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Photos Included in Exhibition in New Zealand

Post author By Nathan
Post date January 27, 2007
3 Comments on Photos Included in Exhibition in New Zealand

About nine months ago, Geoff Budd commented on a set of photos I have on Flickr called Shoe Dump, a collection of shoes hanging from powerlines:

Primo set Nathan! I’m a photographer based in New Zealand putting together an exhibition on the topic. If you’d like to have some of your images included please check my website & let me know…

A few months after submitting some photos, the project started coming to life. Here are a few images from Geoff as the collage was coming together.

Mosaic V1!
For the Santos Cafe ‘mini-exhib’ I’ve been producing the shots onto various thickness PVC blocks at 100mm square. With the limited wall space at this venue I am only able to produce a mosaic of around 50 images though the main exhib will feature the rest of the group. There’s been a few late nights as it’s quite labour intensive but it’s looking sweet!

Will update more pics as it progresses…

Thanks again for all your shots & stories!

Originally uploaded by sole intentions.

Mosaic V1 contd…
Originally uploaded by sole intentions.

See if you can spot this one of mine nestled in there. It’s one of my personal favorites, and ranks as #4 for interestingness (800 views, 11 favorites, 6 comments) of my photos on Flickr (also see #1, #2, #3). It also is holding steady at around #235 on Flickr’s Explore for the most interesting photos uploaded on December 5, 2006 (see all photos of mine that made Explore pages)

Read more about the exhibition and Geoff Budd in the article Exhibition with plenty of sole, check out the exhibition flyer (PDF), and if you’re near Auckland, New Zealand, the opening is this Tuesday Jan. 30 at Satellite Gallery from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

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Upgrades for 2006

I’ve been doing some digital housecleaning and I dug up a video from 2004 of me narrating my MFA thesis exhibition. It was online in the first iteration of nathangibbs.com but managed to get swept under the rug when rolling out WordPress last year. Bringing the video out of the closet got me thinking about how much online video has changed even in the last year and how poorly I’m taking advantage it.

So, I went ahead and uploaded everything to YouTube, Google Video, and added self-hosted Flash versions here on the site. I added copy/paste embed code to give bloggers as many options as I possibly can to make it portable (a huge improvement over the quad-option WindowsMedia / Quicktime / Hi / Low choices that launch a popup window). I also adjusted the wording on the links in the header, re-ordered the sidebar, and added Related Posts to the bottom of each blog entry.

While the updates aren’t revolutionary, it does feel like a milestone. The videos are out there, really out there, with searchable transcripts on Google and everything. I was always hesitant about giving the videos away to places like YouTube, but in the end, the value of visibility is worth more than the $0 status quo while it sits on the shelf. And if the videos start going nuts on ~~YouTube and~~ Google, ~~both have~~ there’s always the option to charge if that made sense further down the line.

Check out Color Studies for a version of me two years ago talking about my work.

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MACSD exhibition “Strange New World” to display work from Tijuana artists

Post author By Nathan
Post date May 16, 2006
2 Comments on MACSD exhibition “Strange New World” to display work from Tijuana artists

You should definitely check out their website. Once you get past the horizontal navigation, it’s a rich experience worth a lot of exploring. The exhibition opens May 21st and runs through September 3, 2006 at both the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Downtown and La Jolla.

Tijuana is a new cultural hot spot. Influential publications in the United States, Europe, and Mexico have recognized the city as a vibrant site of innovation in the arts. Journalists, scholars, and critics alike celebrate Tijuana’s diversity of artistic production from art made with traditional media, such as, painting and printmaking to installation and conceptual art; from photography to digitally derived images; from street-level video to ambitious feature films; from utopian architectural proposals to streamlined and economic housing design. As the city’s newest art weekly recently announced, “Tijuana moves –and it’s everywhere.”

This exhibition will document the recent explosion of artistic experimentation in Tijuana, and will also explore the subtle shift in focus from art about the border experience to art that takes advantage of a new type of accelerated urbanism being pioneered in developing cities around the world.

Here’s an interview from KPBS These Days about the exhibition.

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NowPublic.com adds my photo to a story

Post author By Nathan
Post date March 16, 2006
5 Comments on NowPublic.com adds my photo to a story

I got an email from Calder Lorenz, Director of Contributor Relations at NowPublic.com asking me for permission to attach this photo (from Flickr) to a story about Mexico extraditing drug lords to the U.S. I’m glad he at least asked and let me know he wanted to use (or share) it.

The image is (sort of) protected by a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike License. I’m a believer in sharing ideas. At this point in time, I am not overly concerned with making money on my creative work. That Creative Commons license is basically an “open source” license for media. If someone decides to use my photo/video to make money, they’ll have to negotiate with me before being legally free to use it. If it serves a non-profit or educational purpose, feel free use it or twist it into something new. Just let me know about it. If my work becomes so massively distributed and culturally important that I could actually make money on it, I suppose I might renegotiate with my conscience.

This is the first time I noticed NowPublic.com and I’m not sure yet what I think of it. Will it be a citizen journalism media frenzy? Or get clogged up with people ranking hot chicks as news?

“We are not just a digg, where we are focused on the editorial stuff, or a Flickr, where we are focused on photography, or YouTube, where it is just video, or Blogger, for that matter, where it is just written stuff. We are pretty much everything…. We organize all of the information around these news events and people can collaborate and report on news stories from whereever they are with whatever device they are using.” Michael Tippett, ~~CEO~~ Founder of NowPublic.com [source]

At a conference for public broadcasting in February, a panelist asked this question: Which is more real, 200 cellphone pictures of an event or a 30 second story by a reporter? The question draws attention to the bias any individual has in telling a story. Hundreds of people telling the same story adds credibility. So giving people a platform should be a great idea… but I’m still a little sceptical of the process. I still think there is a cultural divide of people who are consciencious and those who just don’t care. At the moment, NowPublic’s top stories are about burlesque, sex symbols, fashion, and tattoos. Go figure.

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Flickr: Social Constructs

Post author By Nathan
Post date February 15, 2006
No Comments on Flickr: Social Constructs

I started a public Flickr group to focus on visualizing social constructs. There are already many photographers from all over the world contributing. If you have work that deals with social construction, please join and submit your work: http://www.flickr.com/groups/socialconstructs/

This group shares images and ideas that deal with socially constructed boundaries. Race, class, sex, beauty. Social constructs shape the way we perceive ourselves and others around us. Pink for girls, blue for boys. Do my teeth really need to be whiter? These modes of thought come out of specific social contexts (political, cultural, social, economic, scientific, etc). When the context is analyzed, their artificial nature can be revealed and often unravelled.

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Flickr MFA

Having become a recent Flickr addict, I’ve started a group called Flickr MFA. The purpose is to gather artists who want to continue in the tradition of art school experimentation, exhibition, and articulate critique. There have been a few interesting discussions on the forum since it started a few weeks ago:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrmfa/