Artful Word

Coloured Map Showing Route Changes

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:35:00 -0500

Ward Map showing route changes by Colour:

Base Map from http://app.toronto.ca/wards/jsp/wards.jsp

TTC Service Changes by Ward

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:40:00 -0500

(black = ward number, red = number of routes affected by service changes according to http://www.ttcriders.ca/)

If you haven’t heard, the City of Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission is planning on cutting service to about 62 bus and streetcar routes. After receiving a e-mail from TTCriders that broke down which wards would be effected by each route, I decided to break down the service cuts by ward to see what parts of town will be affected the most:

A disclaimer - to more fully understand this information, the percentage of total routes that run through that ward should be calculated. I’m currently looking for information regarding numbers of routes per ward, and if I find this, I will update this post.

Wards With the Highest Amount of Routes Cut:

42 - Scarborough Rouge River

12 routes cut

Population - 74 075

35 - Scarborough Southwest

12 routes cut

Population - 56 750

13 - Parkdale-High Park

11 routes cut

Population - 50 640

5 - Etobicoke-Lakeshore

11 routes cut

Population - 57 260

11 - York South-Weston

10 routes cut

Population - 59 870

24 -Willowdale

10 routes cut

Population - 58 805

38 - Scarborough Centre

10 routes cut

Population - 63 310

39 - Scarborough Agincourt

10 routes cut

Population - 54 545

Wards with the Lowest Amount of Routes Cut:

29 - Toronto Danforth

1 route cut

Population - 44 420

31 - Beaches-East York

2 routes cut

Population - 52 430

32 - Beaches-East York

3 routes cut

Population - 55 410

26 - Don Valley West

3 routes cut

Population - 60 585

21 - St. Paul’s

3 routes cut

Population - 47 085

22 - St Paul’s

3 routes cut

Population - 59 905

34 - Don Valley East

3 routes cut

Population - 56 895

Map from http://app.toronto.ca/wards/jsp/wards.jsp

Collections and Collections

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:44:00 -0500

I’ve been thinking of this blog as a collection - links and short blurbs on things that I have found interesting. A bibliography of sorts.

I love to collect. When I was a girl I collected TY Beanie Babies (I recently found a box of them: about 50 small adorable beady eyed little creatures). I’ve collected every ticket stub and receipt from concerts and traveling that I’ve done over the past 6 years and I keep them in a little chocolate box that I received from my first admirer. One of my favourite collections is that of strangely shaped paper clips, that I found mostly in my work in the archives of a Pension Fund I worked at for two years, and that I continue to add to when I find I have the chance.

So, in the same vein of collection, I decided to go out and collect some twitter feeds today, and I spent the morning rounding up (particularly) Canadian Museum twitter feeds and added them to my roster. I also added them to a website called paper.li - a website that uses a list of users to create an auto-generated newspaper form bulletin for every 24 hours. I will be using this myself as a collection ground - what are these institutions talking about every day? I’ve decided to share it on my twitter feed as well, so if you’re interested, give it a look.

http://paper.li/artfulword/artful-word-2

Another collection I would like to draw your eye to is that of Herb and Dorothy’s http://www.herbanddorothy.com/ a fantastically cute little documentary that I’m hoping to get my hands on very soon.

MuseumNerd

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 09:20:26 -0500

One of the twitter feeds featured in the 1st edition of the Artful Word newsletter is MuseumNerd - when I asked them if I could use their twitter profile picture in the newsletter, they helpfully and kindly said yes, and also pointed me in the direction of an interview they did with Hyperallergic in March 2010. I’d like to share this all with you, particulairly this passage:

The feed began in April of 2009 like most people start Twitterfeeds: to keep in touch. But one day, on a trip through the Brooklyn Museum, @MuseumNerd noticed that iPod Touches featuring video of the artists had been mistakenly placed under the wrong artists. Tweeting about this error caught the attention of the always online attentive Brooklyn Museum staff and a conversation began.

“I was like, oh my gosh, the museum talked back to me,” @MuseumNerd remembers. “It was an incredible new way to communicate with an institution that seems so big.”

This is a perfect representation of how museums can interact with visitors and bring the experience to a new level. Twitter is such a personal and casual medium, it offers these large institutions a rare opportunity to connect with people on a more personal level.

The interview is also great, as it shows why MuseumNerd is such a great person to follow and why their work is so great in bringing attention to art through social media.

The Article is located HERE

Artful Word Newsletter - First Edition

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:57:00 -0500

Emperor, John Guthrie, Acrylic on Canvas, 76” x 60”

I’m very happy to present to you the first edition of the Artful Word Newsletter, focusing on Social Media in Museums and Galleries. This edition features an interview with Amrita Chandra, who I would like to thank for her time in contributing to the newsletter.

The .pdf of the newsletter can be found here

I’ve also uploaded jpg Images of Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

Please let me know what you think!

