When I was trying to come up with a good reason to not explode in frustration with the state of the contemporary art market in New York, as exemplified by last week’s art fairs (armory, scope etc.), I realized something rather minor.
When I was younger, there were very few ways of getting good books. I grew up in a small town with a good library, provided by the university. But, as a mere resident, I wasn’t allowed to check them out, except with the help of my father’s ID card…a risky affair given his beard and silver hair. Short of our noses and fast talking, it was hard to pull off the 30+ years he had on me.
After 1996, certain things changed. Whether one wants to attribute the internet to a general notion of progress, or explode in a luddite-like rage, certain aspects of the tcp/ip protocol, as well as the emergence of low-cost internet access, have provided real opportunities for real change.
I was asked what I think are good digital communities recently. I came up with a short list in no particular order:
1. art of the cities, art of the fields
they say: “arbitrary” topography based on project of the free and multilingual encyclopaedia that each one can improve on line WikiProject on the contemporary art and the movements or artistic proclamations indexed until there, of the Sixties at our day.
2. Socialight
Map cities with your voice, photos and txts from J2me app on yer cell phone. Stickies on streetcorners. Simple, smart and works.
3. Worldcat
World’s largest network of library content and services. this site inspired this blog entry i am writing and you might be reading.
4. future me
email yourself up to 30 years in advance. be social with yourself…dream for a second.
The future is the attention economy. Spy on your internet habits just google! Let your friends spy on you! And spy on your friends. Great data viz from stamen, and, hell I helped build it, so it must be good!
6. slifeshare
Like sharing absolutely all your freakin’ computer life? Want everyone to know what a slacker you are/n’t? Share your life. Slifeshare. For mac only, app is pretty intense and free way to share all your habits with everyone. Attention economy on speed…
7. emusic
For those of you who don’t already use it, use it. For those of you who do, props. DRM free, and I didn’t know, but u can download over and over once you have bought it. Nice.
8. bloglines
RSS aggregator of choice by yours truly. If you look at blogs, or the news, or like the idea of looking at blogs and the news, but can’t keep up, this brings it all home. Slack, and it’ll just keep feedin’ ya and feedin’ ya. Sure, there are others, but bloglines has always been there for me, like a nice pair of dungarees.
9. Eyespot
Screw youtube. Mix yer own vids. Jumpcut does the trick, but eyespot seems to still be independent (yahoo bought jumpcut). Anyway, mix and match, edit and socialize video. Online. for free.
10. Video Comments
Hey! If video is the future of the net (?!) then the future of video is video commenting. And the future is now! And now just happened! Ok, no winning there. But you can’t lose with a wordpress plugin for realtime and recorded video commenting designed by ITP folks.
Ok, again, this is just a list, and numbers were used so that I felt some sense of order. Now back to trying to create a little more disorder in this rather overly ordered NY. Stay warm!