Category: Social Media

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.

Early days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah

There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

The more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.

We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style.

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event.

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.

Comments

3 artworks a day for 5 days -- and an extra challenge

2/20/2015

Comments

Vancouver artist Connie Sabo threw the current Facebook challenge (three artworks a day for five days) to me this week. I'm taking on the challenge for the chance to create three art experimentations per day, as opposed to sharing three artworks on each of those five days. Because there's nothing like a daily deadline of three new works to eliminate my usual obsessiveness and overworking, while pushing in new directions. I call it Fun with Failure.

And just to ensure there will be no preciousness in the program I added another element to my personal challenge: none of the materials used may be new. I'm using stuff that's already had a first use.

Here then is Day 1 of my Nothing New 3 Artworks in 5 days mission. The rest will be posted on Facebook for the next four days, culminating in a look at the outcomes of the challenge next Friday in this space.

Coffee bag collage, 1 coffee bag, gluestick, paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Typography cluster, discarded magazines, gluestick on paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Paint-chip block, paint chips, gluestick on paper, 12" x 12" (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Comments

Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

1/9/2015

Comments

I'm writing this as the radio airs a live report of gunfire. The French police have just killed the two brothers who hunted down particular editorial workers at the satirical Paris magazine two days ago, murdering 12.

A bloodbath over hand-drawn images is over (for now), while the global reaction is unfolding in drawings.

French illustrator Lucille Clerc's image that she posted on Twitter went viral after it appeared on a fake Banksy Instagram account.

The call has been sent - and heard - far and wide: Defend free speech by publishing the triggering images of Mohammed, and by taking up the pen or pencil in a massive freedom of expression effort. (Some early responses by cartoonists can be seen here.)

As much as I am deeply offended by some of the cartoons printed in Charlie Hebdo (like this one of the naked young woman with her burqa up her ass, in line with the magazine's support of banning women's right to choose) I will defend all extremists' right to draw and publish extremist drawings. Respecting the right of all dissenting voices is part of a (still mythical) free and open society that nurtures rational thought and behaviour. The world witnessed the alternative on Wednesday morning.

Here in Vancouver, former Province editorial cartoonist Bob Krieger took to the drawing board hours after the news of the murders of his fellow cartoonists and others.

But you won't find this one-panel in the local newspaper anymore; the last Province cartoonist was let go in 2013, the way cartoonists have been unloaded all over the country by their corporate media owners.

Surely it was simply a cost-saving measure, but the result is a pitiful amount of visual commentary, and a corporate curbing of free speech.

This week the Province (owned by Postmedia which also owns the only other paid daily newspaper in this town) ran a guest column on the topic of the need for cartoonists' freedom of expression by Aislin (Terry Mosher) of the Montreal Gazette. That one voice ran in other Postmedia outlets including the Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star and a whole whack of online news aggregators. And nothing against Aislin, but I miss our own, Vancouver-based critical drawings as we try to absorb the unfathomable. But as Krieger told The Tyee after he was shown the door, "corporate media is way too controlling and they don't want as much of a variety of opinion as newspapers should have."

You can't keep good cartoonists down.

Yet suddenly Canada's corporate media can't get enough visual commentaries, and entire pages have been dedicated to the drawings, sometimes in full colour - a dream to many cartoonists. But look closer at the spread in yesterday's National Post (also owned by Postmedia) and it's clear that less than half of the cartoonists are actually employed by newspapers.

You can see the irony here. Freedom of expression: Yes! ... unless there's more money in clickbait that has no relevance to local readership.

Cartoonists are compelled to make art, to share their expression freely. The papers aren't paying like they used to but the people are clearly paying attention, via social media retweets, hits, and followers. There's a lot of value in that.

It's astounding that the penny has not yet dropped.

Comments

Is Instagram a godsend for artists, a social drug, or worse?

11/14/2014

Comments

I've been giving Instagram a lot of thought. And I've concluded that I'm exhausted.

(Photo by Carlyn Yandle)

I realize that Instagam can turn a small-town lady with a crafty idea into an international business success story, but that's quickly eclipsed by thoughts of more insidious, multinational business antics: top-level consumer marketers who court those Grammars' "Insta-fluence": Nike, Holiday Inn, Burberry. (More at this New York Times article.)

I think about how encouraging it is to have people following you in your creative endeavours, but then I think about the shared similarities among the top social-media savvy "micro-celebrities", our exploding narcissistic culture and the easy-pickins' exploitation for big-brand profit and almost-free fame.

I realize that Instagram can open a door for artists to the big wide sharing world and that by refusing to open that door runs the risk of a lifetime of professional obscurity. Indeed, "Instagram is custom made for the art world," says New York Observer opinion-writer/billionaire financier/art collector Adam Lindemann. But he then adds: "You get a quick flash of an image with virtually no text or explanation. There’s no need to read. It’s perfect for people with zero attention span, zero education and zero interest in learning about anything—perfect, in other words, for the art collectors of today. You could go so far as to say that the successful art of this current generation must be Instagramable to succeed, and if it doesn’t look good on Instagram, it ain’t working in this instant-gratification art world: goldfish have longer attention spans than ‘grammers."

