Posted inOpinion

Twittering Machine 2.0

Angelo Plessas is a net artist whose works predominately deal with color, interactivity and sound. “Re-Twittering Machine” (2012) caught my attention because of the ever growing hype around social media’s role in social unrest like the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement.

Posted inNews

Artist Sleeps Outside Till the Grass Grows

LOS ANGELES — I first noticed a few pictures of a curious performance piece on Sina Weibo and then Ai Weiwei also posted about it on his Twitter account. Since March 24, He Yunchang, also known as A Chang, has been sleeping outside in the Beijing artist village of Caochangdi (whose name literally means “Grassland/s”) until the grass is fully grown.

Posted inOpinion

A Three-Month College Sitcom on Facebook

LOS ANGELES —London/LA-based artist Ed Fornieles has created a new Facebook-based project, Dorm Daze, with 35 characters who acted out a fictitious three months of college, with a series of dramas, like a college basketball star and math geek involved in a drug ring and the unrequited love of two fraternity guys.

Posted inOpinion

Twitter Portraits of Rupert Murdoch

Artist Michelle Vaughan continues to render tweets into letterpress. Her 100 Tweets project was the first to give the quips of the twitteratti some permanence in print but now the queen of the twitter press has created a small series devoted to the dark lord of right-wing news media himself, Rupert Murdoch.

Posted inBooks

New Book Explores Social Media From Many Angles

We all use social media. We tweet, Facebook, tumble and pin away, and some of us even make art on these platforms. Social media have been explored in countless talks and essays, as everyone from sociologists to artists to technologists have come together to explore just why these new media are so interesting, and what they mean about society.

Posted inArt

A Report from #ArtsTech’s Social Media Art Panel

On Wednesday I attended “Social Media Week Edition: Social Media Art,” the newest in a series of Arts, Culture and Technology Meetups. These meetups, organized by Julia Kaganskiy, global editor for The Creators Project and co-director of Blue Box Gallery, are all about the potential for technology in and out of the art world.

Posted inArt

The INTERNETworked Bridge: Connected But Unequal

BEIJING — I moved to China almost a year ago now, into a country where I knew no one and where even the internet was foreign. I pulled away from my main social circle geographically, but did what I could do stay connected via the internet and phone.

And yet, just as I turned to the internet for social connection, I also realized it was increasingly difficult to rely on my usual circles. Timezones, the Great Firewall and the weak internet connection in my neighborhood all made me realize that the utopian ideal of global connection was far from being achieved.