An Art Concepts Forum
Published by Jeremy Douglass October 28th, 2005 in Features, Off Topic, Text Art.In my ongoing readings in digital art, I commonly ask myself “what does this have to do with text?” For many provocative pieces the immediate answer is “Nothing! but….” Generally, these fall into two categories: designs which aren’t text-focused, but could easily could be; and innovative techniques which are strongly image-centered but suggestive of parallel text practices.
I imagine these posts of mine as entries for art rather than inventions to the Halfbakery, “a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.” Alternately, I imagine them as conceptual art sketches yearning to be realized, which might perhaps yet be implemented with the right request to Lazyweb. As with many actual Halfbakery entries and actual Lazyweb requests, often my imaginings turn out to have been preceded by the work of other. (For example, see the many, many versions of TextQuake that I discovered following my initial speculations.)
In order to easily discover the extent of one’s unoriginality in such cases, reader comments are crucial helpful, whether they occur in forum threads or in the blog comments that Torill and Mark Bernstein recently eschewed.
The problem with giving up comments is that when one has an idle or half-formed question, (e.g. season changes in World of Warcraft) then presumably one needs some kind of back-channel for reader communication. Without reader feedback one has to research every detail personally, rather than making use of the highly efficient method of polling an expert audience - which is quite a loss considering that many blog and journal audiences are expert audiences of one kind or another.
On the other hand, perhaps the place for an expert audience sounding board should be just that, a board or a forum. Lazyweb and Halfbakery are two good instances of places where one can post projects or dreamed-up inventions without doing a market analysis or prior art search first - in fact, those forums are a good quick sanity check for existing market alternatives or prior art.
So:
Is there currently such an ideas forum for art projects? (…I ask, lazily….)
Tags: forums, halfbakery, lazyweb
I am aware of the problem with questions. I see that this is one of the changes that my writing will have to go through: I can’t ask questions like that if I don’t give people a chance to reply. It is part of the investigation. But for me to not use comments does not mean the rest of the world needs to drop them. Unlike Mark, I don’t think comments are bad for blogs. I only think they are wrong for my blog at the moment.
Torill - No argument there! I don’t think that closing blog comments = no reader interaction… after all, regular readers can still send you email, or you can use general message boards and forums when you have those kinds of questions. That was really my point - not that comments are too valuable to give up, but that topical forums are a reasonable substitute, and perhaps it would be nice for us digital art / games bloggers to use one, rather than me posting “wouldn’t it be neat if…?” questions on a blog.
P.S. We currently only get 3-4 spam a day, so we just deal with them manually. If that changed, we might consider following in your footsteps.