The world has just gotten a cool new free virtual museum, the one that Google built.  

Aptly named Google’s Cultural Institute, the Internet-based multimedia site showcases first-hand testimonials, photographs, artifacts and manuscripts that until last Wednesday, you had to take a plane trip or at least pay an admission fee to see.

A Museum Milestone

Museum of Polish History called the Cultural Institute “a real revolution." Avner Shalev of Yad Vashem - also a Cultural Institute partner - said of the project, “it might be seen as one of the major milestones in modern history.”  Not only is Google’s Cultural Institute providing public access to documents otherwise previously unavailable for mass consumption, the project is “taking away the notion of physical custody of archival material” noted Razia Saleh of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in a mini-doc about the project.Building on the success of Google’s Art Project launched in February of 2011 in conjunction with now over 150 museums, Google partnered with 17 additional foundations and museums to launch 42 free digital exhibits as part of the Cultural Institute.

Not A Light-Hearted Experience

The 42 exhibits are a solid foundation and focus on World War II, the Holocaust and South African politics. Light-hearted or uplighting fare is few and far between. Google’s Mark Yoshitake has acknowledged the project will expand in the future though.

The exhibits themselves are displayed on a horizontal timeline, with navigation predominantly left and right arrows on both sides of the screen (you scroll across as opposed to scrolling down). This orientation makes sense when thinking about how exhibits are displayed in the real world, and Google has done a good job with its darker color scheme in keeping the site beautiful but solemn.

My Personal Thoughts

Eager to experience this revolutionary and game-changing web project, I spent a couple of hours perusing the site’s offerings. It wasn’t a life-altering experience, but I could immediately see its usefulness, especially if I was researching a moment in history covered by one of the digital exhibits. 

Personal items that you would only see in a museum were also included in the exhibits, including photographs of Frank’s infamous diary in the Anne Frank exhibit, and pictures of locks of hair in the Tragic Love at Auschwitz exhibit. These items were diligently added by curators trying to create in-depth stories about their subjects - and I certainly appreciated them. But I couldn’t help but feel their impact on me was cheapened when viewed through the Internet as opposed to me seeing it in person.

In a good museum, getting lost can be half the fun. Google’s Cultural Institute isn’t built yet for this type of free-form exploration, though I was able to achieve a bit of that same sense of discovery by browsing through the photo collections of LIFE and Getty Images, a search that was surprisingly clunky for a Google product. While browsing, I found this 1985 photo of former Libyan leader Gaddafi and a whole section of photos about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As a refugee from a former Soviet Union-occupied country, I was disappointed by the lack of cohesive exhibits about the USSR (or Hungary), but the vast photo collections might one day be organized like the previously mentioned 42 exhibits. (Some additional treats I found: this photo of a gay couple walking by graffiti on the Berlin wall, Boris Yeltsin making a fist while a portrait of Lenin looks on, and an anti-NATO communist propaganda poster from 1981.)

Would I visit the Cultural Institute again? Definitely. But it in no way replaced the experience of an actual museum. If anything, it made me appreciate my local (and physical) institutions a bit more.

Andy Warhol once said "being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." Case in point: deviantART, often described as the Pandora of the art world. 

The 12-year-old site is a social-media pioneer. A platform for art discovery and ecommerce, it's also one of a handful of social networks born at the start of the dot-com era that are still alive, kicking and making money.

The site boasts 250 million images and 22 million registered members in 3,000 genre communities. And it made a reported $10 million in revenue in 2010. (A 2011 figure is not available.)

But its newest project could push deviantART to a new level of prominence. The site is teaming up with New York Times bestseller Clive Barker to release a crowdsourced book.

It's called the Odyssey project, the second crowdsourced book from the site. The creator of the Hellraiser movie franchise is writing the prologue and, along with deviantART staff, will select subsequent chapters from community submissions.

The final product will be published online and in print, with proceeds donated to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the horror master's favorite charity.