-Heather

Have you seen But Does It Float yet?

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:42:37 -0500

I am a huge fan of the art blog But Does it Float. Not only do they post interesting and beautiful works of art and design, but they accompany each post with a curatorial statement, so to say. Reading this short sentence before viewing the art adds something to the experience and changes what you look for in the post.

Some of my favourite statements:

The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars

If you really want to do it, you do it. There are no excuses

To find a form that accommodates the mess; that is the task of the artist now

Twitter and Copyright

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:18:28 -0500

Would you like to hear something slightly disturbing?

Agence France-Presse is arguing that “Twitter’s terms of service allow third parties broad re-use rights to their content, and thus the photographer’s selection of this mode of digital distribution gave AFP a broad license to redistribute the photographer’s images without consent from the photographer.”

Hyper Allergic in their recent post “Who Owns Photos on Twitter?” showcase the recent claims by Agence France-Presse that they have the right to License photographs uploaded to Twitter’s interface.

My reaction? “Uh, really?”

For More Information:

http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/11/twitter_tighten.htm

http://clancco.com/wp/2010/11/11/photos_twitter_copyright_social-media/

http://crlgrn.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/new-twitter-terms-potentially-impact-archiving/

Museums and Inclusively - Canada's Pricey Museums

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:13:00 -0500

Leah Sandals in her recent piece for This Magazine discusses the fact that Canadian Museums have some of the highest prices in North America.

This is a huge area of concern - how are people to benefit from museums if they can’t feasibly access them? An admission price of $24 or an average of $80 for a family visit (as found at the ROM) certainly presents a barrier for access that can be insurmountable in some cases.

While using social media and internet resources to make a museum space more accessible is commendable, perhaps making the space accessible through price should be the first step.

Read Leah’s article here

Catching Up

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:42:00 -0500

I’ve been MIA this past week so I’ve decided to play a little catch up, by highlighting some new initiatives going on in the museum world -

Call For Proposals - Indianapolis Museum of Art

The Indianapolis Museum of art has recently released a call for proposals and six week residency program for Indianapolis Island in their 100 Acre Outdoor exhibition space. This program will be incorporating a blog into the project and is a great opportunity for artists to use this new space.

How I Got Here

Museum 2.0 Blogger and author of the Participatory Museum Nina K Simon commemorates her 4 year blogging anniversary with a post on how she’s gotten to where she is and the impact her blog has had on her career.

1st Fans moves to Meetup.com

The Brooklyn Museum shocked the online community with the announcement of the movement of their online membership community from Twitter and Facebook to Meetup.com.

Guggenheim Museum’s -

The Guggenheim Museum as part of their exhibition Play has started a blog Called the Take, that has recently posted about the use of the internet as platform for collaboration in art and access to material and the complications of copyright. On Access is in particular a great and intersting read, featuring the works of artists done with public domain material from the National Film Board of Canada.

The Powerhouse Museum Embraces Creative Commons Licensing

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:48:56 -0400

The Powerhouse Museum Embraces Creative Commons Licensing:

The Powerhouse Museum has recently announced that it will be launching a repository of digital images that are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Much like the Brooklyn Museum, the digital image collection will now be available for people to reproduce. Great news!

New Museum's "Free" Catalog

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:30:40 -0400

The blog Hyper Allergic has posted a review on the New Muesum’s online catalog for their show Free, that has been published in an online format. As Hyper Allergic points out, the success of the Free catalog lies in the simple layout and easy navigation that doesn’t detract from the content.

Some quotes from the review:

The interactivity is a smooth, intuitive experience, which is a rare quality for online exhibition documentation and something that should be widely emulated. The New Museum’s Free catalogue condenses the exhibition to the familiar, fluent format of a blog, and succeeds in using it.

What the Free catalogue does well is provide an exemplary case for simplicity in the online presentation of exhibitions.

Integrated with social media and continuously updated, here we have a living display that will doubtless be seen by more people than the exhibition itself. This catalogue becomes a didactic exhibition in itself, and an effective one at that.

Check out this awesome art project called “Dead...

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:44:00 -0400

Check out this awesome art project called “Dead Drops” in New York City. USB drives have been embedded into brick walls, and users can plug in their laptops to drop or download files in the drives. From the website:

“Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space.”

Super interesting project. I’m dying to find out what the USB drives hold.

Amrita Chandra on Gartner Voice

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:41:35 -0400

For the first edition of the Artful Word newsletter, which should be up later this week, I will be interviewing Amrita Chandra about the use of social media (in particular, blogs and twitter) to engage viewers in gallery space. Amrita is the Senior Director of Marketing at Asigra, a software company in Toronto, and also is the Owner of Tinku Gallery. Tinku was originally a gallery on Roncesvalles Ave in Toronto, but it has recently transitioned into an art consultancy and publishing operation that is exclusively online.

