P'unk Avenue Window

Microsoft will allow bass-ackwards XP-only applications, such as IE 6-only web apps, to run in emulation via Virtual PC as part of the regular Windows 7 desktop. That feature will apparently be standard in enterprise-class versions of Windows.

I appreciate that Microsoft has found a way to do what they have been unable to do for years: push a modern web browser onto the desktops of the most stubborn corporate and institutional clients. The people who make the lives of web designers pure hell by insisting on IE 6 compatibility because they once allowed someone to sell them a web application that can never, ever be upgraded to work with anything else. This is good. Frustrating as all hell, but good.

But Microsoft, if you do this the wrong way… where “the wrong way” is allowing admins to enforce a policy like “everybody gets virtualized IE6 all the time and may not have IE8 as their default browser…” then you’re going to hear the screaming, the wailing and the gnashing all over again.

I enjoyed last night’s Junto discussion on art criticism in Philadelphia but I’m puzzling over some fundamentals. The larger context went mostly unspoken.

All journalism everywhere is in deep sheep dip right now because print newspapers are dying.

At the same time, everybody’s a critic (ahem) thanks to the Interwebs.

Which means we have an overwhelming supply of armchair critique of everything— art, politics, sports, everything— but our supply of profoundly well-informed criticism is perhaps in danger.

But that last is far more an issue for politics (if you can’t afford to send stringers to Pakistan, your information is limited) than for art (there are people who choose to invest 20 hours a week in art, on their own dime).

Also, why is this discussion so centered on Philly? Who cares about locality? Okay, it’s an important color in the palette, but it’s not everything. And other media have already gotten the message that it doesn’t matter so much anymore.

Craft artists have moved en masse to Etsy. They can sell their work, they can get discovered. And criticism and commentary happen everywhere people care enough about the work. Geography is mostly irrelevant, except insofar as it informs the style of the work itself.

And I’m talking about craft artists who produce functional objects. The need to be in the same room with it before you buy it should be greater, not less, than the need to stand in a gallery with a painting. So why must fine art sales, and fine art criticism, be local? And dependent on the expense of galleries and print publication?

Local artist Katie Henry produces both sewn paintings and bags. To my knowledge her sewn paintings have sold only on a local basis, while it is completely impossible for her to keep a handmade bag in stock for more than eight seconds. But I suspect this is mostly because her paintings haven’t been listed on Etsy (hey, the lady’s busy enough as it is).

So why hasn’t fine art really arrived on Etsy yet? It could be as simple as a marketing decision on Etsy’s part. Perhaps a wise one. But that’s just an opportunity for someone else.

Thursday April 23, 2009

The discussion which will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Please join us next Thursday, April 23rd at 6pm for the Junto. This month we will be discussing the past, present, and future of art criticism in Philadelphia. We are pleased to host an all-star panel representing the many sides of the art world.

Sid Sachs: Director of Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, UArts faculty, author, curator, with a long history in the Philadelphia art world.

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof: the ever-present writers/critics responsible for the Philadelphia Art Blog. Roberta and Libby founded the Zero .1% for Art Commission to bridge the gap between ordinary people and art. Artblog, established in 2003, is an outgrowth of that mission.

Katie Murken: Philadelphia artist and educator. Since receiving her MFA in Printmaking & Book Arts from the University of the Arts Katie has been an instructor at the Tyler School of Art and practicing artist. In 2007, she worked with P’unk Avenue on the multimedia installation Debtor’s Inheritance at the Schuylkill Center. In 2008, she received an Independence Foundation Fellowship for the Public Author Project, a long-term interactive project that will use text messaging to explore the phenomenon of books and libraries in today’s digital climate. Katie is currently collaborating with three Philadelphia artists as part of the Little Berlin gallery’s upcoming exhibition Offerings.

Andrew Suggs: (from the Vox Populi website) “Recent exhibition venues include The Galleries at Moore (Philadelphia, PA), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), ThreeWalls (Chicago, IL), Publico Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). Andrew currently lives and works in Philadephia, where he is the Executive Director of Vox Populi. He earned an AB cum laude from Harvard University.”

As always, we provide the cold Newcastle Brown and Philadelphia’s best tomato pie. You bring something to share, if it is not too much trouble.

Hope to see you there!

