Artomatic is happening again this year (05/29-07/05)! Art by everyone for everyone. Last year, there were 1,000 visual and performing artists and approximately 50,000 visitors. Get involved as an artist, volunteer, visitor, or all three! Artomatic 2009 registration opens Friday, March 27.

For registration questions, e-mail register@artomatic.org. To volunteer, e-mail volunteer@artomatic.org.

You can also visit the forums (which I help moderate) at: http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?board=37.0

I participated as an artist in both 2007:

• http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/new-artomatic-in-second-life-event-schedule/
• http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/artomatic-second-life-splattered-paint-oh-my/

and 2008:

• http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/python-photography-digital-art-artomatic/

Both times were phenomenal experiences as an artist and as a visitor. The art was fun, good, bad, amusing, awful, and totally worth seeing. More than that,  being part of such a huge volunteer-run event outside of the uptight art snootery and commodities market you normally encounter is totally worth it.

The official press release can be found here:

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Artomatic 2009 to be held in D.C.’s Capitol Riverfront neighborhood

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Artomatic will be bringing its trademark one-of-a-kind
multimedia arts event to Half Street’s 55 M Street, S.E., in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol
Riverfront neighborhood in summer 2009, the arts organization announced today.

In conjunction with the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District (BID) and Monument
Realty, Artomatic will be presenting more than five weeks of art, music, theater, workshops
and more — all of it free for visitors. Located between the U.S. Capitol Building and the
Anacostia River and between Barracks Row Main Street and South Capitol Street, the Capitol
Riverfront is a vibrant new business center, urban neighborhood, entertainment district and
waterfront destination.

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Artomatic on this unique arts event. With both Artomatic
and Major League Baseball within blocks of one another, the Capitol Riverfront will be the goto
location for summertime entertainment in 2009,” said Michael Stevens, executive director
of the Capitol Riverfront BID. “Artomatic sets the stage for the type of future festivals and
entertainment that you will see in the Capitol Riverfront at the three new parks — Diamond
Teague, The Yards Park and Canal Park — which begin opening spring 2009 through 2011.”
Artomatic 2009 will be held at 55 M Street, S.E., a new 275,000 square feet LEED Silver Class
A office building developed by Monument Realty. The building, currently under construction, is
located atop the Navy Yard Metro stop and within a block of Nationals Park, home to the
Nationals baseball team.

“We are pleased to be hosting Artomatic at 55 M Street for its 10th anniversary,” said Michael
Darby, principal of Monument Realty. “It is not only a great opportunity to promote the
neighborhood and attract new visitors but also to bring some very talented artists to the
Capitol Riverfront.”

Held regularly since 1999, Artomatic transforms an unfinished indoor space into an exciting
and diverse arts event that is free and open to the public. In addition to displays by hundreds
of artists, the event features free films, educational presentations and children’s activities, as
well as musical, dance, poetry, theater and other performances. Artomatic 2008, held in D.C.’s
NoMa neighborhood, attracted a record-breaking 52,500 visitors and 1,540 participating
artists.

The 2009 Artomatic event promises to be an equally appealing destination for D.C. area arts
fans as well as those looking for summer entertainment, said Artomatic President Veronica
Szalus.

“The D.C. area has a vibrant, energetic arts scene and we are excited to be able to showcase
that talent and share it with the community,” Szalus said.

Artomatic 2009 will be held May 29 to July 5. The event will be open Wednesdays and
Thursdays from noon to 10 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 1 a.m., and Sundays
from noon to 10 p.m. Artomatic will be closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission to Artomatic
is always free for visitors.