"I am incredibly excited about the Odyssey project," Barker wrote in an email. "DeviantART is a place where artists can thrive and embark upon that which has been my life's work; the creation of worlds. Now, I eagerly look forward to the experience of creating a new world, together, with the deviantART community. The possibilities are endless. The potential, vast. I am enthralled by where this journey will take us."

Fan literature, art work, poems and drawings will be accepted during the eight-week run with writing prompts posted each Monday. Last year's crowdsourced book project received 10,000 submissions, so the final product is likely a few months away, and won't be available to scare you this Halloween. 

Deviant Art

Deviant's founder and chief executive Angelo Sotira founded the site in his early 20s in Los Angeles during a time when few investors wanted anything to do with something that looked like a risky entertainment venture.

Years later, they're singing a different tune, and Sotira is a seasoned veteran in online business. He's doing something he loves, and it's apparent when his eyes light up as he walks me through varied galleries that show how deep deep of a vertical that deviantART is, and yet how nuanced the subject matter is.

There're so many galleries that you can get lost for hours. The very engaged community adds 200,000 images a day, forcing deviantArt to keep multiple data centers around the country to keep up with traffic. 

The organization has a profit-sharing arrangement with artists. Sales are primarily lithographs and image prints; deviantArt does fulfillment, framing and shipping, and takes 70% of each purchase. 

DeviantART's only real competition is Art.Sy, but that site is geared toward fine art, while deviant is for the masses, Sotira says. He says his site is for the 99%, reflecting the diversity of people's interests, everything from galleries on black and white photography to cute animals to anime characters to noir pin-ups. Images are ranked via shares and crowdsourcing.

Sotira said his site appeals to people who want to explore art, generally, and their specific interests particularly in a tangible, contemporary way. His site's online galleries are this generation's museums, with dedicated artists and fans who engage in dialogue. And it's a place to create a custom art feed, in a way that's more engaging and refined than a Flickr or Photobucket.  

After a dozen years growing the brand, Sotira still has big plans. Very big plans. He wants the site to be the world's art feed, envisioning deviantART providing curated content that appeals to almost any interest.

Toward that goal, his staff has spent the last three years developing a product to turn that desire into a reality. The site has developed advanced search algorithm similar to what Netflix does with films, a tool aptly called "more like this," which shows images based on a person's community and actions on the site. 

Sotira called the site a place to expose artists to social media and tech, giving them a way to reach a larger audience and make their work easier to access by the masses. "There's no clear path for artists," Sotira explained. "Our responsibility is to find what the Internet means for artists."

Sotira said that giving artists and consumers a way to express themselves and see what people react to creates a healthy, competitive environment where artists can get inspired and speak to their fans. "It's an art feed for every person."

Every year at Burning Man, I have the same argument. Someone plays the role of the starry-eyed futurist, someone else is the grizzly survivalist. The futurist says, “If only we had map and chat apps out here, we could meet everyone and see everything! It would be a utopia!” The survivalist says “Hell no. We come out here to get away from all that.” At Burning Man, as in everyday urban life, the answer lies somewhere in between.

I think what scares the grizzly survivalist (which was me this year) is the notion of burners walking around Black Rock City peering down their arms at the glow of a smartphone instead of looking around at the people and the spectacle. It’s already happening to some extent. Now that smartphones are many people’s primary camera, people have them out even without a data connection.

That’s bad enough. On Saturday night, when the Man burns, it’s hard to see the real thing through the forest of arms holding up phones and cameras in front of you. I understand why people want a document of this mind-blowing event, but how many (thousand) copies do we need? The grizzly survivalist worries about the spirit of those spectators who watch life through the screens rather than connecting directly through their optic nerves.

There are Burning Man-specific apps, like iBurn, but I have never seen the thing in use. Frankly, I hope I never do. Black Rock City is designed to be dead easy to navigate, and Burning Man is the best place in the world to ask for directions. It doesn’t even matter where somebody sends you; you’re going to like it.