When:

Thursday April 23, 2009 at 6pm

The discussion which will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Where:

P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19147

Sometimes Google doesn’t exactly rush pell-mell to index your blog. And when Google does index your blog, sometimes they don’t do it in a way that really helps your readers.

To my mind, blogs have two kinds of readers:

1. People who read it regularly, via RSS or similar
2. People who find individual articles via a search.

Category #1 isn’t really Google’s department. Fair enough.

Category #2, of course, is what Google Search is all about. Sure, 99% of queries are about “country matters” and every search engine has them down to a tee, but the queries you really care about are always in that 1% that’s obscure and weird and only mentioned in passing on one site ever. And Google’s capacity to actually find that stuff is the reason they took over the search world in the first place.

But for a while there, this really wasn’t working for the P’unk Avenue Window blog.

Searches like these (with the quotes, making them exact):

“Designing while intoxicated”
“svncampfire”

Were turning up other people linking to or talking about our articles, but they were not turning up the articles themselves. Results on our actual blog always turned out to be category pages or the home page… which, more often than not, didn’t feature that content anymore due to the addition of new blog posts.

This poses a problem because people don’t know they are interested in something like svncampfire until they need it.

I did quite a bit of research looking for an explanation for Google’s dislike of our individual article pages. I considered blaming our robots.txt file, the presence of dates in our article page URLs, and of course sunspots.

But in the process I finally got around to learning about Google Sitemaps. And more importantly, the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress, which is beautiful. There’s really no other word for it.

A sitemap is a simple file that spells out what pages are on your site and what their relative importance is. You can’t use it to increase your overall rank with Google, but you can use it to promote your individual articles at the expense of things that might otherwise seem more important to Google, like your category pages. Where before Google might only rarely bother to crawl back through your calendar archive links, now Google clearly understands that your posts are special and unique snowflakes that do not wither with age and should be taken equally seriously. And unless you’re giving out stock tips or weather reports, this is of the good.

The sitemap plugin will not only generate sitemaps for you, it will automatically update them whenever you post to your blog. Tweak the weightings using the handy control panel and you’re good to go.

There is, however, one catch that meant an extra week of waiting before Google finally caught on: the very first time you write a sitemap, you must submit it to Google manually via the Google Webmaster Tools. The plugin cheerfully informed me that it had already “submitted the sitemap to Google” without mentioning this little fact. So take care to follow through on that detail. You should be using the webmaster tools anyway!

The results are not perfect. Some searches that ought to bring up our individual articles still mysteriously bring up only category pages. And tweets consisting almost entirely of links to our articles (often using the hated URL shorteners, which Google doesn’t seem to translate) still often outrank the articles themselves. But hey, it’s progress. Most of the time we’re on the first page in appropriately narrow searches. It’s a big improvement, and I have a much warmer, fuzzier feeling about the usefulness of blogging on topics of lasting interest.

I talked with Isaac Schell after his recent opening about the motivation and inspiration for his pictures. At first he frame photography as a compulsion. A way to get an image out of his head. He later conceded that Garry Winogrand got it right by saying, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

A picture I took, New York City

Photography is the invention of an impatient world. Insofar as It is a way to render a scene timeless, it varies little from the early functions of painting. However, the quickness with which photography can snapshot such a scene is where it has set itself apart. Photography is an enabler of faster-paced living. We augment and extend our memories by time shifting scenes. We can mediate a vacation through the lens, flatten an overwhelmingly deep scene, vignette a busy one, and most significantly grant ourselves a continuance to process and reprocess the witnessed event at later times. We mostly ignore the present, storing the past on SD cards, and fantasize about photographs we’d like to take in the future.

Beyond the documentary function of photography there are a number of post-structural functions, those that rely on the interpretation of the viewer. They fit nicely into three categories of design outlined by Donald Norman in his not so recent TED talk—the visceral, the behavioral, and the reflective.

The visceral function speaks to the content of a photograph. A pretty girl, a sunset, a landmark, violence, action, and so forth. These are the pictures in our albums and shoeboxes, gathering dust and yellowing as they attempt to preserve spent time.

The behavioral layer of a photograph contains its composition, the juxtaposition of objects, counterpoint, light and shadow, the mechanics of the scene. It is informed by and understood through the a knowledge of the operation of the camera/lens/film. These are the clever pictures we took in our first black and white photography class.

