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04 April 2008 by BradyDale

Artist-Blog versus The-Work-Itself

Every artist should have a website, or at least a blog. This is a point I’ve been making to a friend of mine who’s trying to make her creative way in New York City. She’s doing this and that, meeting with little successes here and there, but it isn’t quite adding up to something whole yet. If she had a website, I argue, it could help people see her body of work. Plus, it would help her be accountable to herself and other artists. The web helps artists keep going in more ways than mere self-promotion.

That said, a tension will develop between your site and your work, especially if you blog. Copyblogger says that he developed the blog not to become a pro-blogger, but because he saw it as a way to become better known in the circles where he does his real work. I think that’s right. If you’re a good sculptor, you should start a blog so that people are interested in sculpture will find out more about your work, your thoughts and your creative process. The hope being that some of those folks are interested enough to buy and they will.

The trouble is, you still have to keep up the blog.

As I’ve been working on my Earth Day Card, I’ve been spending much less time in front of the computer. This has become a sort of guilt inside me, that I’m not generating some semi-interesting new essay every day for folks to read or find or think about. I’ve started to feel a responsibility to the netizens. Once upon a time, I would go to bed proud and content if I’d gone to the gym and spent two hours at the drawing board after a workday. Now, I feel like something is undone if I don’t write something here. Like I didn’t brush my teeth. Or I didn’t make my bed.

Okay, I never make my bed.

So I thought about this tension, and came up with some mental strategies the artist-who-blogs can use to make sure the blog serves you and you aren’t serving the blog:

  • Blog about your artwork. This is the most important rule I’ve got for you. If your best work is your sculpture/writing/video/comix, then that’s what you will write the most interesting posts about. Plus, if you’re writing about your real work then you are thinking about your real work and you’ll get back to it.
  • Blog first – but keep it short. You don’t really have to blog every day, but if you’re going to carve out some time to blog, then you should carve it out before starting your real creative work. Let blogging clear out the cobwebs in your head before you start working, but if you don’t finish the post in the time allocated, hit save as draft. Your public can wait a day.
  • Your process is interesting, so blog about it. Don’t interpret your work at the end. That’s not a story. The story is how that crazy stuff you do comes together! We all think our creative process is boring. We don’t see why anyone would want to hear about the fact that we take an old racquetball into the backyard and bounce it against a wall in time to the lyrics we’re composing. It is interesting, though. An artist’s bizarre little creative quirks are, perhaps, the most interesting thing he or she has to write about. So write about it.
  • Blog about your progress. I need to do this more. Try to read and be read by some other similar artists, so you know that other folks that will understand are reading about it when you write about how far you’re getting. Maybe it’s just me, but I find accountability motivational. I want people to know if I’m trucking along or if I’m on dead center, and knowing that someone is seeing those reports makes it more motivational.

If you’re an artist-who-blogs, it would be great to hear you say whether or not you feel this tension, like I do. Is blogging giving you a more short-term view of creativity? Is there a tension between long projects and punchy posts? How much time does blogging take up for you? Do you have balancing strategies of your own? Do you think mine are wrong-headed?

I’m still working on convincing my friend to start her own blog. Once we’ve got her on-line and she’s feeling comfortable with the Internet, I’ll make sure you all know where to find her. Till then, I took today off so I could finish the inks on page one of my Earth Day Card and get page two drawn. So I’d better get off here and back to work! What are you getting done today?
___________________
BradyDale keeps up ThisTooWillPass.com

Archives

11 December 2007 by BradyDale

Social Networking

A guy with a robot head

Today I did something embarrassing. It was the kind of thing that only an Internet neophyte does. See, I’ve been really focusing in on my blog lately and reading sites that talk a lot about good blog promotion and use of social networking and blah blah blah.

So I finally decided that I should join StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been a member of del.icio.us for a while (which can’t be beat for lo-fi simplicity and keeping track of sites you want to spend more time with later – that is, not at work) and Utterz. Of course, there’s a ton of other sites like these out there, too. The basic idea behind all of them is that users will identify things that they like and other users will find them. Then, as people organize themselves about shared interests or tastes, they’ll get better and better at sharing sites they like.

Fine, but I resisted because I burn enough time on-line as it is.

Well, part of the process for joining StumbleUpon.com is checking your address book to see if you have many friends who are on already. It turned out that I only had about 10 friends who were using the site and over 200 contacts that were not. I wanted to add the folks who were on there, but I didn’t really want to add the ones who weren’t.

Wouldn’t you know, like an Internet Neophyte, I hit the wrong button and sent the invite to everyone. Friends who don’t like me anymore, ex’es, co-workers, estranged former bosses and girls I couldn’t get a date with. People who don’t even remember me! Everyone!

I guess it doesn’t hurt much, but it did strike me. Of all the tech savvy people I know, only ten of them were on uber-hip StumbleUpon? How odd? Yet all these sites have thousands of users! Yet only about 5% of my contacts were on there!

