Alistair Henning

Pretty cool also BBB's new album 'Blue Eyed Black Boy' is coming out April 27 -- on National Geographic's record label!

Definitely one of those artists you`d expect to have gone this way, sooner. Nevertheless, a huge loss. My favorite album of his is the recent collaboration he did with Danger Mouse and David Lynch. Yours?

Interesting colors of a place, and time.

There's a great interview with Jessica Dimmock at PDN here:
http://www.pdnpulse.com/2010/03/heroin-oblique-jessica-dimmocks-music-video-f...

Yet another item on the growing list why, despite its inadvisable name, the iPad will be really big.

Somewhat perverse, but endearing too. ...

Two of my favorite photographers, together.

Agreed.

(The following essay was written by my pal, writer Bill Barol. Look for more from him on Boing Boing in the future! -- Mark)

Even if the Hipstamatic were just another iPhone app it'd be worth your two bucks. What's not to like? The Hipstamatic 110 (the next-gen 150 is in review at the App Store) is a great little photo app that attempts to replicate the experience of shooting with a cut-rate '80s snapshot camera, right down to the leatherette "skin" and the big clunky shutter button. But the app isn't aping just any cheap camera; it's the reincarnation of the mysterious, beloved Hipstamatic 100, and right there is where the story takes a turn.

The original Hipstamatic was the invention of two Wisconsin brothers, Bruce and Winston Dorbowski. In the winter of 1982 they came up with what their big brother Richard later called "a million dollar idea for bringing photographic art to the masses cheaply" -- a camera inspired by the popular Kodak Instamatic (and probably by the Russian Lomo) but made entirely of plastic, right down to the lens. The brothers set up a fabricating shop in a tiny cabin on the banks of the Wisconsin River and got to work. Over the next 18 months they produced just 157 cameras, at $8.25 retail apiece. In the summer of 1984 they were on their way home from signing the lease on a new production facility when they were killed by a drunk driver. Nine years later the family lost most of the brothers' photos and work archives in a fire, and the Hipstamatic slipped into the half-light of photo history.

The story would have ended there, except for Richard Dorbowski. In the summer of 2007 he decided to set up a web site memorializing his younger brothers. The site languished for two years, until two Web developers from Minnesota contacted Dorbowski about reviving the Hipstamatic for the iPhone. Their studio, Synthetic Infatuation, released Hipstamatic 110 just before Christmas last year. It's now in the Top 5 of iPhone photo apps. And it's an absolute blast. The clever interface is wholly successful at mimicking the experience of shooting with a Hipstamatic 100, even allowing a user to change "lenses" as he could with the original, or swap out "films" (which are really just cleverly-repackaged sets of digital effects). Best of all, the developers have so far resisted some users' requests that Hipstamatic have the capability to reprocess images shot in the iPhone camera app, keeping true to the "Grab it in real time and take your chances" aesthetic of the original camera. This hasn't prevented a community of iPhone shooters from getting some inventive and beautiful results. Their photographs are odd, skewed, sometimes murky, and have a great found-image quality. Which seems like exactly what the brothers would have wanted. According to Richard Dorbowski, writing on his blog in a post that manages to capture, snapshot-like, a complicated picture of love, grief, and passing time:

"My brother Bruce once said, 'It doesn't matter if the photos aren't perfect -- as long as people are capturing memories I will be happy.' At the time I didn't agree, but now in my fifties I finally understand what he was talking about."

Hipstamatic web site | Hisptamatic iPhone app | Hipstamatic Flickr Pool

Definitely check out the Hipstamatic Flickr group pool. It's fascinating how a certain format either instantly signifies as 'arty', or genuinely inspires people to produce 'art' (I can't decide which ...).

Individuals gave about $101 million to arts and culture organizations in 2007, but these donors represent a very small percentage of Canadians who make charitable donations, according to a new report.

A study by Hill Strategies Research found that of the Canadians who give, only 3.3 per cent give to the arts. The report is based on figures from 2007, when the recession had not yet hurt donation practices.

Donations to non-profits
Religious organizations	$4.6 billion
Health organizations	$1.5 billion
Social service organizations	$915 million
Law, advocacy and politics	$130 million
Arts and culture	$101 million
Source: Hill Strategies Research

"Some cultural attendees and participants may not realize that a large portion of the revenues of arts and culture organizations is not covered by admission fees, other earned revenues or government funding," the report said.

There were an estimated 759,000 cultural donors, but they were relatively generous %u2014 with an average donation of $132 each.

Canadians over age 45 and with university education are more likely to give than younger Canadians or those with just a high school education.