Lastly, the reflective function is that post-modern one, entirely reliant on the social context of a picture, entirely ignoring the visceral and behavioral. These pictures concern the backstory rather than the scene. They are new topographic photos of small town storefronts, street snapshots, Stephen Shore’s steak dinner, the mundane, photographs of nothing. They don’t have inherent meaning. The burden understanding their relevance falls entirely on the viewer, one with some knowledge of the history of photography and of the culture reflected by the mirror of these photographs.

When I take (I can’t bring myself to say “make a picture,” I’m just not that good at it) a picture I fixate on those functions of photography. I flex my eyes and brain too hard, it always seems to look like I tripped right before releasing the shutter. I end up a little too close, let some rogue element in the corner of the frame, or find perfectly dull flat light. By thinking about too many things, I accomplish very little in my picture-taking.

I get overly excited when I see that someone has unconsciously arranged their overflow recycling to look like a still-life—how quaint and lofty all at once, and Yes! it’s six PM with light hitting it at a wonderfully oblique angle. If I crouch just so, and take a step back, and stop down, and Click. Somehow I have managed to take nothing more and nothing less than a picture of garbage. It’s that other function of photography, the elusive and unteachable one, that contains a photograph’s aura.

From the Google Lat Long Blog:

As the news began to spread of the Red River’s record-setting crest level, the first order of the day was to help get the word out to as many as possible. This was especially true in Fargo, North Dakota’s most populous city, with 92,000 residents living in the vicinity of the Red River.

View can view that as a larger map if you want. Go ahead and add Google Maps to your list of game changing technologies. Civic, artistic, environmental, social. Location based platforms open up a whole new world to what you can do on the web.

Thankfully, these platforms are relatively easy to use, and becoming familiar with them is like adding a bazooka to your already powerful arsenal of tools. The maps and mashups you create with them become tips of a massive, contextual, data iceberg. Naturally, we want you to become familiar with these tools. You will be working to create a map that can be used as part of the Farm Philly project.

Today, Rick will also be working with you to continue the customization of the Farm Philly site. The design and templates should be up to snuff by next week.

COMMENT

• With the Google Lat Long Blog as a starting point, go find a mapping project that really inspires you. Write a short post about it on your personal blog.

CREATE

• Use Google Maps to create a map that demonstrates a part of the food production and distribution system. Show us how something is broken and inefficient or demonstrate a sustainable system. Consider how you use lines and icons to visualize your data. Embed your map on your personal blog. In class next week we will choose a map or a group of maps to be featured on the Farm Philly site.
• Continue to post in your sections on the Farm Philly site. You should have documented all of your groups’ progress to date by the next class.

For several years, I taught a Game Design course in the Multimedia department at UArts. To give this course more intellectual heft, I would say that play is essential to humans. I went so far as to say that when humans stop playing we are either sick or near death.

Sadly, sometimes I forget my own advice.

I don’t let myself play enough. I love hanging out with my kids. I love watching them play, and even went so far as to move to a new home that would allow them more space for free play.

Thankfully, though, my play history is pretty rich. Watching the above video of Stuart Brown talking about Why play is vital — no matter your age made me very thankful that I grew up playing… a lot. Our basement and garage were filled with tools and parts. My siblings, neighborhood friends and I would spend all nice days outside playing and tinkering. We would take our bikes apart and create new bikes out of parts. Build treehouses. Build ramps. Make up a new game and play it until we tired of it and then create a new one. Whenever there was a school project that required building something, my friends would come over to find parts in our basement and use our tools to put it together.

One of the most powerful quotes from Stuart Brown’s talk speaks about the importance of playing early in life in order to be a good problem solver:

Now JPL and NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solvers, even if they are summa cum laude from Harvard or CalTech, if they haven’t fixed cars, haven’t done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can’t problem-solve, as well. So play is practical and it is very important.

Listening to this as I rode the hi-speed line on the way home I had one of those moments where I was infinitely grateful to my parents. For all the things that all parents do wrong, sometimes parents get something so right.

We have a private chat room on campfire, an awesome group chat solution from 37signals.

We also have lots of code— HTML, PHP, Ruby, C, whatever— checked into subversion repositories.