Registration for participation in Artomatic will open in March and will be open to all artists —
including painters, photographers, sculptors, graphic designers, musicians, poets, actors and
dancers. Artomatic is an unjuried event, so all artists are welcome, from professionals to
beginners. Registration will be on a first-come, first-served basis and will end once space is
filled. To be notified of the date when registration will open or to stay up on other Artomatic
news, sign up to receive ArtoNews, the Artomatic newsletter, on the Artomatic Web site.
Artomatic is run entirely by participating volunteers, and new participants are sought yearround.
To volunteer and help make plans for Artomatic 2009, e-mail volunteer@artomatic.org.
“Artomatic 2009 will fulfill 10 years of commitment to the growth of our cultural community
and help fuel our creative economy,” said Artomatic Chair George C. Koch.

More details on the event will be available on the Artomatic Web site, www.artomatic.org, in
coming weeks.

###

About Artomatic: Artomatic is a creative community that collaborates to produce and
present a free arts spectacular. Participation is open to all, from recognized artists to
undiscovered talents, who work in a variety of arts forms. In partnership with the
development community, Artomatic transforms unused building space into a playground for
expression, serves as a catalyst for community growth in up-and-coming neighborhoods, and
helps to grow the creative economy. The nonprofit Artomatic organization is headed by a
volunteer Board of Directors and is funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and
Humanities, an agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. For more
information, visit www.artomatic.org

About the Capitol Riverfront BID: The Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District
(BID) is dedicated to making the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood clean, safe, friendly and
vibrant; to creating the best quality of life in the neighborhood; and to attracting office
tenants, residents, retailers and visitors. For more information, visit www.capitolriverfront.org
About Monument Realty: Monument Realty is an award-winning full service real estate firm.
The firm’s diverse portfolio includes mixed use, office, residential and hotel properties.
Monument Realty has developed more than 5 million square feet of office space, nearly 5,000
residential units and three hotels valued at more than $5 billion. For more information, visit
www.monumentrealty.com.

Just to let everyone know, Rebecca famous (and infamous, I hear) asked Angela and I to help out with moderation of the Artomatic forums on artdc (probably because we’re -always- there gabbing). That’s cool.

She actually said the funniest thing in her email to me:

What I really like best about what you do on the forums is get people to think and interact instead of flame and run. And you both do so with much humor, but with the all important “go fuck yourself” at the ready. We appreciate that.

That’s a compliment, right? Right?

Anyway, there’s a lot of good information about Artomatic and DC art in general on the board, so if you haven’t visited, you should. Becoming a member is free.

Check it out here:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?board=37.0

First, I finished the python code I was working on that will allow two -color- images to be merged into one color mosaic. The color transformations it has to make to fit in the smaller picture to the larger one seem to result in some pretty wild effects – I’m digging it. I’ll clean up the code and post it here tomorrow.

As far as social stuff goes: Angela Kleis’s blogger night at Artomatic was pretty cool. I don’t want to post a lot of thoughts on that yet (I will tomorrow), but it did reinforce the fact that a lot of event management will have to be done at the June 6th ArtDC Artist’s tour dinner. Unfortunately, people have short attention spans and the time each artist speaks will have to be managed and expectations set ahead of time. 5 minutes seems to be about the “max”. We’ll have to bring a timer or something. It’s going to be a -really- interesting night, though, and a lot of fun.

More info on the upcoming dinner can be found in this thread:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=8997.0

Pictures of Blogger’s Night can be found here in a set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sintixerr/sets/72157605133432629/

Finally, Erin Antognoli took a couple of great shots of my space while I talked about it to what was left of the crowd:

Last night was fantastic. It started off kind of quiet, but even at 6-something, plenty of people were milling about. The number of people there was perfect. Enough to feel well-attended on all 9 floors, but not so many that you couldn’t move around.

Early on, I had a lovely conversation about art, politics, technology, cataloging, and other sundry topics for about 20 minutes with a woman whom I found out later was a friend of Rebecca.

Not many of my most recent “friends” made an appearance, but I did see quite of few of my old and good ones. Justin Marino, for example, and his girlfriend were there. It was funny, but in the time (years?) they’ve been together, this is only the 2nd time I’ve met her and I was wearing the same scary paisley shirt in both cases, heh.