Meeting People Is Easy

The topic of social networking also comes up inevitably in Burning Man's annual tech conversation. There are too many cool people there to meet them all, the reasoning goes. Wouldn’t a little app with searchable profile pages, photos, lists of interests, events and messaging help us have the best possible time?

If you ask me, the repeated failures in the meeting-people app category in general should be enough of a lesson. People don’t like meeting people this way. It locks you into plans and creates pressure to be in specific places at specific times, all for the uncertain payoff of meeting someone you only know as a performance of social media skills.

But that’s hardly the biggest issue. At Burning Man, anything that keeps you from physically approaching a person and saying hello is a problem. The social network is implicit there. Burning Man is a gathering of collaborators. Everyone is a partner working together on building and maintaining a city that’s also an art project. You’ll have something to talk about with them, so just do it.

It seems to me that we’d do well to treat every urban encounter this way. Just because Burning Man is explicitly an arts festival doesn’t mean that Manhattan or San Francisco can't be regarded as collaborative works in progress.

Art is a critical part of any shared civic space because it gives people something to talk about. It contributes to a shared identity. Art is a technology for creating networks of people nearby. And the best part is that they share the experience, rather than each having their own glowing, 4-inch window on it.

Building A Lighthouse

Amber Case posed a question that perfectly framed this issue on the urban design website Smart Urban Stage: “How do we make public areas where strangers are encouraged to communicate with each other instead of stare into screens?”

She laments the fact that “modern cities are full of ‘non-places’ - locations where people are strangers to one another and have no impetus to interact.” Cell phones provide a “comfortable lighthouse in a sea of uncertain social situations” in our dislocated urban lives.

Case asks for a way to reconstruct public spaces that encourages interaction, and Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere gives some great examples. The NYC-based group he founded stages fun “missions” to snap people out of their urban isolation.

Certainly, Improv Everywhere is a troupe after a burner’s own heart. In fact, if you drop the capital letters, “improv everywhere” is a pretty apt description of Burning Man itself. But human hacks of dreary city spaces can’t finish the job. Burning Man artist-architects build physical spaces intentionally to contain and stimulate fully human encounters, and I think our cities need those as well.

Keeping A Portal

Just about any structure at Burning Man can serve as an example, but one artist’s work consistently means the most to me. Harlan Emil Gruber’s portals are “evolutionary technology” designed to power up the people inside and bring them together.

You spot them out on the playa as brightly colored, intriguingly shaped shelters. You climb up into a space big enough to hold 10 or 12 people, and you instantly relax. The whole structure purrs with the sound of the Quasar Wave Transducer, a musical device of Gruber’s own design. That tone serves as a baseline. It grounds everyone inside to the same frequency. It brings us in tune with one another.

I’ve had countless life-changing encounters in these portals over the five years I’ve been going to Burning Man. This year, I stayed in the 12:21 Turquoise Portal overnight twice, and you can read about those weird trips over on the official Burning Blog. I’m pretty heavily steeped in technology, and nothing I’ve seen, hardware or software, has affected me as profoundly.

My friend Randall, with whom I hung out in last year’s 2:22 Amethyst Portal, wants Quasar Wave Transducers installed in bus hutches and subway stations. Artist Christopher Janney has a head start; he installed an “urban musical instrument” called Reach New York in an NYC subway station in 1996. If you’re a technologist looking for a way to bring people together, consider expanding your view. We don’t just need more apps. We need interactive public spaces. That’s how you network with the people around you.

Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. Check out his entries here.

I’m scared of the Web’s impermanence. We’re putting valuable knowledge and memories into ephemeral forms stored on other people’s servers, and we’re not even sure those people will be in business in a year. So I channeled my angst into a unique repository for my most precious bits.

Friends of mine introduced me to an artist named Miss Sheets who carves wooden amulets under the name arc*hive adornment. One of her offerings lets you store your story on a tiny, water-resistant flash drive stored in a magnetically insulated compartment. Due to my fear of losing my data, I yearned to have one.