I know that this will change over time, but I realized this morning that, for now, as much reach as the big social networking sites have, they all pretty much have the same reach. My guess is that if you did an analysis of the people on those sites, you’d find that they are, by and large, pretty much the same people. Like me, they’ve all just joined as many as they can handle.

Meanwhile, though, I think creative techy types, like the readers of this site, have an opportunity… NAY, A RESPONSIBILITY… to find ways to use these sites not to just promote our creative work but to hijack them and turn them into creative works. Like, by creating mazes of links that pass through multiple ones or games for our readers to play where they solve riddles through our pages or… I don’t know… on-line installations of Tagged, Stumbled and del.icio’ed sites. You decide… but I smell new space here.

Digg it!
___________________
BradyDale

Archives

03 July 2006 by nathaniel

RBS

One of the most fascinating discussions that emerged from the iCommons iSummit, at least for me, came out of the presentation by Israeli rock stars RHYTHM BEATING SILENCE aka RBS. Their fascinating story is of a band who "made it," but in a small scene driven by virtually one label and one radio station, were completely taken advantage of. Instead of sitting idly, the band went on their own, and gave their music away for free (now all under Creative Commons licences), making money by playing gigs and archiving their albums. Everything is available for re-mix use and non-commercial distribution through their web site.  We went on to discuss revenue generation for lesser known artists, various production modes, DIY art and the importance of collaboration. RBS’s frontman, Nimrod Lev, is quite an interesting activist – here’s a translation of a recent speech he gave at the University of Haifa. Money quote (speaking of criminalizing the downloading of music):

Personally, I was never willing to think of my audience as criminals or to turn the people for whom I create music into criminals, just because the music industry is in a crisis. …
 
I would like to begin with the opening lines of the announcement we attached to the song "Vegas" which was played here earlier:

It does not matter when and how the music and all that is related to it became only a matter of business and commerce. It happened. The love of music became marginal, and in most cases it is not part of the considerations of music products, marketed to the public.

Archives

29 June 2006 by BradyDale

When new technology is sort of like is a marketing gimmick

You probably know what greenbaiting is, right? Like when they put hybrid engines in an SUV?  Or when they put 20% post-consumer content in paper plates and call them "eco-plates?" Tonight, I think I experienced the same thing in technology and entertainment. I went and saw Superman Returns at the Tuttleman IMAX in Philadelphia.

The movie was great, but I wasn’t so hot on the IMAX. This wasn’t my first IMAX experience, but it was the first time I’d seen a traditional movie on one, as opposed to some nature film or whatever.

I’m not really sure the movie was shot on IMAX tape. It definitely, definitely warped at the edges throughout the movie. This distracted me the whole time.

The lower corners noticeably did not fit on the screen. They had it too wide. No one would have objected if they would have pulled it in a few degrees. it still would have been huge.

I also found that during some of the really chaotic scenes where a lot is happening yet the director shoots in close so you can hardly tell what, you really couldn’t tell what with the IMAX. In fact, the screen almost seemed to black out during the really chaotic close stuff. Again, distracting. I will also be interested to see it in a regular theater and see if anyone ever looks blurred. Many parts of the scene often appeared blurred at times. Again, possibly another effect of projecting at a level the original film had not been meant for.

The biggest problem, though, was that there really was hardly a good seat in the house. The seats were far too close to the enormous screen. I was turning my head through the whole thing and I could never see take in the whole screen at once. And my seat was roughly in middle. I feel very badly for anyone further down.

At the start of the movie, they run a little text across the screen and everyone laughed because no one could really read it. It was too big and we were all too close.

In the end, I wish I would have seen it at a normal theater. I feel like I was suckered in to see it on the super-high-tech screen.

Overall, though, it was a great film. Then again, I know I’m a sucker for big heroes and heroics. I like being a sucker for that, though.

Archives

01 December 2005 by BradyDale

Underground Literary Alliance

I know that most of the folks who read this aren’t American… but if any of you follow American literature for what ever reason and find it wanting… it’s worth knowing that there is a group that is resisting the mainstream not just by producing its own work, but by doing the occassional protest and bellicose hollering at the tyrants of American lit.

We’re a bit grumpy.

Anyway, I’m one of the 30-something members around the states… recently inducted. Go me. We are working on kicking up a few particular storms in coming days, but I thought I’d promote a little something I’ve started doing on the site in South Africa before I really start talking about it in the states too much. I’m going to start running a weekly homily, or public prayer, on the site. These homilies will be humorous commentaries, but they are genuine prayers as well. They are audio files recorded with an old Compaq Ipaq.

Here’s the first.
And the second.

The third will be out next Wednesday. I promise it will make you laugh… though it will also be rather crass. The fourth is already recorded… in it, I’ll actually touch on literature for the first time.

I also highly recommend checking out the ULA’s Monday Report Box and other fine ULA writing.

The ULA’s leader and founder, King Wenclas, has the fine distinction of running the most threatening and hated blog in literature. Check it out! Get scared!

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Brady Russell
Underground Literary Alliance
Rank-and-file

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