Similarly, another friend – again, Justin-Bryce – came to chat for awhile. Justin and I grew up near to each other in Daytona Beach Florida, met at Duke University during a middle school summer program, and have had many various adventures together. We’ve even worked for the same company here in DC. Twice. His girlfriend is actually on artdc (which I found out last night) as craftpunk….whom Id had suspicions about, but no confirmation

This was the first time Id seen Justin since he became one of only 45+ people since 1950 to cut his esophagus open swallowing a sword.

Throughout the evening, I was entertained and interested in watching people interact with my art and really As more and more people cam by, I started seeing a pattern. Some of them saw the “big” picture. Others just saw the small ones. So, I put some tape down on the floor in the shape of a “1″. Then made a straight line of tape closer to the piece with a “2″. The reaction to the piece was SO much more interactive after I did that and the response improved even further. (Ill post a pic of that Wed of this week.)

Notables:

• A couple didnt want to buy my piece, but asked if I did commission work and enthusiastically repeated (more than once) that they’d be in touch. I doubt they well, but I was happy to have that kind of interest.
• One girl walked up and down my tape line then went to grab 5 other people to bring them and show them the piece from another side of the floor completely.
• One couple spent 5 minutes just talking about it.
• Etc.

The best time, though, was spent with Secret Sean, Kerri, Brad, Erin, Michael, and other artdc’ers. Secret Sean and Kerri, and particular, spent a great deal of time with us. It really made the night.

(Especially on the metro on the way home. Because….thats the way we roll)

We also made a stop at Miss 5 NE C3′s space to see what kind of art she had brought to the table (after she trashed -everyone else’s art- at Artomatic. It’s too bad her attitude was so bad, I would’ve thought better of the art. (Can find the thread here: http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=9112.20)

Two nights ago, Paivi, Angela, and I worked our second Artomatic volunteer shift together.

I got to look at my installation finally that night in a variety of lighting conditions and Im -really- happy with how the plastic helped out. It doesnt prevent the glare completely, but it does fix it from all the important angles.

It was also definitely still satisfying to watch people look at the installation from a distance. They’d look at it from 15 feet away. Walk up to it. Move back. Walk up to it. Interact with it…too cool.

We came in beforehand so Paivi and Angela could talk to Paul (britishink…I didnt have much to say, though, I was zoning out for whatever reason – sorry! ) and we got to roam around for a bit. Waved at Danny and the crew manning the blood drive (sorry I didnt give, lost track of time…I was a bit distracted when I arrived). Saw jennifer, who was fun to talk to as always…

And we saw Tracy‘s piece beforehand as well, which I honestly liked a lot. As I’ve said things about Tom’s partition resonated with me, so did Tracy’s. I think using pieces from one’s life and arranging them into art can be dramatically effective, as hers was. Particularly (and Im not sure this was intentional), but she had a lot of materials there from her childhood….things that smelled like everyone’s childhood does after it’s been sitting in a box or the attic for decades. That made the installation tangible and personal, to me. It enhanced the impact and created a connection to the piece that wouldn’t have been there otherwise (for myself).

On shift, I helped out Barry with lighting (and worked it on my own for most of the shift) and worked as an errand boy in between problems. I -really- enjoyed this shift a lot more than the last one and felt I made some more concrete impact on the event. I enjoy solving problems – mine or others’. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of which floors had which lighting problems other than to say there is probably a short or something odd on the 6th floor that makes it markedly different from the others.

I took care of issues on 5, 6, and 8 at least. If you had a problem on another floor which wasn’t resolved, I apologize – I didnt hear about it. (Someone told me the THIRD floor had an issue. Uh. Yeah. It would )

Did some trash duty…found out Aaron is in a similar profession to mine ….and did other odds and ends. At some point, a guy who had seen my piece started gushing over how good it was to meet me. I didnt really know how to respond to that.

