Friday, January 25, 2008

Aggregation

Based on activities I've recently been pursuing and advocating to my students (spread throughout 3 departments at VCU) I've become enamored of Web 2.0 hype. You know, flickr, youtube, social networking sites, blogging.The Utopian impulses involved in that rhetoric and sensibility do ignore all sorts of privacy issues and corporate co-modification, but I still think artists should be entering into it in good faith.
I think of Walter Benjamin as a proto-blogger. Pointing to selected links and sequencing them over time has such critical and political potential. Even if that practice constantly points away from the artist/curator/ blogger it can say as much or more than an extended personal diatribe.
That's generally how this wonderful curator works

http://www.francismckee.com/


I've been using the following blogging platform with my students for it's ease of use, design sensibility, and how it allows me (on the back-end of the blog which they call the Dashboard) to get feeds of all my students posts as they happen. In other words the site aggregates like an RSS feed, but on a massive yet personal level.
http://tumblr.com/

This is mine

http://tba.tumblr.com/

Finally I'll leave you with a link one of my first year art students left with me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

It definitely shares my wonder, trepidation, and excitement .

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