A Fresh Start (up)

You really thought I wasn’t going to participate? For those who haven’t caught the vawe, Blogday is the day when bloggers can share with their readers 5 blogs they like, which helps making discover new blogs. I was also proud to be in the BlogDay selection of Tête au carré (thanks!). So here is my selection, among all my center of interests:

• eBay strategies: Ok, it’s not at all a new blog, but Scott Wingo is just amazing when it comes to analyse eBay current strategy, and as I’m still passionate about the company I interned in these past 6 months, I couldn’t miss this one.
• Inside the USA: the blog of a French expatriate who came bak from the US but who keep on commenting US news. Obviously, I couldn’t miss this one either.
• Qu’est ce que l’art aujourd’hui: again it is for French readers (really sorry for others) and it is about everything happening in contemporary art. It also proposes some great analysis about the market.
• Tourism Internet Marketing blog:  great blog about the tourism industry and its use of the Internet.
• Future of real estate marketing: a blog exploring Real Estate marketing and the impact of the Internet, Web 2.0 and blogging on the Real Estate industry.

Enjoy!

Apparently flowers and gardens are inspiring when it comes to Net art! Zefrank.com, which is an amazing source of Net art projects (what he calls “interactive toys”), has created some projects around flowers and gardens that are really worth mentioning.

First of all you can create your own flower by choosing you petal type, size and color. Then, you can select your flower or / and the ones of the whole community of users to create your customized garden (tree or vine-like).

As I told in my previous article about Net art, it is again a “navigation” Net art project as the user just have to choose but “adds” absolutely nothing.

But Zefrank also created a flower related project where users can add a particular thing to the project: their voice. The composition of the flower depends on the sound and intensity of your voice, and it gives amazing things, you should try it!

Again I’m wondering: what is the purpose behind these artistic projects? Just experimenting all the possibilities of web design, entertaining visitors, or revealing something more profound? If you are a Net artist, I would LOVE to interview you for my thesis

I might be in a slow blogging phase as I don’t find a lot of tech news where my insight can be a real added value. But as I am completely diving into the subject of Net art (I am working on my thesis about it), I continue to share with you my great discoveries. TinyGrow is a flash toy created by Shinichiro Sato of box7box.com, which lets you create a virtual garden composed of surreal plants from surreal seeds you have to select and drop. It is amazingly captivating since colours and shapes are beautiful and you always wonder what will come next.

From the academical books I am reading about Net art, all the interest of those projects is the part of interaction with users. In this project the interaction is minimal: it is only some kind of “navigation”, as visitors don’t “add” anything to the project (text or images), unlike Mosaics or Typogenerator. However, it seems that you are really building your own garden and it manages to give the impression that interaction with the project is greater that it is, which is for me the real interest of this “game”.

I planned on stopping blogging for a little while but I stumbled upon this Net art project and wanted to share it with you: the Typogenerator.

How does Typogenerator work? “The user types some text; typogenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects. Then it places the text, using random effects too.”

The image of this article is the result of the typogenerator for the word “LIFE”.

If you have stumbled upon great Net art projects, do not hesitate to share them here, it would be helpful for the thesis I’m working on this year ;-) 

I have found another initiative about getting a visual representation of your website, directly inspired by the previous initiative I mentioned “websites as graphs”. This time, WEB2DNA displays the “DNA” of your website. It also has a coding explanation but it is really obscure for me, so I just leave you admire this other art initiative. The picture represents of course A Frest Start (up)’s DNA. And you can find other websites’ DNA here.

What is particularly cool is that you can turn your website’s DNA into a printing on canvas. It was inspired by DNA11 which turns your real DNA into printing. Too bad it is printed and not hand made; I can’t stand buying prints on canvas yet, I just love painting irregularities too much. But my interest for the benefits of the reproduction process in the art market will probably make me change my mind!

I am starting to do a lot of research concerning my working paper about “Internet: a way to democratize contemporary art?” so do not be surprised if you see more Net art-related posts on this blog…

Today I stumbled upon Mr Picassohead, a website allowing you to create your Picasso painting or avatar based on Picasso style shapes. You can check all the other users’ creations here, some are really great.

When I discover this type of sites I always wonder if it is a cool idea from a developer willing to make something fun, or a real artistical project with a social purpose (like for example democratizing Picasso’s style by making it interactive). After the reading I have done on Net art it seems that it is often the second one, but it is not obvious for the user, and sometimes it would be great to add a bit of background about the real meaning of the program. What do you think?

For a very long time I have been trying to prove to my friends that I’m not a geek. But my reaction when I saw my Moo stickers in the mail today definitely ruins my attempts to convince them!

Moo, a UK start-up which had launched a printing on mini-cards service, has recently added to its offer some stickerbooks: you can basically convert your Flickr (and other photo sharing services) photos into stickers. As you can see I can now stick my head and my boyfriend’s everywhere, on postcards, on gifts… (I have plenty of ideas, but I have to select the least kitsch ones!). Of course it can be used in different ways: you can use any picture you want, so for example you can have stickers with famous paintings. I will also probably order my mother’s shop logo and she will stick her stickers on all the wraps she will make. Both mini-cards and stickers have generated creative ideas among users who have created a Flickr group here.

In my “Pieces of art” serie, a cool trend I want to speak about: it is what I call “community art”.

Sites giving access to their API have allowed programmers to interact with their data, and with users’ pictures among other things.

It has resulted in great things in terms of artistic initiatives: you can see in this article a mosaic of my picture made with thousands of Flickr pictures thanks to the Mosaic Generator. Of couse it is too small to be seen here but you’ll see the result with your picture.

The same thing is being made through Twitter API by Twitter Mosaic, a Twitter user who convert pictures into thousands of Twitter users’ pictures. I even had the honor of having my picture used in one of his mosaics

Due to the great feedbacks I have about my “Pieces of art” serie I will continue it. Today a Facebook application displaying a virtual representation of your network. It is hard to say if this is a real form of art but it is a visual representation with a social project, which is why I put it in this section. You can see mine in large view here. To install this Facebook app click here.

If you know other artistic initiatives based on communities, I would be glad to read about them, and it would help me with my working paper

Please leave me a link in the comments so that I can see your Friend wheel!

After having facilitated the creation of wikis, Wetpaint has just launched a great tool to foster collaborative Web art: Wetpaint Please Touch. You just have to grab one of the tools and pick a color and start your piece of art on a wall (I have always dreamt about doing that in real life). Then you will run out of paint, which incitates you to save your work and to send it (or just leave it in Wetpaint database) to let others contribute to it.

You can see here that it has produced pretty amazing things; it is both simple and fun, and I will love to see how my piece of art “Collaboration“ (the picture of this article) will evolve over time. Do not hesitate to contribute and modify it! After submitting it, I received an email entitled “Your painting has begun!”: it shows that it is really lively art, I can’t wait to see if there are enough people visiting to contribute greatly.