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02 November 2007 by nathaniel

SL Dublin festival

Was part of a festival / party promoting Irish tourism in Dublin SL this past weekend (weird to be dancing and partying while sick in bed, but there you are). Below is a brief video with some of my prints (and my dancing avi) featured, and below that, a scan of the Irish Times feature (preview) article on the event. In the coming weeks, I’ll be putting together a large solo exhibition of Compressionist works for a new gallery opening up in Second Life, courtesy of Haydn Shaughnessy…

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLxPAqUIT1k]

Second Life, Dublin festival for Irish Tourism

Click for larger image of Irish Times article

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27 October 2007 by nathaniel

Rhizome re-launches!

I was planning on writing about this, but have been sick in bed all day, and then T.Whid of MTAA did a much better job of reviewing the features than I would have from behind this haze of flu, so here comes a re-blog, via their site:

rhiz-new.gif

A superb upgrade of the new media community site

Some of the changes:

1. A major change (for RHIZOME_RAW email list subscribers) is the breaking up of the list into 3 different categories: discussion, opportunities and an arts calendar. This required me to redo my email filters a tad, but also gives me the option to filter categories I don’t want or filter them more granularly.

2. The member pages have been transformed into profiles pages with lots more features: enhanced portfolio section (unclear of whether the portfolio entries get added to the artbase automatically), ability to upload audio and video (very cool) and include the feed from your blog. The organizational improvements to the profile page makes it much easier to read and see how the person is interacting with the platform.

3. There has been a major visual re-design. The front page is easier to scan quickly and is laid out more logically. The top navigation has been improved.

4. The discussion board is much better. One can now drill way back in time very quickly. The only problem is that it seems to go back only to 2002. Also, it would be nice to filter these pages (Max Herman is just as annoying now as he was then) but I suppose that’s what the advanced search is for. Which brings me to…

…Bugs. I did run into some bugs. The biggest bug being that the advanced search form isn’t working (I’ve been waiting and waiting this feature). I’m hoping to see major speed improvements in the search. Also with search, it would be nice to have the same sort of pagination in the search results as we get in the discussion area.

But enough of bug talk. This is a major, major upgrade for Rhizome and a big improvement. Lauren, Patrick and Marisa should be very proud. Congrats!

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22 October 2007 by nathaniel

new web site: wordpress as CMS / Portfolio

If you haven’t noticed, my main site has had a massive overhaul, with which the royal ‘we’ are very pleased.

Besides the new design, some new work and texts have been added in the upgrade process, most notably the digital and traditional prints I did at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium this summer, the Johannesburg-based public intervention from a few weeks ago (a continuation from my Wireframe Series started in Croatia), and new writings on my research and artistic inquiry.

For non-geeks:

The new site is driven by categories, so as to showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. Artworks are each listed across all the concepts and media they might fit into, and are then organized by date. A hidden system of keywords also helps to show related pieces, and there are other goodies such as lightbox slideshows, youtube videos, RSS feeds, and more, throughout the site. Feedback welcome!

For geeks: 

There are now 2 WordPress installs on this site: the blog (what you are reading now, this is a standard install) and the main site, which is using WP as a Content Management System.

The idea was to have an artist portfolio that did not look like a blog, but that did use a similar database for cross-categoried posts and related works (through tags) in a way that could showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. After a lot of research – and not wanting to have to do any database coding on my own – I came to WordPress as my best choice for a starting point; there are no changes to the wordpress core at all (just a very customized theme and a bunch of plugins) – I’m very pleased with the result:

http://nathanielstern.com

Feedback welcome! More geek tidbits below the fold… Continue reading →

Archives

19 October 2007 by nathaniel

errors?

Moved a bunch of stuff around on my servers today, in preparation for the big update on Monday (I hope on Monday!). A simple refresh should give you exactly what you are looking for in most cases (like if images are missing), very close to it in all (like, you may be redirected to the same content on another site). If this is not the case, and you are missing images or getting errors, please let me know! And definitely, the same holds true after Monday, when you will see a very different site (erm, but the blog will look the same, maybe with less spelling mistakes and dead links – see below).

In this process of making a dynamically-driven site, beside lots of help from php.net and codex.wordpress.org (yes, I hacked an open source blog software for my portfolio), I found these two great resources:

The top one is unlimited, the bottom one checks up to 1000 pages for spelling errors, and there are some useful options in the wares (but do not use the “email results to me” option on the top one – I had to start over 3 times because it could not connect to my mail server….).

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16 October 2007 by nathaniel

best web host ever

Sorry, this has little to do with my work or art, but…

I’ve been recommending hostgator to students and friends for years – they are fantastic: never down, have a great control panel, huge amounts of space and resources, unlimited domains and traffic, and I’ve never waited more than 1 minute when entering the live chat for support – no matter what time of day or night. For $10 a month (and yes, they have both cheaper and more expensive options), I get 600GB of space, unlimited traffic, unlimited databases and all kinds of open source goodies (php, mysql, wordpress, zencart, cpanel, fantastico, joomla, mambo – you name it, it’s available for one-click install). Now, I’ve signed up for their affiliates program. Bear in mind that I’ve been recommending them anyhow (and probably would have made a LOT of money had I signed up long ago), so this is not just to make me some cash (tho I’d love it if you did): they are really great.

Thinking of getting a site, changing servers, or sharing domain services? USE HOSTGATOR.

Archives

05 October 2007 by nathaniel

elicit – interactive installation + dance piece

“elicit is a full body interactive installation that produces projected text in front of wherever the participant moves. Shown here is South African dancer Jeanette Ginslove using the piece”  — more

This work is under a Creative Commons GPL license, and has been used in several multimedia performances since late 2001.  See link above to download the ware.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAQ95fzLqrk]
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