After a three month hiatus, A Feverish Dream returns with Medals (After Stella). This Olympics-themed piece pulls its composition cues from Twitter, presenting a changing array of concentric squares in gold, silver, and bronze. The piece searches Twitter for recent tweets containing the words "olympics", "medal", and at least one of the three medal colors. New qualifying tweets appear in the outer-most ring and are subsequently pushed towards the center. During competitions and telecasts, the composition will likely shift more frequently than late at night or early in the day. Once the Vancouver olympics close out on February 28th, the piece could eventually slow to a stop altogether.

The visual motif is borrowed from artist Frank Stella, whose black paintings hit me like a hammer and opened up my eyes to what Art could be. So when thinking about medals — or metals — and olympic rings, Stella’s black, aluminum, and copper paintings jumped to mind. Having already recognized Ellsworth Kelly’s influence in my work, I’m happy to have an opportunity to tip my hat to Stella with Medals.

Thanks again to Donovan Buck for his scripting expertise.

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!

With enduring gratitude, I would like to thank the following tweeters:
@byron_m, @desmarkie, @twisty1965, @mikeynaphi1, @jmartinezdb, @v_hopson, @Fotofest_Intl, @CosmoPolitican, @NBCF, @nbcf_manda, @Rosgemjewelry, @dtex, @brenjoe76, @tracylynnproffe, @MNDOZA, @reptilegrrl, @monaism, @salvocheque, @cablegram, @claireruud, @gurl_friday, and @nicolejcaruth.

(go to Tweeting Colors)

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.

Thank you,
Brian

Glasstire
‘Bout What I Sees	Rhizome.org

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.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Spacetaker	Wax by the Fire

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.

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.