time chart of postings from people I follow on Twitter. I have manually reduced the individual avatars of those I follow to a single, representative color, and each block shown represents an individual tweet that has come through my Twitter feed. This method of reductive abstraction largely characterizes my pre-residency work, and 2007’s Barack’s Twitter even contains a "Following" grid in the right-hand column. What’s new here, however, is that the grid is being generated in real-time, with the top-left square representing the most recent post. The remaining squares are presented left-to-right, top-down in reverse chronological order. A viewer can actively change the composition of the grid by simply changing the size of the browser window. Rows and columns can be added or removed, causing the individual squares to shift and/or wrap, thus creating a new composition. While the actual content of the tweet is not shown, the author, time, and date of the post can be viewed by placing your cursor over any given square.
This piece was always conceptualized to be a color grid, but it wasn’t until I started Photoshopping mockups that I thought of Ellsworth Kelly and, specifically, his grid pieces (such as Colors for a Large Wall). The visual aesthetic is certainly similar, but the nature of how the two grids are arranged couldn’t be more different. Kelly’s color square pieces are arranged in an arbitrary sequence, whereas this piece is a direct chronological representation of my Twitter feed. While unpredictable, it is certainly not arbitrary. So, as a title, Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter only holds up on a visual level and not a conceptual one. I just think it’s more fun than, say, TwitterGrid, for instance.
Many, many thanks go out to Donovan Buck for providing the scripting that makes this piece possible. Donovan also acted as a brainstorming foil, and – most importantly – put up with a few bouts of designer indecision. Thank you, Donovan!
Last week, in the midst of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I paid a visit to the official website of the Supreme Court of the United States. I was shocked – SHOCKED! – at how out-of-date and, well, broken the site was. It’s a visual trainwreck, yes, but it’s also in need of some serious usability redesign. Or at the very least some common-sense maintenance. Barack Obama’s online campaign and subsequent whitehouse.gov relaunch have forged new ground in governmental web presence and accesibility, making the existing website of the most powerful court in the land that much harder to stomach. It’s an embarrassment. Truly laughable.
I’ve managed to make art from poorly-designed websites before, but abstracting the SCOTUS website would conceal all of its delicious flaws. So after kicking around ideas for a few days, I decided that this merits the first (and certainly only) performance piece for A Feverish Dream.
And so let me present @scuswebsite, the official (and snarky) Twitter feed of the website of the Supreme Court. Follow along for the next week as the website vents its frustrations at being so bad. It’s even making some handy visual examples of its own suckage, which will be made available exclusivly through its Twitter page. If you’re on Twitter, please consider following and spreading the good word. Maybe, one day, change will come for this underappreciated little website.
One of the many great things about @cmonstah’s blog, c-monster.net, is that it occasionally throws in something completely bizarre and unexpected. And one of the more recent delectable treasures is this. The song has – for better or worse – become a bit of a mantra around my house. I’m sure it will lose its appeal soon enough, but for now I’m still basking in its awesomeness.
So I now present its powerful story as told through favicon sculptures of its two primary players. Flash animation below and a handy JPEG after the jump.
My favorite piece of art that I’ve seen this summer is a wall installation by The Art Guys at their New Clichés exhibition at McClain Gallery. There was a semi-public (as public as blogs can be) point/counter-point earlier this Summer between the Houston Chronicle’s Douglas Britt and The Art Guys’ Michael Galbreth regarding their recent behavior piece, The Art Guys Marry a Plant (held in conjunction with the CAMH’s No Zoning exhibition). While I missed the ceremony, I made a point to visit their Clichés exhibition the following week. The work was clever, funny, and beautifully executed, but this one wall piece grabbed hold of me and hasn’t let go. It had me at "Fuck ‘em".
Comprised of wooden letters and motors, the words of a "new cliché" rose and fell on the wall, powered by contraptions slowly rotating as if they were vertical mobiles. The literal message was dismissive and defensive, but instead of being loud or aggressive, it was presented in a disarmingly playful fashion. I loved it. Had there been a chair, I would have sat down and just stared for God knows how long, mesmerized my the movement of the letters and taken back by the brilliant silliness of it all.
In the weeks since, that piece – and its "Eff ‘em" sentiment – have stayed with me. (This has been helped by repeated listens of the Wild Light’s California on My Mind, which manages to properly "eff" today, San Francisco, and California, all in the song’s first 17 seconds. Please consider this the official soundtrack of Online Derivative of a New Cliché.)
Then, while perusing a list of the most popular websites in the United States this past weekend, inspiration finally struck. Using the logos of these companies, I could derive an online variation from The Art Guys’ piece. The message is still there and can be found within the animated blur of letters. Twenty-five of the top 45 sites are represented, selected largely for how they could assist in the piece’s completion. They are not in any particular order, but they do link to their respective sites. (You might stay away from "J" if you’re at work.) You could effectively use this as your home page, depending on the sites you frequent.
