Archive for April, 2009

Desirée Holman’s “Reborn” at Silverman Gallery

At first glance, interdisciplinary Oakland-based artist Desirée Holman’s  burqa and bikini wearing women bear little resemblance to the pencil-drawn character wearing a Liza Minelli-esque mask that opens Holman’s website, so much so that you may wonder if they were created by the same person. Alas, the work is all Holman’s: the former CCA sculpture student has received nationwide acclaim after getting early attention from the University of California at Berkeley’s creative Eisner Awards in both video and photography. She says she’s primarily influenced by sociology and psychology, fantasy-based cultures, online gaming, and music videos. Elements of each can be seen as her newest work, the drawing and video series “Reborn,” opens at the Silverman Gallery on Geary this Friday.

Geoffrey Ellis’ Sadkids

I was excited to meet local photographer Geoffrey Ellis at the print company 20×200‘s San Francisco get together recently. Ellis’ photo journal blog Sadkids is aptly named: its coverage can be as blue (with posts like “Burn Santa burn”) as it can be lighthearted and youthful (”Easter valley of the sun” and “Hawaii + Halloween = Hawaiiloween” come to mind). But no matter the mood, the imagery featured has the same lovingly cluttered, colorful aesthetic as Ellis’ self-published photo zine of the same name, now in its fifth edition. The winner of the SF Cameraworks’ Phelan Award in Photography, Ellis chose the name for his photo collections as a tribute to 1960s paintings featuring large-eyed kids, cats and dogs in the style of Walter and Margaret Keane. When asked how he chooses where to point his lens, the photographer said he likes to shoot “old signs, antique shops, junk shops, flea markets, bars and record stores (unpolished America). I am trying to document everything I like before it no longer exists.”

Majora Carter Speaking in SF Tonight

Tonight I’m looking forward to seeing Majora Carter, the executive director of the environmental justice organization Sustainable South Bronx, at the Responsible Endowments Coalition Celebration at the Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center in the Mission. Carter, whose talk at TED blew me away, won a MacArthur Genius Award for her work in encouraging New Yorkers to fight against flawed urban policy and green their neighborhoods.

SF International Film Fest: Preview on Sean Uyehara

Tonight’s Films Films Films panel with local documentarians discussing their works in progress at Mezzanine made for a great excuse to sit down recently with San Francisco Film Society programmer Sean Uyehara to hear his thoughts on new media’s role in film. He’s a knowledgeable person to ask: in addition to leading film and music programming for the San Francisco International Film Festival beginning this month, Uyehara plans content for the International Animation Festival in the fall and year-round live multimedia events for the bi-monthly screening program SF360 Film + Club. 

Uyehara, who started as a volunteer screener for the film society’s awards series out of film school, got his first job in the publications department putting together the festival’s program guide. After becoming a programmer, he created KinoTek, a non-traditional programming thread “dedicated to exhibiting cross-platform technologies and emergent media,” in the words of the Film Society. KinoTek presentations at past International Film Festivals have included generative art, VJ performances, social and collaborative video, and live animation. Last week the film lineup for this year’s late April and early May festival was announced along with forums to address issues raised in the screenings, including “Truth, Youth and the New Muslim Cool.” The KinoTek event that looks most intriguing is that featuring Travis Wilkerson, the director of documentary “An Injury to One,” as lead to “death folk-band” Los Duggans—quite a way to get independent filmmaker frustration out.

As for people whose work has influenced him, Uyehara said he admires fellow SFFS programmer Doug Jones’ work in promoting up and coming filmmakers and encouraging their work to be shown. When asked about the types of personality traits that are important in festival programming, Uyehara identified the following characteristics:

  • Curiosity: It’s imperative that a programmer be open to finding something good in an unexpected place, Uyehara said. “Otherwise forget it–much of what we do is turning over rocks and looking underneath.”
  • Integrity: Knowing what value you’re able to offer audiences but not overstating your role is important. Uyehara also warns against exploiting projects by novice filmmakers and said that it’s important to work together so first-time distributors understand what they’ll get out of a project or festival.
  • Foresight: A good programmer’s ability to look beyond their own film preferences and host screenings with projects that push boundaries is crucial. “I try to program things that are on the edge of my own taste,” said Uyehara, who said only showing films of interest to him would be a disservice to local audiences. “The important thing is creating a public program that will engage people on a social and cultural level, that has relevance. Our work isn’t done in a vacuum.”

He doesn’t work in one either, stressing that he’s one of several programmers and part of a large team that plans and executes the annual International Film Festival. More content around the screenings to come.

Virgance Equinox Event at 111 Minna Tomorrow

Tuesday’s Equinox Event at 111 Minna will be the most recent SF Beta event and program from Virgance, the for-profit activism campaign management company whose primary tool for encouraging change is online networking. They’re the minds behind 1 Block Off the Grid, a community effort to make solar power available in bulk to neighborhoods, as well as consumer network Carrotmob, which invites people to reward companies that make socially responsible purchasing decisions. Promoted as “the biggest beta ever,” tomorrow’s event is co-sponsored by GOOD Magazine and promises cocktails to celebrate Virgance’s recent purchase of sustainable blog network Green Options Media.

Web 2.0 Expo: Tim O’Reilly Takeaways

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media and the person who coined the phrase “Web 2.0” to describe the phenomenon of increased social and consumer-created interactions online, spoke this week about the changes in the media industry with a group of 15 bloggers at a morning roundtable. O’Reilly, whose company publishes the DIY magazine Make and its sister web publication Craft, wore a Maker Faire t-shirt while answering questions about the types on content that stand to survive the much-discussed “death of print.” Craft has been distributed as a somewhat substantial print magazine but is soon to become an online only publication. The switch is a bittersweet one: while I’ll miss dog-earing and saving the physical volumes, I’m intrigued by the multimedia and mobile content possibilities it presents for clever creators.

