John Bell: Blog
It's like Twitter on Ritalin
Passing Through: Bus-Tops
Nov 11th
Bus.tops – a city wide canvas for sharing the art of our streets, our communities, our London, our experience.
Bus.tops – if you can’t tell from the slide above that I’m sure made much more sense with people talking over it – is a series of LED panels that are going to be attached to the top of bus stops around London for people to view from the second floor of the famous double-decker buses. The content will come from a number of artists and programmers, and will presumably be made interactive using the interfaces shown in the slide. It seems like an interesting way to make a piece that is unique to London by utilizing a resource that wouldn’t be available anywhere else in the world (or at least, not as famously available.) I might question how much interaction would be possible during a quick stop of the bus, but that’s a challenge for the artists to work out, not me. I’m just glad it wasn’t turned into ad space.
via a project to transform London’s Bus journeys | Bus-Tops.
Passing Through: Hat for the Insufficiently Happy
Oct 29th
[Lauren] has created a facial conditioning device dubbed the Happiness Hat. The hat measures a sensor at the wearer’s cheek to determine if the wearer is smiling. When the hat does detects the wearer is not smiling, it activates a servo that prods the wearer.
Ok. I’m disturbed. Maybe it’s just because I read too much Sluggy.
Blatant Plug: Open Source Art
Oct 9th
“We need not destroy the past; it is gone. At any moment it might reappear and seem to be and be the present. Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we.”
John Cage, Lecture on Nothing
I have an article up in this month’s issue of the Open Source Business Resource journal with an introduction to some of the work I do at the Still Water lab. It looks at how we are applying the ideas of open source software development to other types of creative production and preservation in The Pool and the Variable Media Questionnaire. Cage’s quote above opens the article and neatly summarizes one of the assumptions built into the VMQ: creation is a constant act of renewal. Much like software, art is only finished until the next version is released.
Passing Through: 1stfans at the Brooklyn Museum
Sep 30th
The Brooklyn Museum has a program running where they’re trying to use social media to expand the scope of their supporters:
The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up–to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other.
The idea here is that they have a certain number of people who are willing to pay for a traditional membership and a certain number of people who use their free services, but they want to create a middle tier that’s based on exclusive content. In this case, the exclusive content is partially being distributed via social media: a private Facebook group, private Twitter feed, etc. They chose a price point of $20 and launched from there.
This program shows how hard it is to draw an audience to exclusive content. It launched in Dec. 2008 and was targeted at 10,000 people who participate in the museum’s free First Saturday events. As of February, when the linked article was written, the paid program had 272 members. I’m not sure what the total number is now, but since the exclusive 1stfans Twitter account only has 218 followers as of this morning, it seems like it’s remained a very small percentage of the total audience the museum was targeting. It seems to be a reminder that having an online audience by no means implies that you have a monetizable audience.
via Museum 2.0: 1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum.
EDIT: Will (from the linked interview) responds to this post in the comments with some interesting thoughts and points out a bad assumption on my part, you should take a look at those for a closer perspective on this.
Interesting Things: Add-Art
Sep 4th
Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.
Interesting project that goes a step beyond AdBlock (which it’s based on) and replaces ad images on a site with something they find a bit more desirable. It works by tapping into FireFox’s user base. Making their project into a plugin makes keeping people’s attention irrelevant; since a plugin is a one-time install, all they need to do is grab your notice for a few seconds and your participation is locked-in until you manually go in and uninstall. Like impulse buying, they don’t need you for any longer than it takes you to plunk down your cash or hit install.