The reason Amrita is being interviewed for this project is because of her use of social media in her gallery practice - she has a very successful blog called Tinku Tales, that has won several awards and received many accolades, and she also has a successful twitter account, that boasts over 3000 followers.

Amrita was recently interviewed for Gartner Voice about “How to Engage the Blogosphere.” Take a listen and hear Amrita talk about software tools that professionals can use to see which blogs are most influential, including bloggers in a marketing plan, buying advertising on blogs and creating company blogs among other issues.

The Brooklyn Museum and Copyright

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:32:00 -0400

With the recent release of Bill C-32 in Canada, (also known as Canada’s Copyright Reform Bill), copyright, especially in relation to information distributed and shared on the internet, is becoming a point of contention. I know that when I decided to start this blog, I was concerned about copyright issues, especially when it came to images. This is why the Brooklyn Museum and the way that they have approached their image collection and copyright is so interesting.

As shown on the Creative Commons Website, the Brooklyn Museum has undergone a huge initiative to define copyright status on all of their images. When you visit their image collection, the copyright of each image is described and restrictions around using each image is detailed. It took staff at the Brooklyn Museum almost two years to complete this. (for an example, check out this image by Charles Hinman, and particularly the rights section)

Overall, the Brooklyn Museum has licensed their image collection under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license, which allows users to share and remix the images as long as the Brooklyn Museum and the artist is acknowledged and the work is not used for commercial purposes.

For more information about the Brooklyn Museum and copyright, check out these articles:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20496

Interview with the Brooklyn Museum on the Creative Commons Blog.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-melber/the-brooklyn-museums-copy_b_430966.html

An article about the project in the Huffington Post by Jonathan Melber

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/tag/copyright?order=asc

A link to the Brooklyn Museum blogs, showing entries that pertain to copyright.

Lots of swearing today (maybe I’m in a mood?) but I...

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:31:00 -0400

Lots of swearing today (maybe I’m in a mood?) but I couldn’t help but be drawn to this piece. The outright hostility to the curator, the use of a simple style to do it, the fact that if I was a curator, I would love to build a whole show around it? I had to share it here.

Found through http://thisisnthappiness.com from http://www.magnificentruin.com the blog of Flux Labs (also a great site, and very worthwhile exploring)

UPDATE - a footnote regarding this image on Magnificent Ruin (10.30.10)

nevver:

Magnificent Ruin

A new marketing initiative, perhaps?

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:52:28 -0400

A new marketing initiative, perhaps?

Interesting Happenings:

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:16:00 -0400

I’ve stumbled upon some interesting online initiatives going on in the Museum and Gallery world, so I thought I’d throw a post together to highlight some of them:

American Archives on Twitter

The Smithsonian Archives of American Art has a twitter account! The account mostly highlights works that are in their digital archives. Some recent gems are a letter to a Smithsonian curator from Roy Lichtenstein, and a list of recommendations from Picasso to curator Walt Kuhn.

Brooklyn Museum and Wikipedia

The Brooklyn Museum Blog recently published a post about their project to update Wikipedia articles with information about Artists in their Seductive Subversion show. Wikipedia has become such a go to website that it’s really encouraging to see a respected museum dedicating their staff time to updating the resource - the more information that is on Wikipedia, the better equipped it is to interest people in the art. To see all of the articles they’ve updated or started, visit

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/seductive_subversion/wiki/

Kate at the Museum of Science and Innovation

The Museum of Science and Innovation in Chicago has started a new marketing campaign called “Month at the Museum”, where they’ve hired Kate to live full time in their museum for a month. Kate updates a blog, twitter and videoblog regularly with her experiences in the museum and it looks like a lot of fun.

Found through Curated Magazine, a very cool video showing the...

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:32:57 -0400

Found through Curated Magazine, a very cool video showing the printing of the Eames Century Modern Catalog.

Original Link

Update - How do comments work?

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:09:57 -0400

As you may have noticed - the layout of the blog has changed, and this is to accomodate the new comments feature, horray!

Commenting is facilitated through Disqus, and found on the Tumblr Hacks blog.

Interesting Piece - via hyperallergic hyperallergic: Frances...

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:38:22 -0400

Interesting Piece - via hyperallergic

hyperallergic:

Frances Stark, “The Inchoate Incarnate: After a Drawing, Toward an Opera, but before a Libretto Even Exists” (2009)

As seen at the Frieze Art Fair this year, and previously at Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House earlier this year as a part of her “I’ve Had It! I’ve Also Had It!” piece, as well as the Aspen Art Museum. The piece, which also features a performance piece including musicians and back-up dancers, is a part of her reworking of the musical “I’ve Had It!” which is comedic tear-down of opera’s pretensions. Stark reworked it to incorporate some art world criticisms, looking at the divide between high and low culture. This dress embodies a high/low culture mash-up as well.