I decided to work with Miss Sheets on a custom design. She conducted an interview to find out what kinds of forms and images I liked, and that process was profoundly enhanced by the Web. I was able to show her my Pinterest and Instagram feeds, which gave a surprisingly good sense of my visual language. I couldn’t be happier with the piece she made me. (Seriously, like arc*hive adornments on Facebook. You'll get regular doses of beauty.)

I opted for the 32GB drive because, duh, I’m a geek. But something surprising happened once I donned the pendant for the first time. I didn’t know what to put on the drive! I couldn't decide what data I would want desperately and what I could tolerate losing. I made some false starts (pro tip: don’t bother trying to make Ubuntu boot on a Mac from a flash drive), but I kept starting over. Months later, the drive is still empty.

So I ask you: What would you put on a 32GB drive you wear around your neck in an ornamental amulet? What bits matter most to you? How would you use this disk? How would you back it up? Here are the answers I’ve collected so far. I’ll update with your ideas.

Social image site Stipple is relaunching Thursday with new tools and indexing features designed to fix the perpetual problem of image attribution and introduce brand-new sales channels through the use of images alone - for all Web users.

Stipple uses what’s known as in-image tagging to let certain Stipple participants to tag an image with information about the picture, or add links back to the participants' Web site.

What is intriguing about this kind of tagging is the way Stipple managed it: instead of embedding the information within the image file itself, typically done with the use of metatags, Stipple can examine images for similarities to other baseline pictures, such as an article of clothing or a certain vehicle model. Tagging images by the way they look, through pattern matching, means that stripping out this meta information becomes nearly impossible.

When a similar image to the indexed image appears on a site scanned by Stipple, Stipple will insert tiny blue tags that appear when the image is passed over with the mouse. When the the cursor passes over the tags in a picture, up pops a little window with links to a vendor or a catalog entry… anything the vendor wants readers to see associated with the image.

In-Image Tagging For Everyone

Just as important, beginning Thursday, Stipple is no longer letting advertisers and brand-owners have all the fun: the tagging service is now available to all Stipple users.

The company is also announcing a new Stipple browser extension that will let users see information on Stippled images on whatever Web site they might appear.

Stipple CEO Rey Flemings described the immediate benefits of Stipple’s tools to its users:

“We ensure that information follows the photo,” Flemings explained. This is critical in an age of hyper-republication, where no one - not individuals and not brands - have control over their images. “Stipple is hoping to solve the problem of image attribution.”

Now that the service is open to all Stipple users, any one can assign the attribution they want to images uploaded to Stipple. And not just attribution.

Real-Time Links

For example, Flemings demonstrated how real-time links to information from product catalog can follow an image of a pair of shoes no matter what website that image ends up on.

Image creators can also take advantage of this service. Photographers can tag their images, and then sell rights to use them for micro-payments. Or ship prints of the image to whoever wants to pay for the privilege.

Flemings also stressed the capability to interject storytelling within images, by attaching videos and text to an image.

It’s not just about setting up creative storytelling and making new sales channels. There is also the promise of gleaning a rich treasure trove of data from Stippled images.

Fleming explained how one large advertiser tagged images for the recent Euro 2012 soccer tournament. On one day of the matches, 152 tagged photos were viewed, receiving a total of 303,962 pageviews. Of the images that were tagged, 64,522 users moused over the tagged images, and 97% of those users actually moused over the Stipple tags themselves, likely curious to see what they represented.

That’s a lot of data to use in a marketing campaign. Even better for the advertiser in question was the click-through rate on those Stipple tags: 1.08%. For “regular” Internet ads, you’re typically thrilled if you get users to click through more than 0.3% of the time.

That kind of interaction and data should be attractive to marketers, but also to anyone who wants to know how their images are used. By opening its door to more users, Stipple hopes to make its in-image tagging service a more ubiquitous Web feature.