The report estimates there are roughly 14,000 arts and culture organizations in Canada, but they get less from government than other non-profit groups %u2014 about 28 per cent of their revenue, compared with 49 per cent for other non-profits. Arts groups raised an average of half their revenue through ticket sales.

There is a lot of competition for donations by Canadians, and arts groups were often given low priority in charitable giving, behind religious and health organizations.

Residents of B.C. and Ontario are the most generous with arts groups, followed by the Prairies and Quebec.

Individual Donors to Arts and Culture Organizations in Canada in 2007 is based on Statistics Canada figures and surveys analyzed by Hamilton, Ont.-based Hill Strategies Research.

This needs to change, especially in view of ever-dwindling government subsidies to this industry.

Artists may not be motivated by money, but less and less money -- between government cutbacks, the public's care-less attitude, and rampant pilfering of artistic content online -- will necessarily mean artists must be amateurs. Is this what we want?

In the March issue of Popular Photography magazine, the editor's note, by Miriam Leuchter, is called 'What Is a Photograph?'.

You'd think that, after 73 years, a magazine called Popular Photography would have figured that out. (Ba-da-bump!)

Actually, though, the editorial is about the magazine%u2019s annual Reader%u2019s Photos Contest. This year, in two of the categories, the winners were what the magazine calls composites, and what I call Photoshop jobs.

One photo shows a motorcyclist being chased by a tornado; another shows a flock of seagulls wheeling around a lighthouse in amazingly photogenic formation. Neither scene ever actually existed as photographed.

Now, in my experience, photographers can be a vocal lot. And a lot of them weren%u2019t crazy about the idea of Photoshop jobs winning the contest.

I have to admit that when I saw the winners revealed in a previous issue, I was a bit taken aback, too. I mean, composition and timing are two key elements of a photographer's skill, right? If you don't have to worry about composition and timing, because you can always combine several photos or move things around later in Photoshop, then, well -- what is a photograph?

The thing is, though, this isn't necessarily an open-and-shut case. Ms. Leuchter's editorial points out that photography has never been strictly a 'capture reality' art form. It's never been limited to reproducing what the eye sees.

From the very beginning, photographers have set up their shots, posed people and adjusted brightness and contrast in the development process. So although you may think that some line has been crossed, it might not be so easy to specify exactly where that line sits.

Here's a list of things people do to and for photographs, ranging from the innocent and traditional to the dangerously artificial. If you were running a photography contest, at what point would you draw the line and say %u201CThat%u2019s not photography anymore?%u201D

* You move the camera to get the best possible shot.

* You attach a lens that takes in a much wider or closer view than you would get with your eyes alone.

* You choose a shallow depth of field, providing that sharp-subject, blurry-background look of professional photos, which looks nothing like reality.

* You set up lights to illuminate a scene in a way that nature never intended.

* You bring in a professional crew to transform a model's skin, clothing and hair.

* You witness a spectacular event, and then ask the people involved to go back and re-enact what just happened so you can have your camera ready.

* In the darkroom, you 'burn' and 'dodge' to make certain parts of the photo brighter or darker.

* You bring the photo into Photoshop to remove red-eye. (After all, the red-eye wouldn't have existed if you hadn't taken the photo to begin with.)

* You bring the photo into Photoshop to make the colors 'pop' a little more.

* You bring the photo into Photoshop to shift one element slightly for better composition.

* You combine two or more photographs of the identical scene, taken at different exposures, strictly to produce a better range of lights and darks (what's called 'high dynamic range' photography).

* You combine two or more elements of different photos of the same scene, taken around the same time, simply to get them all in the frame at once (like the seagulls/lighthouse photo).

* You combine two or more elements of different photos that were taken at different times and places (like the motorcycle/tornado photo).

* You use a 3-D modeling program to create a photorealistic scene that never existed anywhere but in your imagination.

Of course, your answer may be something like,'It depends on the purpose of the photo.' If you're a news photographer, you (and your audience) would probably be O.K. with tweaks to the color and contrast, but that's it. On the other hand, if you're an advertising photographer, you and your audience would probably have no problem with anything on the list above.

The question here is, what should the rules be for a photo competition?

Ms. Leuchter suggests that next year, they%u2019ll have a separate category for Photoshop creations. I think that%u2019s a good idea.

But meanwhile, we live in an age where Photoshop jobs are commonplace, reality TV shows dominate the airwaves, and news bites are taken out of context and manipulated. Maybe, these days, the question isn't 'What is a photograph?'; it's 'What is reality?'

Pogue insightful as (almost) always.