I also met Angela’s 5th floor volunteer-mate, Ann Saybolt, who was nice, conversational, and has some photos up on 5 that I particularly like.

At the end of the shift, I transitioned lights over to one of the incoming volunteers that indicated he’d had lighting/electrical experience.

We roamed around a few floors for awhile, but I was a bit too gone to remember much of it by then….Paivi pointed out -her- volunteer-mate’s (they were on one of the 1st floor bars) photos on 8. Some of them were from the south pole, where he took a job there for 4 months just to be able to go there and take pictures. The south pole ones were cool, but that guy had THE BEST picture of Burning Man I’ve ever seen. Really, it’s fantastic. First name was Pat…8th floor…can’t remember the rest. Try and check that piece out if you can.

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

I will be at Meet the Artists Night May 16th all evening from 6 or 7 until close. If you’d like to come say hi, that would be the best time to do it. Reminder: IM IN SPACE 8 SE D6. It’s just next to the “M” of the Artomatic sign outside.

Artomatic Space – Almost Done

Originally uploaded by sintixerr

Ok I so I got in to Artomatic tonight finally – despite feeling really physically bad all day long and managed to get the bulk of the installation work done.

This picture is the result and should help make the previous comments and pictures make a little more sense.

My big concerns tonight were lighting and hanging. I had no idea how I was going to fit those pieces together evenly AND close together. The normal wire method of hanging simply wasn’t going to work. Instead, I opted for screws with big, flat heads and hung the frames from them directly. I only used one screw per framed section so that I could pivot them to fit any variance in the positions of the adjoining sections. They’re not perfectly even by any means, but close enough for government as they say. I dont think it detracts from the effect.

They are, however, not as stable as I’d like so Im going to work on securing them better somehow. That and clean them – we have 3 cats in a 600 sq foot studio apartment. It shows

Unfortunately, the lighting is going to be a bigger problem. I want to (and still will) light up the area with red lighting, but the lights I have there (1 100 watt and 2 50′s) is simply not strong enough to overcome the ambient light from the window. Because so much of the piece is dark – and because Ritz’s shiotty matte printing forced me to use lustre – up until about 8pm it’s really hard to make out what the large image actually IS due to all the reflections caused by the window light. Im hoping that If I bring in a couple of stronger lights, the edge of the problem will be blunted a bit.

I had also considered using blue and yellow lighting to create a subtle mix of color on the black and white pieces, but Erin (Halo) rightly thought that the interplay would be lost in all but the darkest surrounding conditions. So, Im sticking with red.

There’s also a question of the other mixed media elements I was planning, but if the image remains unclear in the daylight, there’s not much sense in covering it up further, so we’ll see.

I was also really please to run into a number of artdc’rs at the end of the night who stopped by my space! It was good to see Halo, even in her sleep deprived state. These last few days make a lot of people loopy. I thought she held up her end of the convo remarkably well and appreciated her input!

We talked about organizing an artDC dinner after opening weekend, but it seems Barry and Jesse have beaten us to the punch.

Tom Cardarella made an appearance down on 8 as well and we had a great talk about his work, mine, AOM, etc. I really like what he’s doing with his space and that kind of piece resonates with me as an artist.

Lastly, Cynthia & Paul of Britishink did come down as well. Being a bit slow and distracted, I was honest to god surprised to see that Paul didn’t actually have a tophat and was not sepia-colored. Again, I’d walked by him more than a couple of times thinking there was something super familiar about him. It was cool to finally meet both of them. I’m such a big fan of their space that I don’t even know what to say about it. Like everyone else, Im thinking about getting ink…but probably won’t. I wouldn’t dream of getting something done that I didnt draw myself…and I havent sat down yet and created the kind of inspired drawing I’d want for myself. My wife has 3, but personally Im not getting Sisters of Mercy or Cure tats and I’m not a scorpio.

It was a good evening and there was definitely a lot more hustle and bustle going on than the previous evenings and Im really looking forward to seeing everyone’s lights on and the floors packed.