Spreading the word…with a new connection.

Last week I received an e-mail from dig­i­tal apple juice which is an art focused blog net­work ask­ing me if I was inter­ested in writ­ing for them. Of course I said yes so that means that the con­tent cre­ated here will be spread quicker and over a wider net­work than we cur­rently have. They will be cre­at­ing a ded­i­cated col­umn for our feed which will either be titled ” The Work­ing Artist” or ” Art Works”…we are still brain storming.

What is amaz­ing and yet not so much when you con­sider the con­text, was their edi­tor ran accross this blog on a social media site! I doubt seri­ously this would have occured with­out the internet’s abil­ity to remove geo­graphic bar­ri­ers. In fact I doubt it could have hap­pened even a year ago because the net was still not fully up to the level of inter­ac­tiv­ity it has now. So if you have any doubts that social media can be a use­ful tool I hope this exam­ple will help you put your hand up in the crowd. Of course inten­tion had some­thing big to play as well because I spent most of last week mak­ing con­nec­tions all the time keep­ing my intent to evan­gela­cally spread the word about the impor­tance of art in our lives.

So click on the image above and check them out…you will find a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion on the site. Here is how they describe themselves:

We are a group of Aca­d­e­mics and Pro­fes­sional Artists and Pho­tog­ra­phers who have thoughts and opin­ions about the dig­i­tal com­puter world, and we have in com­mon two things—we all use Apple com­put­ers, and we all pro­duce in the dig­i­tal world.

First, we talked among our­selves about equip­ment and soft­ware, ask­ing one another about the ins and outs of par­tic­u­lar hard­ware and soft­ware.  Then we talked about ideas. We had thoughts about the ways our lives have changed in the last fif­teen to twenty years as we evolved from type­writ­ers to word proces­sors, from film to dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, from snail mail to email, from paint and easel to high-end inkjet print­ers, and don’t for­get tele­phones over IP.

Our workflow’s have changed, and as that has occurred, even the way we think about cre­ativ­ity has changed.  Those of us who are teach­ing real­ize that the way we approach teach­ing has evolved and bears lit­tle resem­blance to the 1970’s or 1980’s.  How many of you can remem­ber the pur­ple ditto sheets once used for class hand­outs?  If you can, you are telling your age.  If you remem­ber mimeo­graph machines you aren’t quite as old. I don’t see slide pro­jec­tors much any­more either.

So we asked our­selves what we wanted to talk about?  The answer is sim­ple; we’re always inter­ested in new soft­ware and new hard­ware, but it is the process of pro­duc­tion and the end prod­uct that most con­cerns us.  Sim­ply put, it means we want to write tuto­ri­als about processes and tech­niques that will serve to guide one another and serve equally to advance the knowl­edge and skill level of oth­ers who are work­ing their way through var­i­ous software’s. That’s the beginning.

We want to talk about the cre­ative process in graphic design, pho­tog­ra­phy and in the fine arts and how the com­puter and the dig­i­tal cam­era have influ­enced them.

We want to talk about the end product–the artis­tic State­ment– and we want to talk about new, emerg­ing artists who use the com­puter or the dig­i­tal cam­era to pro­duce their works of art.  We wel­come inquiries from those whose cre­ative processes use the com­puter or the dig­i­tal cam­era.  It may be pos­si­ble that you can share your work with us, and we can expand all our expe­ri­ences, both for oth­ers and ourselves.