Even if they’re in London! Many of this set are architectural landmarks like BBC headquarters and the Isokon building.

Peter Crawley's Ikoson stitch art

From AotM’s interview, Crawley begins his work with either photos, vector files or pencil before moving on to the needle:

After finding a suitable subject – one that has nice lines and interesting details – the subject is either photographed, edited and traced in Illustrator or drawn freehand.

The vector lines are printed and placed over the watercolour paper. I then have to decide how the piece will be stitched and meticulously pierce every hole with a pin ready for the stitching, sometimes over a thousand holes. Finally using a needle and thread, stitch the illustration.

Crawley's BBC Mast Tower

Most of the work on Peter’s site is either abstract or architectural. I would love to see some of the maps he hints at on his About page and in the interview. Stunning stuff, all around.

All images ⓒ Peter Crawley, 2009.

Update: For more goodies, Ape on the Moon is @moonape on Twitter.

BARCAMP UPDATE!

Have you seen the video from #barcampchs? Jerry and I made the cut while we were grabbing every sticker we could smash into our pockets:)

NEVER MIND SETTING UP! GRAB THE STICKERS!

Enjoy.

barcamp CHARLESTON  starts tomorrow.  Registration begins at 8am.  Liked sessions include:

• BaconCamp by TedDombrowski  – Food Tech
• Developing your first iPhone app by Paul Reynolds – Programming
• Wild Edibles of the Lowcountry by calweb  – Environmental
• Beyond Twitter and Facebook by Jared – Social Media
• Building a community-powered website with Drupal by chrys  – Software
• Technology Tools for the Changemaker by calweb Non-Profit
• Creating and maintaining a rock star portfolio by katiejohnston  – Web Design

To see the full list, visit: http://www.barcampchs.org/sessions/liked

We hope to see you there!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHoDsZDMH_Y

It’s wonderful what Creative Commons makes possible. Randall releases each xkcd under an Attribution-NonCommercial license, freeing NoamR to create this video, which he shared with an Attribution-NonCommerial-ShareAlike license.

So now you and I are free to adapt both, under those simple provisions. How hard is it to attribute, not make money and share?

Note: WordPress.com sadly refuses to embed Noam’s Vimeo-hosted video no matter what I do. It’s bad about stripping code out. If I can get the video in the post rather than linking, I will. (WordPress, FIX THIS.)

Update:  Vladimir Prelovac’s Smart YouTube plugin is great for getting YT videos to embed correctly in WP.  Luckily, Noam Raby also has a YouTube account as well as Vimeo.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is proud to open the doors of its new gallery space, located in The Marion and Wayland H. Cato Jr. Center for the Arts with the exhibition, Aldwyth: Work v. / Work n. — Collage and Assemblage 1991- 2009. The exhibition begins with a reception on Friday, October 23, 6 – 9 p.m. and will run through Saturday, January 9, 2010. During the reception, at 7 p.m., the artist Aldwyth and curator Mark Sloan, will lead interested guests on an exhibition walk-through. The first public viewing of the Halsey Institute’s new space will continue with a Hallelujah Chorus performed by members of the Taylor Festival Choir, the College’s professional choir in residence, as well as a dance performance by local Charleston dance group, Buen Aché. The exhibition opening is the first of many celebratory events for the School of the Arts’ 20th anniversary. The new building is located at the corner of Calhoun and St. Philip Streets (161 Calhoun St.).

This is the first major retrospective of the collage and assemblage artist Aldwyth. Now in her 70s, Aldwyth lives and works in an octagonal house on the edge of a salt marsh on one of South Carolina’s sea islands. Aldwyth: Work v. / Work n. features fifty-two collage and assemblage works created within the past two decades. A film by John Reynolds with commissioned soundtrack by Bill Carson accompanies the exhibition, documenting the artist’s interaction with many three dimensional works. The Halsey Institute has also published a full color, 112-page exhibition catalogue including essays by curator Sloan and Boston artist/writer Rosamond Purcell. Aldwyth’s complex, often epic-scaled collages resemble “medieval manuscript pages writ large” says Sloan. Each piece can take years to make. Ackland Art Museum Director Emily Kass says about Aldwyth,”Her remarkable work demands to be seen. It is hard to think of an audience who will not be mesmerized by these extraordinary pieces of art.”