Doodle.ly has already topped 30,000 users. The main audience comprises women 18-24, followed by men of the same age. The third biggest userbase on Doodle.ly is young girls ages 13-17 years of age.

What is it about Doodle.ly that attracts users? Pierre Graf, a user based in Lyon, France, describes his Doodle.ly experience as similar to "sailing on the sea, you have the absolution liberty of your destination and what you're going to accomplish." For a glass screen and mild finger-focused interaction, doodlers are able to accomplish quite a bit. Here's a drawing by Mr. Graf, in fact. 

Social Games Be Gone: Doodle.ly Is For Loners

Doodle.ly users range from the more serious artist types to casual users who are already using Draw Something, which continues to lose users. Doodle.ly describes itself as "Draw Something meets Instagram." It does not connect to Facebook in the way that Draw Something does, and it also isn't focused around competition. Doodle.ly is like the casual cousin of the super social Draw Something. While there are plenty of competitions hosted by Doodle.ly for outside entitites, these contests are not focused on beating your friends, or even incorporating your friends into the mix. On Doodle.ly, you can practice with ease, and then share those doodles out to Facebook and Twitter, if you so desire. The social sketchpad nature of Doodle.ly makes it perfect for those who just want to practice, quietly, online or on their iPads. 

Contests on Doodle.ly are social, but not social networked. In a contest for the NHL team the New Jersey Devils, Doodle.ly users were asked to draw a play-off themed doodle. Winners would see their doodles come to life on rally towel drawings. This week's contest focuses around doodling a summer sun. It seems like a pretty easy task, but try it yourself - doodling takes time and energy. 

Winners must practice often, and stay true to their doodle.ly visions. Users, start your fingers!

Instagram is a community conducive to likes and comments, whereas Flickr focuses more on displaying collections of photographs in photostreams, sets and galleries, organized by tags and maps. Yet interestingly, the most-used camera on Flickr is the iPhone4. What's fundamentally different about the two sites? The privacy settings.

"I've been using Flickr for six years now and have post almost 6,000 photos in that time and have almost 600,000 views," says Boston-based photographer Greg Peverill-Conti. "The main thing I use Flickr for is a project called 1000faces that's almost at 3,000 photos now. It's been great for storage, for having people find photographs and connecting with other photographers."

For Peverill-Conti, Flickr operates more as a storage space and ongoing project. He also shoots photos that he uploads to Flickr with a Canon T2i in RAW format, which in English is the highest resolution possible. He then uploads them with Flickr Uploadr or Lightroom. Instagram is more of an afterthought, for spur-of-the-moment stuff that he sees when he's out and about.

"Last night, for example, I was walking out of a movie theater and a guy was on a scissor truck changing the marquee," he says. "That I shot with my iPhone."

Photographer Chris Azar tells ReadWriteWeb that he sees Flickr as "a good space for my DSLR photos, and Instagram for grab shots and realtime stuff."

"I send Insta stuff to Flickr, too," he adds. "Instagram is almost exclusively mobile versus Flickr, which is exclusively desktop (& more studio work & creative commons)."

The two do not often share the same space. And why would they?

Public vs. Private Imagery: Instagram vs. Flickr

Instagram features the Andy Warhol-esque polaroids of our day. One perfect description of Instagram lives on Instagrammers.com's About page: 

"Instagram unearths your creative side and gets it flowing. It allows you to make artistic pictures even if you always thought you were the least creative person on earth, and last but not least, it makes you part of an international and multicultural community that is really into sharing."

And on Instagram, everything is public. Audiences appear and disappear almost as quickly as images on the stream.

That is not the case on Flickr, where users have granular settings for changing photos to public, visible to friends, visible to family or completely private. Communities are more deliberate. Following is not an option, but joining is.

Flickr provides a list of the most popular tags on the site. Not surprisingly, a few of the biggest categories include canon, instagramapp, iphoneography, nikon and wedding. The iPhone4 is the most popular camera of the Flickr community, just ahead of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the Canon EOS REBEL T2i.

