SMartCamp: Social Media Art Camp

I'm on a break from SMartCAMP, and wow! is it fabulous to hear some of the speakers so far. The opening presentation by Marc Schiller, of Wooster Collective, reminds me of why I love blogging.

Schiller stumbled into blogging because he was looking for a way to host photographs he had taken of street art in his neighborhood, the West Village, while walking his dog. Since then, the blog he has created with his wife Sara has become an authority on street art that mainstream media turns to for content. Schiller still runs the project as a passion rather than a job, and it's well-worth checking out if you aren't familiar with the site.

Favorite Quote: "It's okay to be a bit crap, as long as you are sincere and honest."



If you want in on the action, check out the live stream on the website or the conversation on twitter by searching #smartcamp. I'm @linnea_west. This afternoon is focused on video and putting them online--perfect timing for my video of Scope and hopefully Pulse. The art fairs have been amazing so far, even more so to me after being on the island for 3 months.

However, it's not for long. I just booked my ticket for Mexico, and I leave this Tuesday morning. I'll probably be there a couple months--which just might be enough time to catch you up on all the art I've seen! Quick judgments: Whitney Biennial can be skipped, William Kentridge at MoMA cannot, Independent is interesting if chaotic, Scope better than Verge, and hopefully I'll be able to say something about Pulse, Armory, and Volta soon!

Sam Leith defend books, I applaud

An uplifting and moral article by Sam Leith, the Literary Editor of The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper. In "Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die," he defends the strength of the narrative in human culture to the delight of all writers and readers, with emphasis on the unfair attack on books by proponents of modern technology who feel books are antiquary repositories of knowledge.

Knowledge and stories come in many shapes and forms. My personal favorite form is a book, and not at all because I'm trying to write one. In anything, I'd say the book form and I have developed a healthy antagonism for just that reason. But the power of the narrative in its classic form is something I consider obvious.

I blog, but I by no means use this platform as write a long story. I use it to connect to other short pieces and to combine word with images and videos. It communicates in a different way by its medium, which is the point, I fancy, of Leith's piece, which I encourage all with old-fashioned bookish tastes to read.

In a twist on this, check out Pepys' Diary in online blog format, where each entry in the diary of Samual Pepys from the 1600s is posted daily, so you can follow his story in much the fashion it was written.