Hold your phone up to a work, snap a picture using the "Is This Art?" application, and the app will declare whether what you're looking at is art. Among the one-liners it delivers: "Sister Wendy would not find God in this, therefore THIS IS NOT ART." Users can then send the image to isthisart.org, where everyone can debate an object's art-worthiness. (Full disclosure: I wrote these one-liners in collaboration with conservator Rosa Lowinger.)

Interestingly, the project was inspired by an off-the-cuff Tweet by art blogger Nina K. Simon, which joked that the Mattress Factory develop just such an app. Jeffrey Inscho, the museum's media and public relations director, ran with the idea. (This isn't the first time the museum has been involved in a guerrilla tech piece: they once helped transform their local stretch of Google Street View into a work of performance-based art.) The museum then teamed up with Deeplocal, a Pittsburgh development and marketing firm founded by Nathan Martin (an artist himself). They designed and built the application. Within a few days -- and a bunch of one-liners later -- we had an app.

It couldn't come at a better time: the Whitney Biennial is on view, the Guggenheim stands empty in the name of performance art, Armory Week gets rolling on March 4th and a mere 10 days later, MoMA will unveil a retrospective of work by Marina Abramovic, in which visitors will be invited to sit and stare at the artist. Everywhere, the boundaries of art are being prodded.

"My favorite thing is that we probably won't have any control over it," says Inscho. "But, my hope is that people will use it to think about their surroundings differently." Perhaps the things that least resemble art as we know it are the ones that people will ultimately find most memorable.

 

 

'Is this art?': wrong question. The question is -- would Sister Wendy find God in this app?

Weird to think that as recently as the '70s color photography was not considered a medium capable of artistic merit.

Listening to the Earth, a mile underground.

Jim Spanfeller is the former president and CEO of Forbes.com. He is also treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and chairman emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The conventional wisdom in digital has been that content in and of itself is a no-win business model, at least recently. The idea is that without core differentiation in technology, there is simply no way to make original content pay because it’s so expensive to create. This is not an entirely wrongheaded, but many investors and senior executives have made extremely misguided decisions in its name.

In every medium, technology has played a key role. But through history, once critical mass has been achieved, the technology implications around the business model begin to wane, and the value of the core product begins to take center stage. Movable type was groundbreaking and totally changed the world. Radio and then TV waves likewise. Sheet feed color printing presses, color TVs, FM radio, and so on—they all fundamentally changed the way the business of the specific media was transacted. But as they became commonplace, and as the newer innovations became variations on a theme, the core creative content was once again the most important part of the product.

The web is no different. Rupert Murdoch recently said that “content is not just king, it is also emperor of all things electronic.” He is right, as he has been many times before. Content is indeed the driving force behind almost any business model in the digital world (with the obvious exception being e-commerce plays). By definition, media is about content. Without content, there is nothing to search; without content, there is nothing to aggregate; without content, there is a whole lot less for folks to comment on.

The problem has been publishers’ inability to deliver on consumer expectations around the new medium. Users want multi-media, they want non-linear navigation, and, most importantly, they want interactivity—but in most cases, they’re not getting it. As people change how they consume and interact with content, publishers have to create some new rules. What it does not require is allowing third parties to perform disintermediation of content from the producers of that content with either the latter’s tacit or explicit permission. The most glaring examples of this are data networks and horizontal-ad networks. Big premium content producers allow these third parties to aggregate their impressions and their data and pay mere pennies in return is one of the most value-destructive practices imaginable. 

It is, in fact, these kinds of misguided practices that are at the root of the problems around making content organizations successful in the digital world. And while I do not share quite share all of Mr. Murdoch’s enthusiasm for pay walls, I believe it’s a step in the right direction. Content is king, but only if it is treated as such. At the end of the day, the reason the end user ventures onto the web in the first place is usually to be informed or entertained. The relationships forged between experience creators and consumers are at least as strong online as off. And the value in that relationship is at the very heart of the general concept of advertising—that is, of inviting consumers to consider a product or service in a different, more positive light than they had before.

The future of value creation in the digital world will almost certainly be more about content than technology. The platform is starting to mature. We have arrived at critical mass and open-source platforms, and the general transparency of code makes replication all too easy.

In reality, the world is almost exactly the opposite of how many see it today: It is the technology that is commonplace and the quality content that is unique.  What a shame that many of today’s content companies will not be around to profit from the sure-to-come better understanding of the digital ecosystem. Why? Because they, themselves, are among the core promulgators of these misperceptions.

Some provocative comments, though one wonders what ex-Forbes Mr. Spanfeller's personal context for such musings might now be.

Don McMillan, comedian = hilarious here.