(Photo by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED)

I realize that it's free and with the help of such apps as Latergram, it's possible to keep the phone-pecking at a daily minimum, but I can't help thinking about these guys: the Instagram and Facebook engineers who recently moved all Instagram photos to Facebook's data centre, without any users the wiser, as reported by Wired.

I realize that this is a wee worried whisper in the hell-yeah storm of 200 million mostly female, mostly under-35 Instagrammers. And I realize that I may be overthinking the whole thing. I could be expanding my visual horizons, connecting with artists around the world, but instead I'm fixated on what becomes of the millions of bits of personal information being sucked into that data centre in Forest City, North Carolina (as suggested in the Wired article) every day, and how that data has been used and how it will be, soon enough.

A slideshow still from How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet (wired.com)

Last year the FBI and the National Security Agency were handed over the ability to suck up people's photos, videos, emails and documents, after the largest businesses online allowed the agencies access to their servers. According to a ground-shaking Washington Post article last year, "The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

I think about Instagram and I think about what's monitored, what's censored (no pubes!), what's the next app to eclipse Instagram's success (Snapchat or Bolt?). I think about how all these social media apps contribute to the time-sucking attention to that little gadget that is now as much a part of the restaurant table as the cutlery and that has turned a busload of riders into something resembling group prayer. I think about how Rogers is a dealer, getting rich on its users' increasing dependency on data, more data.

Am I overthinking Instagram and the rest of the global social re-wiring? Yes, but I might not be thinking about it enough either.

Comments

art has a function in unfathomable times

10/24/2014

Comments

It was a day of horror that has changed the climate at the centre of the Canadian hive forever.
And it took an artist to channel our collective grief.

Cartoon from thechronicleherald.ca

Veteran editorial cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon's one-panel image that ran in the Halifax Chronicle Herald yesterday earned immediate and widespread reaction because it showed where words failed.

It depicts one of the bronze WWI soldiers from the National War Memorial escaping the pack to attend to the lifeless body of 24-year-old Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, whose image is only identified in colourful contrast by the Argyll and Sutherland Highland socks in white spats.

Art happens in the emotional minefield where makers dare to tread. It's a risky business, editorial cartooning; too strong or ambiguous and it becomes a target of already-highly-charged readers. Too sentimental or obvious and it dies on the page. MacKinnon did it right, and The Chronicle Herald had his back.

In a follow-up Herald story on that weighty cartoon, the artist said it was "gratifying" that in the internet age of image-bombardment "a single still image can still move so many people."

MacKinnon's modesty likely has something to do with how many media owners in this country regard the cartoon. Far from being an escapee from the funny pages, it is line drawing in and of the moment. It has the ability to distill public dispair with the point of a pen. Sometimes the one-panel will fall flat, but that fear does not deter artists from trying again. They can't help themselves, but it helps to be employed to keep at it.

(Image courtesy of the artist)

Vancouver cartoonist Bob Krieger did it in the days after the World Trade buildings and too many of its occupants were annihilated. Suddenly, the heroes of that town were no longer their beloved (and winning) Yankees. While readers were near drowning in stories of tears and fears, he hit the right note, in simple crosshatch.

As a former newspaper editor I grappled with editorial cartoonists over intention and ideas, but that all came to an abrupt end when the publisher announced that paying for an original weekly editorial cartoon was a waste of what had been whittled down to $100 per artwork. That was the beginning of the end for me.

So it's gratifying to see thousands of people virtually passing around this piece of art, bringing global attention to the remaining newspaper publishers who still see the value of paying to ensure original work by local artists are in their folds.

Comments

Next stop on writers' blog tour is this space

9/26/2014

Comments

Arleigh Wood

A few weeks back, Vancouver artist-blogger Arleigh Wood asked me if I would be willing to catch the baton on an ongoing, international writers' blog tour. I'm bullish on all collaborative, non-monetizing projects involving social media so I agreed to devote one column to answering the four questions, then passing the baton myself.

Dispensing with the urge to apologize for making this all about My Process, here goes:

What are you working on?

I’ve just finished up a public artwork in Richmond, and finished writing about it, too, so I’m looking forward to re-joining the world beyond this all-consuming project. On my good days I see this as the ‘fallow’ period, when I can absorb, research, reflect, rest and socialize. Other days I see this as my ‘unemployed’ period. What I’m really working on is this idea that ‘working’ is not synonymous with ‘getting paid.’ The weekly blog — I still call this thing a column — provides structure and requires that I get out there and get informed and involved. My journalism career conditioned me to write, on deadline, and regularly. Now it’s become an unconditional part of my creative process.

Why do you do what you do?

