So this is cool. A couple of days, HeatherMG (who, among other things, chooses Photo of the Day for the DCist blog from the DCist flickr pool), contacted Angela to ask if I minded if my pic of Artomatic was used in their (DCist) post about Artomatic. I’m not sure why Heather didn’t message me directly (probably because she had Ang on gchat), but Anglea agreed on my behalf. Cool.

I wish, now, that my flickr name (sintixerr) was actually my real name, because the pic is attributed to “sintixerr”. It’s also a little too bad that the post doesn’t identify the installation as mine directly, but I’ll deal. Cool to have it on there at all

New Year’s Eve at Chronic&Shock’sOriginally uploaded by sintixerr

Eep. The year’s over! That might seem old news (God, we’re already a week into 08), but the sad thing is that to remember what I’ve been doing for the last few months I had to go back to my Flickr stream and -look- at the photographic evidence! Kind of cool…but not?

But before I get into what -has- happened, I’d like to talk about what is and -will- happen. I just spent a lovely evening at the soon-to-be-no-more Dr. Dremo’s in Arlington with a bunch of the Art Outlet volunteers, artists, other board members, and friends.

One of the reasons I was there was to talk about digital art shows and the imminent re-opening of my free space for Washington, DC artists and arts events in Second Life – the SintixErr Gallery. (About which Amanda Hess has written a great article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34394 )

It looks like Art Outlet (the board of which I chair – at least for one more year!) will be, as a 501c(3) non-profit arts organization in DC, will be sponsoring an entire island in Second Life. My high level goals for the island will be to:

• Provide a place for any DC-based artist to exhibit their work to worldwide audience
• Host mixed-reality events in support of Art Outlet shows
• Provide a central Second Life hosting capability for other DC arts organizations, museums, galleries, etc.
• Allow for additional research into interesting ways to use virtual worlds to aid art through technology and technology through art.

There’s still no -monetary- sponsor for this (and it’s not a done deal till it’s done), but I can front the cost initially and hope through grants, donations, shows, and by way of small fees for other organizations to use the space, the area will support itself and break even.

In addition to the pure Second Life announcement, I’ve also been working on putting together (and participating in) one or more digital arts and technology shows in the DC area. These are still in their infancy, but there are a number of great, dedicated, reliable people working on them and I expect some cool event news to show up here in the next few months.

You can find more info here on what some of the participating artists’ thoughts on technology, culture, and art are in this thread:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=7860.msg33345#msg33345

I’ll close out this post with my own thoughts from that thread:

I have two perspectives on technology’s role in culture, as it pertains to my art. First, I’ve always struggled with the concept that there is “technology” and “stuff that isn’t technology”. I never really believed that there was an inherent line there. The only thing that really rings true is Douglas Adams’ quote on the subject. He said something to the effect of “Technology means ‘stuff that isn’t quite working right yet’”. Pencils, oil paint, paper, cameras – they’re all technology. They’re absolutely the same thing as computers and any other digital mechanisms for interacting with human senses.

So, my first interest in technology, art, and culture is in the process of cultural integration of new technology into the “stuff that works” category. Things we forget about. I’m interested in the creation of and interaction with art that REFUSES to distinguish between itself and any other “old” tools used to create art. I like to see moving images framed behind museum quality glass hanging from a wall. I enjoy the idea of traditional tools being used as part of the creation of what would otherwise be considered “new technology” art.

Along these lines, I’m also fascinated by the artifical lines and boundaries we (humans) create to keep our perception of the universe coherent. Technology has always helped people do more better faster, but until the advent of science allowing long distance communication between people, our boundaries expanded, but tended to retain the same shapes. As people began to communciate over vast distances, however, our sense of “place” began to erode a little bit. TV accelerated that process, cell phones turned the process into an avalanche, and the internet looks like it might eradicate the bond between place and self altogether in our culture. Not only that, but with the variety of identities we are begining to maintain, our most basic sense of “self” is getting fuzzy. Who are we when we can “be” in multiple places at once. Who are we when we can be physically perceived by others in different ways at the same time? We have IM accounts, blog accounts, we exist (well, some of us ) in virtual worlds, etc. Part of how we perceive and understand who we are ourselves is by how we are reflected back by other people. What happens to us as our reflections become fractured and non-contiguous?

Art, over time, has often been used to explore our relationship – as people – to the universe around us. In my mind, these particular technologically-wrought changes in our culture are acute and our exploration of them as humans is well-served by doing so through art.

Ok, it’s getting late and I’ve been working on Ofrenda stuff all night and the real job all day, but I just wanted to let you all know that DCist has chosen these two photos of mine from their Flickr pool to use in the past three days! That’s outstanding I’m really psyched about that. I am, though, still curious how they make those kinds of decisions. Do they pour through them all looking for the “best” (on it’s own merits) photo to fit their purposes, or just the first “good” one that will do?

