WHOOT! Aurora, Installation by Philip Beesley wins People's Choice Award in Nuit Blanche. Well deserved!

Attendance held steady at this year’s Nuit Blanche, and the all-night arts festival pumped tens of millions into the local economy, according to figures released by the city Tuesday.

A little under a million people came to the event, which saw 130 art installations set up across central Toronto on Oct. 2 and 3, the same as last year. Slightly more of those attendees came from out of town – 140,000, compared to 100,000 in 2009.

While the festival itself is free, the sheer number of people on the streets and out-of-town tourists were estimated to have generated $34.7-million in revenue for businesses, up from $18-million last year.

The city also announced the winners of this year’s Nuit Blanche Peoples’ Choice Awards. They included Aurora, a series of chain-mounted lights suspended in the atrium of the old Royal Conservatory of Music building, that lit up based on peoples’ movement; XXIX, where scores of speakers played 29 singers singing in different languages in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum; and Flux and Fire, a platform near Lamport Stadium that, using motion detectors, would spew forth three-metre-long columns of flame.

Curators are also accepting submissions for next year’s installment, the festival’s sixth. The deadline for submitting ideas for city-produced projects in Dec. 15, while those hoping to create independently-funded works have until Feb. 15.

New post from Brian Solis: 'The Three C’s of Social Content: Consumption, Curation, Creation'

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The full post is an excellent read. Find it here:

http://www.briansolis.com/2010/11/the-three-cs-of-social-networking-consumpti...

Excerpt:

"The 3C’s, Consumption, Creation, and Curation

Bucking the trend of growth in the “creator” category, Twitter, for instance, grew by 30 million users in the last few months. Twitter isn’t so much driven by pure creation as it is rich with a combination of curation and consumption. And, while the services require its users to “create” content, doing so within 140 character doesn’t constitute creation in the same way a blog, YouTube, or Flickr account demand. It’s worth noting however, that creators still account for almost 41 million US online adults.

According to Forrester Consumer Insight Analyst Jackie Anderson, “The initial wave of consumers using social technologies in the US has halted. Companies will now need to devise strategies to extend social applications past the early mavens. This means that it’s necessary to understand how consumers in a target audience use social media.”

I recently conducted a survey with Vocus to understand the qualities that equate to influence and the characteristics that define an influencer. The number one reason we found that consumers follow or Like an individual or brand is the consistent creation of compelling content. I believe that it is the discovery and consumption of compelling content that helps individuals shift from consumption to assume a contributing role of curator…a meaningful step before creator. Curation drives a significant volume of Tweets and it is also curation that balances the art and science of engagement between creation and conversation.

Businesses must join the elite and integrate the creation of compelling content into the social marketing mix. Doing so gives consumers reason to share, expanding the role of curator within the 3C’s of Content and earning authority and influence in the process. I highly advise Forrester to introduce the Curator into the next version of its Social Technographics Ladder...."

Great post from Brian Solis on 'Behaviorgraphics Humanize the Social Web'

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Read the full post for an excellent overview of socialgraphics:

http://www.briansolis.com/2010/03/behaviorgraphics-humanize-the-social-web/

Excerpt:

"Introducing Behaviorgraphics…

Behaviorgraphics examines the “me” in Social Media. While it’s avatars that capture our attention, it’s personality that captures our heart and mind.
Social media tests the filter that divides inner monologue from disclosure. As our thoughts become words online, they color our avatars and profiles with a glimpse of our personality – who we are online and in the real world. Over time, it is how we put our words into action that establishes our character. And, it is our character, through the marriage of our words and actions that paves the way for relationships and opportunities."

Visualization by JESS3

Call for papers for new Interactive Doc Lab/Symposium: i-Docs

In an era of pervasive computing, social media and a networked ‘information society’, digital documentary is embracing new forms. Web-docs, docu-games, photo-reportages, trans-media projects and locative narratives are developing new languages of factual communication that challenge the established linear narrative of documentary.

i-Docs is the first lab/symposium to be dedicated to the rapidly evolving field of interactive documentary. The symposium will be a day-long event to showcase new projects and to discuss the artistic, economic and political implications of new forms of factual representation.