Take a tour with gallery director Mark Sloan:  http://www.youtube.com/collegeofcharleston#p/u/3/mgAtt8HK5_c

For an in-depth, online preview of the exhibition, please visit:  http://halsey.cofc.edu/exhibitions/2009/04_aldwyth_main.php

If you keep wondering what Twitter is, why everyone is talking about it, if you should start doing it, or if you should just ignore it entirely and hope it will simply GO AWAY, The Complete Guide to Twitter, by Mark O’Neill, from MakeUseOf might help you make up your mind.  The guide “tackles every Twitter feature, tip and trick you can think of.”  The recently released guide provides instructions and screenshots for learning how to use the Twitter interface, provides suggestions for tweeting from your desktop, and details many other helpful hints.

Twitter Basics
Even if you are not sure if you want to play around with Twitter, you might want to consider signing up for an account.  It is very easy for your name or brand to get hijacked in social networking sites and very difficult to get them back.  I recommend this for most social media sites, even if you aren’t sure you want to use the application.

Here’s the basics for Twitter:

• To Tweet means to send a message.
• You can only Tweet/post 140 characters.  Shorten words and be brief, use slang and abbreviated words just like you would if you were sending a text message.
  • Twictionary: The Dictionary for Twitter! is a great place to find the meanings of abbreviated words on Twitter.
  • Use URL shortening services like tinyurl to save characters in your messages.
  • If you want to send pictures with your tweets, use a content hosting service like Twitpic.
  • @twittername sends a message to a specific user – EVERYONE SEES IT
  • d twittername sends a PRIVATE direct message.  YOU CAN ONLY SEND DIRECT MESSAGES TO PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW AND THEY ACCEPT THE REQUEST AND FOLLOW BACK.
  • BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU TWEET – You can protect your updates with a privacy setting but it will be very hard to understand the nature of twitter, promote yourself, or make new contacts if you do.  YOU CAN DELETE A TWEET BUT THEY DON’T EVER REALLY GO AWAY.
  • DON’T SPAM! Don’t send messages to people you don’t know.
  • DON’T BE SELF PROMOTING! Mix your messages.  It’s best if you use Twitter for personal contact most of the time and self promoting occasionally.

• Followers are people who want to see what you are tweeting
  • Remember to use Twitter to relay interesting news, valuable information, your opinions on current events…
  • Don’t follow everyone.  Be selective until you get the hang of it.
• ReTweeting is when someone resends a tweet that someone else said.
• Hashtags are used to search the Twitter system for tweets about a particular topic.  Users can define their own hashtags by using #before a word or phrase.
  • I monitor #cofc, #chs, #Addlestone Library, and #club addlestone right now on the CofC Twitter Account.  I monitor other hashtags on my personal twitter account.
  • #hashtags is a good place to look for twitter trends.
• Sending and Receiving Tweets
  • You can send tweets from the Twitter website, your phone, or with external applications.
  • I like tweetdeck and hootsuite because they allow me to manage multiple searches and twitter profiles.
  • You can also tie your twitter account to your Facebook profile.  When you do this, anything you post on your wall is automatically sent out via your twitter account.

How Can I Use It In My Every Day Life?

• Watch Twitter hashtags to keep abreast of current trends
  Bates Information Services provides many useful tips for using Twitter in real life in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip available at www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html One of Bates’ suggestions is to use  word-cloud generators to see what words are most frequently used in conjunction with a news event.  She uses Search Cloudlet, an add-on for Firefox.

• Analyze current trends
  One of today’s hot topics is Balloon Boy (found via the new Bing Twitter Search)
  

• A very quick Wordle visualization based on the tweets produced this – Balloon Boy Hoax, and some comparisons to Kanye.  I find this humorous.

There are lots of ways to visualize twitter trends.  A good starting point to find out how is to read the article 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by flowingdata.