A couple of days ago I heard a radio interview in which the guest musician said something to the effect of: “Artists can’t help themselves. They do what they have to do.” I relate to that strongly. I will do just the bare minimum of cooking, cleaning, visiting, caretaking, or travelling to buy myself more time to make. I was the kid in the classroom whose only question about the in-class assignment was, “After we do this can we go to the arts and crafts corner?” The leopard really does not change its spots.

How does your creative process work?

I used to write for a living, then make on my off hours, which sustained me for many years but at some point I knew that when it was financially possible I would have to flip the priorities. I loved the community-building that happens through reporting and writing but I was so creatively spent at the end of the day the best I could do was follow directions by Martha Stewart. I started resenting the fact that I was basically selling all my creative energy. Now I make first, write later. I still need the writing, though, because it leads to more making. That really begins with a compulsion, a need to quell my anxiety. Repetitive, often laborious work is a kind of meditation. With my muscles and motor skills engaged in a pattern of movement or a set of gestures, my brain is free to roam. Often I don’t know at the onset what I’m making but it reveals itself, the way fiction writers often talk about how they will introduce a character then watch that character develop. My making opens up possibilities for new explorations and ideas.

What makes your work/blog unique?

Charting the blogoshphere (from datamining.typepad.com)

I have trouble with the concept of uniqueness. I see my work as a small act of participation indicative of our unique social species, one buzzy speck in the hive. I blog to take full advantage of the free opportunity (for now) to participate in the larger conversation, by sharing visually and through the written word. I am not driven by a need to amass followers or accumulate hits but more by a compulsion to create a personal record of developing creative process and culture. It may just dissolve into the ether, or maybe it will be added to the social record but at least no trees were sacrificed in the process.

Who would you like to pass the blogging baton to?

Leanne Prain is another Vancouver-based maker/writer combo and the author of the newly published Strange Material: Storytelling Through Textiles; Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti (co-authored with Mandy Moore) and Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery. She blogs about crafts (especially textiles) and the people who make them, design, art, urbanism, publishing, and her writing life. She also does public speaking and leads workshops.

Meet Ms. Prain in person at  Hot Wet Art City gallery on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 7:30 p.m. when she and fellow authors Betsy Greer and Kim Piper Werker tackle “The Intersection of Craft, Creativity, & Activism.”

Linking over to you, Leanne.

Comments

Fleeting acts of self-expression hold special power

8/1/2014

Comments

Zen Garden, Buddhist Temple, Japan

The first time I saw a "dry landscape" Zen garden in one of the hundreds of temples in Kyoto, my brain sort of short-circuited.

This was the mid-'80s, and here was a Zen Buddhist priest meticulously raking the gravel against a lurid neon backdrop of sudden affluence and an alarming amount of consumer waste, often un-used and in its original packaging.

Now, of course, we get it. We have been seduced by the easy acquisition of stuff, then oppressed by all our stuff as the economy contracted (and nearly collapsed in the U.S.) We realized the two-car-garage life was not for us and now we spend a lot of time and angst trying to figure out how to part with our stuff. We have been hoodwinked by marketers who prey on and play up our inadequacies, even inventing a highly lucrative shopping 'holiday', Cyber-Monday.

Leah Biggs photo

There's an entire genre of art that reflects our dis-ease with all the stuff (see 10 visuals here) and painters have had to re-think their practice (of eking out a living) now that 'original' oil paintings sell at Winner's for $39.99, straight from Dafen Village, China.

What is emerging is a conversation about what really matters, which inevitably concludes with 'experiences.' It would be nice to think this shared revelation is rooted in our own free will, but really, the marketers have shot themselves in the collective foot. A rampant, speculative real estate

Beck's fleeting design at a French ski resort uses snowshoes and clotheslines.

market has forced mortgage-choked folks into smaller quarters where there is just no room for more stuff. Car-ownership is being increasingly seen as a hangover from another marketing era and self-expression is no longer synonymous with the home-decor category. Expression is becoming a participatory practice, enhanced by that one burgeoning consumption category — the ubiquitous personal screen and all its accompanying non-object data packages, games and apps. Mobility-marketing promotes an era of impermanence. Photos are as fleeting as the gravel-raking or the daily rice-flower Kolam drawings of South Indian women (see video, at bottom) or the snowshoe-patterns created by Englishman Simon Beck (left).

Carlyn Yandle photo

Retail therapy is slowly being replaced by escape therapy. We balance rocks and create Calder-esque mobiles of driftwood. We take pictures, we post them on our blogs. We have amassed nothing but memories of that mindful, meditative moment of exploring the surface and mass of natural objects. We share them and are inspired by others' sharing.

Priceless.

Comments

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

3 artworks a day for 5 days -- and an extra challenge

Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

Is Instagram a godsend for artists, a social drug, or worse?

art has a function in unfathomable times

Next stop on writers' blog tour is this space

Fleeting acts of self-expression hold special power

browse by topic:

Archives