In the evening the programme City Symphonies will open with a screening of Jean Vigo’s 1930 film A propos de Nice, followed by a live response from documentary film-makers Keith Marley (Liverpool John Moores University) and Geoffrey Cox (University of Huddersfield)

Marley and Cox’s performance will explore the contemporary relevance of the City Symphony genre, suggesting new audiences for documentary through live performance, interactivity and VJ culture.

After this we’ll be turning up the tunes and showcasing some more VJ talent!

i-Docs is convened by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi and Jonathan Dovey on behalf of the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol. The event will be held at the Watershed Media Centre in central Bristol on Friday, 25th of March 2011.

Participants are invited to present their current projects and research. There will also be panel discussion, with a view to promoting debate between media practitioners, commissioning editors, artists and academics.

Proposals for both paper and project presentations should be sent to:
idocs.symposium@gmail.com by Monday, 15th of November 2010.

The proposal should clearly outline your intentions in no more than 300 words. Links to further visual materials can be provided, if appropriate.

Confirmed keynote presentations from: Upian (Prison Valley, Gaza/Sderot, Havana/Miami), Blast Theory (Rider Spoke, Desert Rain, A Machine To See With), Nick Cohen – BBC Multiplatform Commissioning Executive for Documentary.

Suggested topics / themes:

  • what is an interactive documentary?: possible classification methodologies for a field in constant development
  • collaborative media and documentary making: objectivity, activism and shared authorship through the screens of mobile phones and web 2.0
  • user-generated content in documentary practice: the new role of the producer and possible models of collaboration
  • crowd sourcing when documenting reality: possible ethical and political consequences
  • docu-games and mixed-reality games: can games document the real?
  • database documentaries: navigational strategies and new possibilities for representing multiple points of view
  • the fine line between new media factual art, collaborative journalism and interactive documentary
  • what does the user think?: how do we user test, or evaluate user experience, of an i-doc?
  • possible financial models for i-docs: who are the financial players and what do they want?
  • case study presentation and/or analysis of specific i-doc projects

Selected papers will be considered for publication in the Journal of Media Practice. Several other publication possibilities are also being considered.

Intriguing: Inception Soundtrack to Get ‘Augmented Sound Project’ | Underwire

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A source at Reality Jockey, the powerhouse behind the RjDj iPhone app, has told Wired.co.uk that it is working with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer on a new “augmented sound project” based on the Inception soundtrack.

The software will squeeze the music through different “dreams” (filters) depending on the location, time, date and activity of the user. “There are dreams that are only played once a month on full-moon nights, or when the weather is bad, or when someone is traveling at more than 120mph....”

Brian Newman's Insights: 'Can We Make Discovery A More Integral Part Of Process?' | Truly Free Film

 

"The volume & density of NOISE seem to have been the dominant parts of the discovery process for some time now. We choose what we choose generally based on how often we hear ourselves being told to make that specific choice.

Everything becomes about level of spend and placement when it is all about how much noise you can generate.. And when it is about noise, everything really stops being about choice, but something much closer to just impulse.  But what would happen if we started valuing certain voices over others?  What would happen, if we committed ourselves to choices, and worked to reduce our impulses? 

There once was a time when film audiences listened to critics, where what someone said about your film, or any film, actually mattered.   It would be hard to imagine a scene in a modern movie about a filmmaker (if such a film could actually get made) when every character waited for the reviews to hit — yet don’t we all remember that scene quite well from past films about filmmaking or any tale about any creative act.  It used to be that other than the audience’s applause, the critic’s review mattered most.

Word of mouth has always been something to cultivate, but the science behind it has always been lacking.  What is the strategy that one can employ to heighten desire among sympathetic ears?  When does interest spread for the core group and then spread like a virus in ever-expanding circles?  If we value the opinions of the people closest to us, what can we build, what do we need, to help share their opinions so that word of mouth can truly bloom?

Do the new group of social network recommendation tools that have been rolling out over the past year+ help build word of mouth or do they just contribute to the volume of all the static?  Back in the days when everyone read the same newspaper — and thus heard the same voice — were we better off, or were we really in a hell, albeit in an ignorant  one, because we were stuck with stuff that had to appeal to the widest audience?"