• Monitor Mentions
  Bates also provides a useful suggestion to “monitor mentions of your organization’s names…” in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip.   As I noted above, I monitor #cofc, #chs, #Addlestone Library, and #club addlestone right now on the CofC Twitter Account.  Although it is fairly quiet on twitter in the library right now, we do have times when activity increases.  For example, we see more activity on #cofc, #chscool, and #rave when students plan a rave in the rotunda.

YouTube Video by sultanolli3

It is nice to know what’s going on around you.  Especially if in the next 15 minutes there are going to be a lot of students dancing in the rotunda.  I’ve been watching the library hashtags for most of the fall 2009 semester and there are a growing number of students using it to communicate with each other.  They seem to use it primarily to communicate where they are in the library or to relay information about where they are going after they leave.

• Gather Highlights from a Conference or Event
  Another great suggestion from Bates in her October 2009 Bates Info Tip is to “Gather hightlights from a conference.”  She suggests searching for the conference hashtag within a week of the conference and copying and pasting all the tweets into Wordle.net to generate a word cloud that can help identify dominant conference themes.  Using a hashtag for a conference or event helps facilitate communication during and after the conference.  It allows attendees to keep in touch, plan meet-ups, discuss information, ask questions, and clarify information that is being presented during the conference.  After the conference attendees many groups continue using their hashtag to stay in touch and continue communicating after the conference is over.

• Community Involvement
  I think one of the best parts of twitter is the ability to keep in touch with people you meet and add them to your social network.   How many times have you added someone to your phone, scribbled emails on your hand, scraps of paper, or a restaurant napkin, and couldn’t ever seem to get back in touch?

  I also think twitter is a wonderful way find local and global events happening that you might not have been aware of otherwise. Two such events/organizations in Charleston I have been able to contribute to and be a part of due to my daily interactions on twitter are the Social Media Club Charleston (#smcchs) and BarCamp Charleston (#barcamp) an ad-hoc, user generated “unconference” taking place October 24, 2009 at the Lowcountry Innovation Center.  I have also found it helpful to follow certain organizations on twitter like CAA (College Arts Association), ALA (American Library Association),  and wfh?! (user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter that tells you what is trending).

  My best advice about twitter is to try it out.  Initially, I was skeptical myself about the usefulness of this particular social web app.  Now I think that I couldn’t do without it.  It is my instant line of communication to people with the same interests as me, exposing me to places, events, and organizations I want to know about.

Other posts in this series:

• Why did Fairey file in the Southern District of New York?
• Does AP actually own the copyright in the Garcia photo?
• Is Fairey’s suit doomed to fail before it even gets off the ground?
• What’s the “original” photo?
• What does the complaint say about the poster creation process?
• The AP strikes back
• What’s a “visual reference”?
• Mannie Garcia joins the suit
• Fairey’s spoliation bombshell—This post

Other Articles/Organizations/Links of Interest

• Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey, A critique by artist Mark Vallen
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Obomicon.me
• Create an Inspirational Vector Political Poster (tutorial)

With 19 days left until BarcampCHS Jerry and I finally submitted our session proposal.  I think it will be a lot of fun.  I hope we get to present. VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN!

If it makes, this will be the official launch of the Articipatory collective that Jerry and I have been working on for years. Keep your fingers crossed!

Here’s the lowdown:

Topic: (Title) Web Tools That Every Artist Must Know
Proposal: I Am Willing to Present on This Topic
Catgegory: Fine Arts
Experience Level: Beginner

Description:
Jolanda-Pieta van Arnhem and Jerry Spiller invite you come (p)articipate and and kick off the first Articipatory workshop for community-centered art.  We will present on tools any artist can use to organize their online presence and share their work and ideas both on social networks and the real, physical world.  We’ll give an overview of how to build a simple website to showcase your portfolio, and where to host your pictures, films and recordings.  We’ll also take you through options for selling your art in online marketplaces, and explore the in’s and out’s of building networks of fans, collaborators and customers on the many, many social sites that abound these days.  Learn to make the most out of WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Etsy, BrightKite and more!

Ssssh…they don’t know yet but everyone that attends gets an “I articipated in BarCampCHS” sticker. Check back for the design! Update:  The stickers aren’t going to make it in time, unfortunately.