O’Reilly described some of the variables that have become key considerations for media organizations looking for sustainable long-term publishing models:

  • Format: The Web becoming more people’s de facto space for interaction with other people and their ideas raises huge questions about how content providers can create the most optimal experiences. Because reading coverage online can be a more distracting experience than holding a piece of printed material, how can web publishers best replicate the more static offline reading experience? Should they?
  • Visibility: It was interesting to see O’Reilly’s mention of the importance of awareness and promitions come up again in the Threadless keynote when founders Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff said they’ve never used print or television advertising to promote their efforts. Instead, they describe their weekly e-newsletter as their most traditional form of marketing.
  • Distribution and sales: The recession has made bottom line production costs a consideration not just for publication managers but for audiences as well. I think that readers have good reason to be concerned about the transition away from the longer lead times and bigger staffs that newspapers and magazines enjoyed, especially since there’s no assurance that bloggers and microbloggers will pick up the slack to regularly develop decent in-depth coverage.

Because each of these factors has so many additional variables (form factors and timeliness of delivery not the least among them), the issue of the quality of the news product that the reader is getting can be overlooked. While print publications are inherently limited in the amount of sensory information they can deliver (video, real-time observations from the community, and photo slideshows win here), I’m concerned that the demise of print gives us an easy excuse not to create something well-made in its place but to sink to the level of what O’Reilly described as the most minimal form of publishing–the dreaded retweet. 

Web 2.0 Expo: Threadless Founders

Photo from Paul May’s Flickr stream.

Today’s Web 2.0 Expo session with the co-founders of online T-shirt marketplace Threadless provided a good reflection on how Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff created an ingenious art/commerce model long before buzz about the craft marketplace Etsy or the opening of Threadless brick and mortar locations in Chicago. They were introduced by conference chair Jennifer Pahlka as the “Harvard Business School example of crowdsourcing,” but it’s important to note that while they’ve created a great model, they also did so long before their counterparts.

In seeking a way to make an open call for T-shirt submissions (of which Threadless now receives 200 daily) lucrative for designers, the self-identified “accidental entrepreneurs” offer a large cash payoff, image critique forums, and placement in a weekly newsletter to 800,000 shirt buyers with select designs. While those ideas don’t sound unheard of now, consider that the duo started putting them into practice almost 10 years ago and haven’t gone back on their promise not to take creators’ rights to their work, even if their designs are printed and sold. Even though Nickell said they “know nothing about business development but are learning,” it was good to hear the proven team provide kudos to Tom’s Shoes, artisan food distributors, and other unique online retailers who no doubt have Threadless to thank for paving the way.

Web 2.0 Expo: NPR and Current Talk APIs

The first full day of the Web 2.0 Expo in SF opened with a great conversation about the benefits and potential improvements of the application programming interfaces (APIs) released by National Public Radio and Current in the past year. NPR’s Director and Chief of Technical Strategy Zach Brand explained the process of making 13 years of broadcast content available for sharing as a “brand and release” approach, while Current’s VP of Strategy Robin Sloan described his joy at the local cable and satellite network’s decision to make its video content available in a structured way.

Photo by Andy Carvin.

Full disclosure: as a former intern at the NPR affiliate station Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) and a supporter of KQED, I’m a public broadcasting junkie. Outside news feeds in an RSS aggregator, I get most of my news from radio coverage online and can often be found streaming and listening through huge headphones at my desk. Programming from Public Radio International and American Public Media is a weekly must-listen, but for me, NPR’s breadth of reporting and analysis takes the cake.

So it was with much excitement that I went to hear Brand and Sloan explain the process of leading their media organizations’ efforts to make content accessible and shareable. NPR, which launched their open API last July, now makes 250,000 individual stories and the work of 16 public broadcasting partners available through it. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: with 1,300 registrants, Brand says the API has increased exposure and reach to audiences who wouldn’t otherwise tune in live or visit NPR.org.

While some of NPR’s competitors have found Atom feeds to be the best distribution mechanism, the majority of the content creator’s API registrants get theirs in the form of XML, widgets, and RSS feeds. Beyond output formats, there is the additional question of how the content available on the API is shared with mobile users. After Public Radio Exchange created a radio tuner iPhone application, a part time programmer and firefighter who supports NPR’s efforts created a second, wildly popular app which listeners can browse and use to listen to stories broken down by category. While Sloan said he’s humbled by the fact that someone outside the organization beat NPR when it came to creating an iPhone app, it’s a testament to how much people are advocating to make its content more accessible anywhere.

Sloan said a similar accessibility was what his Current team strived for in partnering with Twitter to deliver real-time updates of debate watchers’ opinions during last fall’s presidential election. The opportunity that an Open API provides, Sloan said, is experimentation—instead of creating a static set of content, the nature of making multimedia shareable is that it can be located and changed. This can be seen in the difference between the one-to-many style election coverage presented in 2004 and the changing presentation of many-to-many coverage of late 2008. Sloan admitted that there was a learning curve in the quality of presentation and scale of distribution between the first debate and election night, but overall I like the idea of the trend away from overly edited, singular voice presentation, even it if means mistakes are made the first few times out of the gate.

While inherently different in their average audience age and funding mechanisms, NPR and Current have both begun to demonstrate the way that long unaltered methods for radio and video distribution are being given a less restricted life. Sloan told Web 2.0 participants to “be imaginative when thinking about who [their] API audiences might be.” Even more than the media companies, the ones who stand to gain the most from the implementation of API software are the people who weren’t formerly able to access all it has the potential to provide. And that’s news worth waking up for.