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Must read post! from Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » 1stfans: Shifting Focus and Moving to Meetup.com

As originally conceived, 1stfans was designed to engage both near and faraway supporters, but having run the program for almost two years, we’ve been seeing what works and what doesn’t and it’s time to respond and change the program.  So far, members are having a great time at the Target First Saturday meetups and we’ve seen a high renewal rate from the ones who’ve attended those events.  Simply put, the in-person benefits rock—people socialize and meet new friends while attending awesome meetups around museum content.  By contrast, the online benefits have not worked as well and when we talked to our far-away supporters informally they indicated they were joining (and continuing to renew) out of general support for the museum, not necessarily to obtain a tangible benefit.

It’s because of this all of this that we are shifting focus to better accommodate the in-person meetup and changing the use of technology to support that goal. At the end of November, we will be discontinuing the use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr groups for 1stfans and we’ll be moving our online operations to Meetup.com.

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At the 1stfans meetup in June 2010, Tash managed to get a Key to City and we all got to open the secret door on the 5th Floor.

This is a long story of creating a program, learning as you go and finding the right technological fits along the way.  I’m going to run down the specifics after the jump.  If you are one of our readers that is new to 1stfans and would like to get caught up, you might check out Will’s introduction to the program and Nina Simon’s interview with the two of us during early days.

Twitter Art Feed:

As much as we loved the Twitter Art Feed, it wasn’t working and we were not seeing much user engagement.    You may remember one of the artists, Joanie San Chirico, actually created an entire project to try and engage the folks that were quietly lurking in the background—a direct response to the issue at hand.  In some ways, since many of the artists featured were 1stfans, the feed provided a way to get to know certain members through their projects, but overall user engagement was low and if the point of 1stfans was to socialize and get to know one another, Twitter didn’t work.   Why?  Well, simply put, Twitter is setup for a one-to-many communication and while it’s possible to have a many-to-many communication there, it’s not the norm and is difficult on the scale we need.  Compared to what we were seeing in the building, the feed felt alien—like it wasn’t part of the program. Though we are sad to see it go, we couldn’t be more thrilled that Dennis Bass is going to send us off.  We got to know Dennis after he became our Foursquare Mayor and he’s been a great supporter of ours—his project, which looks at our permanent collection, tagging and his own photography, is going to provide a lovely close to the feed.  We’d like to take this time to thank the artists who contributed to the feed over the past two years—they created some amazing projects and utilized Twitter in very innovative ways. If you are curious for more, each project has its own blog post detailing the project and to celebrate them, we are making the feed public so you can scroll back through and take a look at these projects before the feed is deleted entirely.

Communication:

We setup Facebook, Flickr and Twitter for communication, but problems cropped up continually.  As much as people are on the social networks, they are not consistently on them all the time and when they are there’s a flood of information coming their way as they try and catch up.  Our communication and meetup announcements were getting lost in that wave. Also, the Facebook group structure (even with recent modifications) makes it difficult for people to get to know one another and communicate together.  Too often, people have their profiles locked down, so if you are curious about somebody and click on their profile, you are faced with this brick wall:

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Would have loved to get to know Nick a little bit, but are we really ready to be FB friends?  Not sure I’m ready for that commitment!

If Facebook was difficult for communication, the use of Twitter bordered on comedy.  You can’t DM users on Twitter unless you mutually follow each other.  Too often, people were confused about the Twitter Art Feed being closed to members only.  When they tried to follow, we had no way to communicate with them to explain and ask them to join.  Here, this says it all. Twitter has these restrictions in place for good reason—you don’t want strangers soliciting you, especially when you could have your DMs going to your phone via SMS, but it stymied communication and there was no way around it.  After November, these groups and feeds will be replaced by a single point of entry at meetup.com, which allows for better communication.

Administrative Overhead:

The online benefits have been difficult to manage internally.  With private groups and feeds, we had to work hard to get people setup initially and you can imagine what a renewal cycle was like.  For every member who didn’t renew, we’d have to go in and find their account to remove them from the group. This was an astounding time drain.  While this could have been partially solved by allowing these groups to be public, that would have created other problems.  For instance, if you open the Twitter Art Feed so anyone can join, what’s the point of it being a benefit of membership?  There’s no good answer here, but since the Twitter Art Feed wasn’t working in other ways, we have a direction to go in that works to solve both problems.