They can be found on DCist: HERE and HERE

Anti War Protest: The Letter A

Originally uploaded by sintixerr
Sweet. While I might be a bit behind the curve here, I just discovered that I can blog straight from Flickr to wordpress. This is out standing and will definitely increase the number of posts coming from me. I’ve recently updated and rearranged my flickr account for the first time in MONTHS and have been spending a lot of time there.

My wife and I have begun to get a lot more serious about photography and have been spending a lot of time out and about taking pictures. On Sunday, Angela Kleis joined us (although she forgot her batteries) and it was so much fun that we’ll be doing it again next Sunday- with cool fun gear

The main star of the experimentation will be a Rolleiflex camera from 1951-1954ish. It’s old, manual, and cool looking.

She also picked up a Holga for us so we could be like all the artdc cool kids (Angela will be bringing hers Sunday as well). That means there will be three of us running around shooting everything we see. Im seriously looking forward to it!

As for this picture, it was taken (as all of mine are lately) with a Digital Rebel XT. It’s been set to take B&W (ie, the B&W isnt a later Photoshop conversion) and a virtual “red filter”.

The scene of the picture was the recent DC anti war protest (we were just there to document, not participate). It really remind me of something from Mirrormask or Neverwhere….

So I feel a bit bad now about completely wiping out my 13,000+ square meters of Second Life territory, but it had to be done. I’m in a groove with work and I’m running a 10k (6 miles) in the Pentagon City area with Angela in 2 months. Those two things alone need all of my concentration. Maybe early next year I’ll get back to virtual worlds – I was really getting to an interesting place by using it as a starting place for 2D art finished in real life – but we’ll see how it goes.

If you’ve been watching my flickr stream, you’ll have noticed that I haven’t abandoned art all together. Rather, the focus for the past several weeks has been on taking local photographs and using them as the base layer for further work. Ive been very much interested in manipulating point of view post-shot. This has manifested itself in a series of photographs where I’ve layered multiple level settings and saturations on top of each other to bring different components of the image into highlight (the raw shapes, primary tones and colors, etc.) all while keeping the shadow of the original image around beneath to hint at what the eyes would see without the manipulations. I don’t kid myself that I’m experienced here, but I’ve enjoyed looking at my own output.

I also opened the new blog (infoage.wordpress.com) but there is nothing there. I had much better names in mind for the blog, but the wordpress site had some short term memory issues at the time and my names got lost in the ether beyond. Oh well.

There is also some camera coolness going on here as well – I’ll be moving into the world of DSLR soon. My wife just ordered herself a new Canon 40D!!!! (should arrive tomorrow), so I’ll be inheriting the Digital Rebel XT. This means we get to share the L series lenses I got her for Christmas last year

Lastly, as if anyone cares, I really made some progress with my architecture modeling efforts at work today. It’s all about Michelangelo’s quote about finding the structure in the stone and not forcing something that’s not there.

This flickr girl is wicked cute, would have a great career as an illustrator, makes art that makes me smile, is jealous of us pie tasting for breakfast, and is the subject of this weekend’s sketch. I could do more with this picture, but as usual I may have chosen my own enjoyment of the process over your potential enjoyment as a viewer. How? By treating the material like music and dancing to it…It was a fun to do and a great close to the weekend.

Should I finish it? Should I do it again as a “real” piece?? My problem is that I can do more than this, I really can (even with correct proportions!), but I don’t care. I can come up with gorgeously finished looking pieces..but…after some point…the drawing does what I want it to and doing any more work is done for the audience, not me.

(…and for those who have asked, the previous post was to everyone who might think it applies to them.)

About a week ago on artdc.org, there were a couple of threads about “Process” in art as art itself. There are obviously as many interpretations of what that means as there are people thinking about it, but I decided to give it ago since I found the idea so interesting. The concept is to take a drawing from start to finish and to capture it in different stages along the way. Once the “final” image is “complete”, I’m going to go back and recreate several of the stages from scratch. That way, each stage that went into the final piece will actually “exist” in the form of an individual drawing and could be considered art in its own right (although, I intend to present them all together as one work once the project is done). Ultimately, I’d then like to take each stage and turn it into something new…finish it…into something else other than what the “original” final piece ended up being. Ultimately, there should be a series of works that, together, materially communicate the process of art in its literal mechanized form as well as the fact that we always leave paths untaken behind us…

The image to the left of this entry is the series I’ll be working on for this. The last image is the first “complete” piece. The previous images are stages that I’ll have to recreate (although I probably wont use all of them).

I’ll track this as its own page in this blog after this post…

(Image links to larger image)