ArtMeddler Blog

Last night Danny and I gave a last minute presentation about the project at the £5 app meet. I compressed the basics of the project into a light-speed talk with the intention of getting some feedback.

In amongst the usual crew of geeks were some artists who’s feedback was extremely useful. I am particularly mindful of what shardcore mentioned about the work that he puts online: ie. that the time lapse videos of him working that he puts on youtube are more popular than the works themselves!

Thanks to the team for putting the event on and Linc for his excellent presentation, I will definitely be attending the event in future.

Photos to follow.

Danny and I have been working on some rough paper prototypes for the most important ‘views’ in v.1 of our project over the past couple of weeks. We’re now moving on to build some of them in XHTML/CSS.

There are a handful of photos from our sessions over at Danny’s flickr profile.

Its our first post….

This blog has been setup so that we can share with everyone what we’re up to in order to create the artmeddler final product. There’s a lot of history/thought behind what we’re up to which I’ll also be detailing.

I feel I need to write a little bit about the genesis of this project before we get into the processes we’re using to get something out the door.

Almost 18 months ago, Sophie and I were discussing some of her works and how sometimes, she’d like some external input to tell her when a work of art is ‘done’. This is no small irony when Sophie is a video editor herself (a role in which you frequently are the person saying ‘done’!). Eventually we ended up talking about how this could be done on the web with community involvement.

The early ideas revolved very specifically around a community ‘telling’ (i.e. voting) that they should stop working on their piece of art. However, what became apparent over time was that there isn’t really a space for showing works in progress online. Lots of people do it (mainly retrospectively) but there’s no structured place for the exploration of how something was created and for a community to input.

I, for one, love to see art deconstructed. I get excited when we get to see how an artist began sketching, or listening to Stevie Wonder’s drumming isolated from the original song.

Lots of ideas are floating around about how this is going to work, and where its future lies, so its an exciting time. In these early days of the project, we’ll be documenting some of the exercises we’re using to get the ball rolling.

Its interesting for me personally to have to make hard decisions about what to include and what not to: a few weeks ago I attended UXI Amsterdam, which was partly about the difficult strategic decisions you have to make when creating the user experience. To quote Brandon Schauer:

“Strategy is about saying no.”

A lot of what we’re up to is to strip things out at the moment, but hopefully, we’ll create a place for all of our ideas to grow with a community.

Signing off,

B