Online Transactions: 

The use of Google Checkout made it much easier for our members to join and renew, but it made things very difficult to manage internally.  When members would join, we’d have to input their data by hand into Raiser’s Edge, the business system we use for tracking development and membership. In addition, we’d have to send reports from Google to our fiance office, so they could properly reconcile the transactions.  This created too much overhead, so we’ve switched to using RE:NetSolutions, which is a product that integrates with our internal systems.  To say we agonized over this change is putting it lightly.  RE:NetSolutions provides a downright awful user experience, but it’s a change we felt we had to make for the 1stfans workload to become more manageable.  At some point we will be able to dump RE:NetSolutions in favor of something better for transactions across the institution, but until then we are stuck {curses}.

Movin’ to Meetup: 

Brooklyn Museum 1stfans

You might be asking why moving to Meetup is going to make all this better.  I’ve been using the site personally for a while and it’s hard to list all of the awesomeness it provides.  I’ll start by saying Meetup has absolutely nailed getting people together in physical space and giving them just enough of an online push to help them do so.  Here are just a few reasons why Meetup works so well:

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1stfans has been on Meetup just a few days and it’s been heartwarming to see visitors finding us there and filling out their profiles so we can better get to know them. The Meetup.com structure facilitates this incredibly well and it is simply awesome.

  • As a group admin, you can ask your members a few questions about why they are joining your group.  Everyone who belongs to the group can see these answers and get to know them a little bit in context.  This is not a major online relationship commitment—it’s just enough information to help all the members get to know each other and facilitate conversations at the events themselves.
  • As a member, I can set my own privacy levels.  I can elect to show which groups I’m a part of or not.  I can decide if I’d like to allow other members to contact me via email and I can do this on a group by group basis.  Ditto for my online life—I can share my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr handles if I want to, but otherwise keep it private or only share it with certain groups.
  • Meetup has single sign-on using Facebook Connect, so I can use my FB credentials without the need of another account.  Alternatively, if I’m not on Facebook, I can just use a meetup.com account. For people wary of Facebook and its problems with privacy, this is incredibly helpful.
  • Meetup sends event announcements and reminders via email and allows members to export events into any number of calendar formats.  I can adjust my email settings on a per-group basis.  When I RSVP to an event, I can elect to share it to my social networks, but this is not forced and doesn’t happen by surprise—I know exactly what I’m sharing and when I’m doing it.
  • Meetup allows each member to create widgets, so they they can help support us by spreading the word on their own blogs and sites.  In addition, organizers can create name tags to be used at the event from the RSVP list, which saves a lot of time.
  • As a group admin, I can greet every new member when they join which is one of the most important things one can do to make people feel welcome and facilitate community growth.

Overall, Meetup has created an experience that can be customized for each group member and I feel like my privacy is protected—I share what I want to, when I want to and it’s clear to me (very clear) what those options are.  It feels like I’m a respected user and that, in turn, makes me feel safe going into real-world meetups and that’s how we want our members to feel.  Bravo.

We are excited about these changes and when I scroll back through all of the 1stfans blog posts, I find myself incredibly proud of how much work we’ve collectively—the staff, the artists and, most of all, the members—put into the program.  I’m looking forward to this next chapter and meeting new 1stfans and seeing old friends at our next meetup.

Lost Girl - Motion Comic - showcase.ca

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Lost Girl: The Interactive Motion Comic

Lost Girl: The Interactive Motion Comic tells the story of Bo before she knew who and what she was. Join her as she lives a secret life in the shadows of the city, trying to survive and unable to control the dangerous urge that controls her life. Then follow Detectives Dyson and Hale as they investigate a strange, grisly murder—and an even stranger set of suspects.

But as the name suggests, this story is interactive. As it plays out, you will be given choices: parts of the scene will "glow" when you run your cursor over them, showing you opportunities for you to interact with the scene and its characters, and discover parts of the story that would otherwise remain hidden. Look through Detective Dyson's cluttered desk for clues or go head to head with an MMA fighter.

comic looks great! thanks Zeroes2Heroes