The very fact that community members of Flickr have the option to upload from a point-and-shoot camera, however, changes the popular imagery that one is likely to see on Flickr.

The iPhone4 may be the most popular camera of Flickr users, but the four other cameras are not smartphones.

What Instagram lacks, Flickr fulfills: A possibility for adjusting privacy settings so that every photo uploaded doesn't appear out there, for the entire Web to see. On Flickr, there is no such thing as social media celebrity.

The public nature of Instagram makes the idea of celebrity not only normal, but encouraged.

Images via GregPC's Flickr, Chris Azar's Flickr, Followgram and Instagram.

Up until its acquisition by Facebook, Instagram was the current site of social media celebrity. As it becomes yet another Facebook app, the photography will most likely change from what was once street photography, landscapes and architecture of early users, to the social, people-oriented imagery that floods Facebook on a daily basis.

"Early Instagram users were more production-oriented," says Zachary McCune, a researcher in social and mobile platforms whose early work on Instagram dug into the types of imagery that users shared. "It was more of an art practice rather than a camera utility."

He notes that at this time last year @instagram's popular page images had 30-60 likes. Today, they have 500-3,500 likes.

Interestingly, the big genre that hasn't gone away - and which pioneered early Instagram user communities - is #streetphotography. "All the people who had early followers on Instagram had that style of photography," McCune says.

These photos are the candid, authentic-feeling images shot with an iPhone while strolling through New York, Chicago, Paris. And before the other week, Instagram was available on iPhone only.

"The iPhone is flaneurial," McCune says. "It's in your hand, it's multipurpose, you can be responding to a text message while snapping a photo, so it's also the surreptitiously arresting, incredible moment. The mobile phone wants to take the quick and quotidian image."

One can liken the early Instagram images to those of 20th-century French photographer Eugene Atget. Those once-striking images of the city alive are turning into socially focused shots of young parents and their children.

Not all of these early Instagram communities will disappear, however.

The proliferation of most popular tags such as #iphoneonly and #nofilter point to the retention of a high-art oriented crowd that doesn't need a filter to make their photos feel fresh.

But where there is purity, there is also popularity - and more specifically, celebrity.

Justin Bieber Recreates Kazimir Malevich, Becomes the Most Popular Instagrammer of All Time

Best known for his 1915 painting "Black Square," Kazimir Malevich founded Supermatism, a movement about geometric forms, especially circles and squares. Such imagery has seen a resurgence in modern-day tattoo culture and, apparently, the Instagram feed of Justin Bieber http://web.stagram.com/n/justinbieber/. In fact, it is the most-liked photo, according to Webstagram.

"So pure fame is still the straightest shot to popularity on the 30 million-user service, even though the general perception of Instagram - until it got bought by Facebook - was that it as this indie thing, where a certain kind of aesthetic or brilliant capture of an OMG moment might achieve a kind of triumphant popularity on its own merits in this rarefied little world," writes Matt Buchanan of Buzzfeed. "What are the self-portraits of Bieber and Gomez but icons of fame itself, after all, affirmed by their armies of likers?"

Over on Instagram.heroku.com, an app made by @mislav, visitors can search the most popular images on Instagram by filter type and keyword. Similarly, populagram.appspot.com filters out the app's most popular images. This popular image from user exapstagram has a total of 401 likes. The most popular location is Jakarta, Indonesia, which hosts 713 photos on Populagram alone. On Webstagram, the current most popular photo has received 9,424 likes and 469 photos. It is an image of a woman's hand with pink nails, leopard print bows and geometric shapes. Users are in love, posting hearts, thumbs up and expressions like "Cute :)".

Images via Wikipedia and Web.stagram.

Welcome to free drawing apps. They're good enough to use and discard, much like a coloring book that has been filled up. And in this way, the disposable factor makes these apps that much more attractive. They will keep kids entertained for an afternoon - and when you discard them, you'll feel like you've had a good experience with a free product.

