Aurora Dallas 2013 or Aurora Project or Aurora 2013 or Dallas Aurora

Whatever name you prefer to use, Aurora, The Light Of Convergence was a stellar art event with a turnout well above the expected 35,000 people.

Aurora is an art event held one night in the Dallas Arts District that features new media artwork in mediums such as light, digital projection, performance and sound. This year all the Arts District Institutions joined in to make it a 68 acre block party.

This was my second time to be an Aurora artist. I selected a 10 foot square cement plinth to project my project onto, which was titled UP.

UP is composed of 63 photographs taken while hiking the back woods of Yosemite National Park. UP is a simple concept: we spend too much time looking at our hands and feet, and not enough time looking UP. By mirroring the images of treetops and projecting them onto a horizontal surface, this simple shift and change of angle illustrates the otherworld quality of simply looking UP.

Keeping this project very simple is something I learned from my last Aurora encounter. People in crowds never stop for very long, perhaps 3 seconds. In that short amount of time you have to grab them with something that is striking AND recognizable. 

Swirling colors and complex geometric shapes or long slow narratives just get passed by.

With UP, the simplicity is its strength. A photo that is mirrored creates a rorschach test experience. It is what it is but it could be something else as well. The added effect of one image fading into the next so that there is a brief 4 seconds of overlapping taps into the basic human instinct to search out recognizable patterns and solve puzzles. 

The end result is that the crowd stopped. Some people watched the whole 3 minute loop, pointing out to each other what they saw hidden in the trees. 

Here are a few links to Aurora reviews and posts:

UP

Aurora Dallas

Dallas Morning News

Bill McCarthy video
WFAA photos 49 and 50 are my favorites.
FrontRow D Magazine 

The Next Big Thing...

Well I don't know if Pinerest is going to really be the NEXT big think, but there is a lot of buzz around it, so I signed up for it. Wouldn't you know that my name is already taken. (One of the reasons to sign up early on these kinds of social networks) So here is the HTML address I ended up with http://pinterest.com/bradfordsmith13.

After you look through my stuff and move onto the sea of pictorial rabbit holes known as Pinterest, you will loose hours of your life looking at all the wonderful pictures that people have pinned.

As for weather Pinterest is a useful site and not just a time suck, I haven't decided yet. I have seen lots of wonderful art that is of a much higher quality than what I have found on Flicker.

The original Pinterest idea was that people would pin images that would link back to the original web site. I have found some new artists websites already. But! A good portion of the images have been detached from their original source, so they now float around the Pinterest sea being pinned over and over without the artist getting any credit or recognition.

The Digitally Drunk In NYC

As I walked the streets of NYC back to the 80s, watching the young hipsters intoxicated on Jagermeister and cocaine, stumbling like helpless puppets into the on coming traffic, I was not surprised to find the late night streets of SoHo speckled with blood and teeth.

Today, texting is the preferred drug. In my latest visit to NYC, I saw people walking purposefully from point A to point B, never looking up from the palms of their hands. Its like watching some new religious cult who beleieve the world contained in the palms of their hands will protect them from the throbbing masses, bike messangers, and feed up taxi drivers.

They are the digitally drunk. Obsessed with being in touch, on top, and so with it NOW that NOW is to late.

These photos are dedicated to them. Look up people. See the drama above your heads.

...And look both ways before crossing the street.

Putting a Name to the Photographs

I mentioned in the last post that TEDxSMU had a really good photographer at the TEDxSMU salon SculptCad Rapid Artists exhibit. I just found out it was Kim Ritzenthler. Here is the link to her website and the link to the TEDxSMU flickr page.

Thanks Kim for catching the moment.

After the Flickring at the DMA

The Dallas Museum of Art Flickr group meet up today turned into a very nice roundtable of topics. We talked about the importance of putting titles on ALL of your photos, and how nice it is when there are descriptions too. Keeping things in titled SETS is a great way to keep the images organized by subject.

Tags are important, but there is still a mystery as to keeping the words in the tag separate: Dallas Museum of Art as opposed to dallasmuseumofart, which seems to be the Flickr tag default.

There was also some discussion about connecting and building a community on Flickr. Nicole from the DMA Flickr group and Stephen from Art and Seek talked about using Flickr as an extension of various cultural institutes.

Well, I did take notes so I could go on and on, but it seems that the best way to learn about Flickr is to use it, and to go to meet ups like the one at the DMA, or you might try DFW Area Meetup. Also the Dallas Camera Club.org.

Flickr meet up at the Dallas Museum of Art

DMA sculpture garden at sunset

I have been using a Flickr account for a few years now as an online portfolio. It has been working fairly well, no real complaints, but I know there is a lot more that I could do with it. So, with that in mind, Nicole Leigh leader of the Dallas Museum of Art Flickr Group and myself are hosting a Flickr meet up. 

We are inviting all local Flickr users to come down to the DMA Sunday July 11th at 2PM, for a coffee talk and laptop discussion about tips and tricks for making Flickr a better tool. With the free wifi at the DMA, everyone who brings their laptop will be able to pull up their sites, explore, and make changes in real time.

If the results of this event are positive, we might have another meet up next month. Let me know what you think... and, if you have a Flickr site send me a link.

Dallas Museum of Art Photo Meet-Up

Hooked up with the DMA Meet-up to take photos around the museum. The group was small this time around, but we had a great time talking about posting work on the DMA Flickr site, managing our Flickr accounts, and I found out about The Art of Photography Podcast.

Then we pulled out our cameras and hit the museum for about 20 minutes, finishing up back in the media lab for some fresh photo show and tell. So it was a pretty straight foreword event this time around, but in the past they worked with pinhole cameras and even played with blue screens. Both of which Nicole Leigh said they would probably do again in the future.

Marco Breuer speaks at SMU

I went to a wonderful lecture by Marco Breuer at SMU. I was not familiar with his work, but I heard that SMU was having some really good artist's lectures, so I went and discovered a really interesting artist. 

He works with photographic paper with out using a camera. Check out the link above to see his work.

Kitty Alice Snead at Janette Kennedy Gallery

Kitty Alice Snead, one of the best photographers in Texas is having a show at the Janette Kennedy Gallery. I wrote a review of the show for Art & Seek. Please note that the above photo has been cropped, but it gives you the flavor of her subject matter.