Back in the day, all of our code lived in a subversion repository provided by Beanstalk. And Beanstalk had a very nice campfire integration feature already. And it was good.

But today our code lives in, gosh, at least three places:

1. Beanstalk
2. A trac-based subversion repository we share with a major client
3. The Symfony project subversion repository, where stuff like pkContextCMSPlugin lives.

So, for a while, we didn’t have any live notifications when new code changes were committed. And we were sad.

I read up on solutions. On the subversion side they involved things like “post-commit hooks” which only make sense if you run the server and want to muck with such things. On the campfire side they were coded in Ruby, a fine language but not available on the servers in question in an acceptable version, blah blah blah.

Then I discovered icecube, a PHP interface to Campfire by Emil Sundberg of Mimmin. And I also discovered Subversion’s svn log command, which lets you find out what’s happened lately on a subversion repository in an efficient way… that is, without beating the server to death… even if you don’t run that repository.

And now there is joy and happiness and kittens and monkeys and monkey-kittens. svncampfire monitors any number of folders in any number of repositories for you, and sends a summary of what’s happened since the last run to the campfire chat room of your choice.

You can download svncampfire from sourceforge. To use it, you’ll need:

PHP 5, with cURL support (check php -i to find out if you have that)
A campfire chat room (duh)
Some subversion repositories you’d like to monitor (double duh)
crontab access, or some other way of running scheduled tasks

You can run it on your development laptop (which I’m doing now) or, for that 24-7 availability thing, on a server.

See the included README file for complete documentation on how to use and configure svncampfire.

6207 Market

Photographs by Isaac Schell

Stockbridge Fine Art Print

319 N. 11th 4th floor

Friday April 3rd, 5-10pm

Let’s talk about art. Isaac Schell is a Drexel photo graduate, and also my housemate. He shoots with a 4×5″ portable rail camera. It’s an enormous thing with an enormous tripod, the kind of camera with a ground glass and a dark cloth that goes over your head. It’s not the most agile camera, but the negatives can be printed 60″ wide before you start to see grain. If it were digital, it would be five hundred megapixels or something.

Isaac’s most recent body of work has had some legs. He participated in a group show at Copy Gallery last August, showing twelve images. One of the photographs was shown in the Project Basho Onward show in January. Two of the photos were selected for the Perkins Center juried exhibition in February. Another photo got him into the 69th annual juried exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum in March.

Tonight’s show is a revisitation of a previous body of work: Bars, Churches, and Beauty Salons. The prints are really really big. The photographs present a topographic vernacular of West Philadelphia storefronts. These commercial/social institutions have at various times served as community glue, doing their best to stave off decay. Many of them have seen better times.

They are sad photographs, but they are beautiful. The buildings don’t tell us their stories, but they invite us to wonder. You can see former glory, recent disintegration, but also a tenacity. West Philly seems to have some fight left.

Today we will revising and polishing each group’s project objective copy and putting a finish on the Farm Philly branding material. You will decide on a domain for the project blog, purchase it, and with our help set up hosting. We will be working together to build a custom Wordpress theme, establish your user accounts, and begin adding content. You will spend the class assisting us with the design and gathering your research materials and other documentation of the project to this point.

For next week you will each have posted at least FIVE items of research, collected data, preliminary design, and other bits of documentation. You will bring with you to class anything you might need to continue getting the project blog caught up to your current progress level. You should continue to exercise the methods we’ve explored thus far, adding photos, videos, scanned notes, data, and copy relevent to your urban farming initiatives. As we are more than halfway through the semester, you should have copious amounts of content ready to upload.

In addition to publishing content, next week’s class will contain a short lecture/demonstration on mapping and leveraging google maps. You will learn to create and share maps, adding points, descriptions, paths, and add maps to the project blog.

GATHER:

• All relevant content you’ve created around the Farm Philly project to date, gather media resources, get organized.

POST:

• AT LEAST FIVE posts regarding your respective contribution to the project. Your posts will be categorized within your group and tagged appropriately.
• Upload your ongoing project photos to Flickr, tag them ides322, farmphilly, and anything else relevant to the project or their content.
• Start creating videos and upload them to your personal video sharing accounts, upload any existing video content. Tag it appropriately. Post it to the project blog.