MyPaint Free: Get What You Don't Pay For

MyPaint Free is a fairly simple app for your basic drawing needs. Seriously, do not try to get fancy with this app. Like MSPaint, it offers you a few simple options: change the brush size and softness or the color of the paint. Enlarge the image if you so desire. Draw white scribbly eraser lines in something you've just drawn. MyPaintFree succeeds in its simplicity, yet fails in the extra steps you need to take in order to toggle back and forth from painting screen to painting tools. To do so, hit the little puppy in the lower righthand corner of the screen.

To go back and "undo" the last action, choose the little blue hook-like option. Much like the Edit/Undo Typing action on a Word processor, which takes you back to the previous step, MyPaint Free only allows you to backtrack once. It's no Photoshop, where you can trace your every last move. But then again, it's free, it's easy to use and you can just as quickly discard what you've made. Paint with your fingertip, not your hand. Drag it across the glass screen until lines look like thick globs of virtual paint. Throw the picture out when you're done.

MyPaint Free is a fantastically simple app for momentary creative urges that need a glass screen rather than a piece of scrap paper. It makes one's fingertip bleed color and feel like a paintbrush in and of itself. ReadWriteWeb highly recommends MyPaint Free for its simplicity and easily discardable nature.

Kid Paint: Go Nuts With Stickers

For the more advanced kid who likes horses, clouds, frogs and hearts mixed in with their scribbles, there's the free app Kid Paint. The app opens to a blank screen, where a kid is able to choose a tool to use: paint brush, paint bucket or just their finger. An eraser seems more like a white pencil line, rather than an actual eraser. What differentiates this app from MyPaint Free, however, is the ability to drop on little mini stickers. The nice part about this is, unlike actual stickers that collect dust, hair and tiny human particles of skin - which eventually cause the stickers to lose their stick - these little guys stay stuck virtually, pixel for pixel. You can also upload an image from your camera roll, and play around by painting over that.

Kid Paint is worth the price of free. The premade stickers make this one step up from MyPaint Free and suggest to kids that art can include more than just their own "finger of genius." It can incorporate premade kitsch items, like smiley-face stickers, frogs and hearts. However, you will grow weary of the same stickers and eventually delete the app from your phone all together.

Vehicle Colors: Paint Your Way to a Car Today!

Both Kid Paints and MyPaint Free don't care if you draw within the lines. Vehicle Colors is a bit more stringent in that respect, and might appeal more to the perfectionist kid type.

Open the app and turn the iPhone sideways. Then select from four different vehicle-filled options: Cartoon, Magic, Paint and Maze. Select Cartoon, and you're presented with a shy purple truck. Move the truck around the white canvas, or leave it where it is and draw sparkly lines around it. As the paint "dries," the sparkles disappear, and you're left with singular scribbles. Select additional vehicles to add to the image, like a helicopter or a tractor.

The Paint option is more like a coloring book, challenging kids to keep the colors inside the lines. When you're drawing with your finger, however, that's much easier said than done.

The Maze option is the most game-y and the least like drawing. A maze pops up on the screen, and you are asked to draw a line from the car to the end of the maze. If you make it successfully, you get a big flashing "Congratulations" sign. Not bad for a free app.

VehicleColors gives kids more structure than either MyPaint Free or Kid Paint. In that sense, it feels more like a game that one can win, especially the Maze option. While receiving rewards for doing things "right" is important, the subtle coloring-in-the-lines mentality within VehicleColors can be limiting at times. The Paint screen on VehicleColors presents an image that needs color rather than a blank white screen. The Magic option script teaches kids that "magic" happens when they take their finger and move it across a black and white screen until perfectly clean colors appear.

Apps like this provide the kind of "magic" that's worth the price of free.

How to Draw app: Full version ($1.99)

Open the How to Draw app, and a little boy's voice comes out of your phone. He is here to teach you and your child how to draw. Select from a variety of items, including three animals (cat, dog, pony, hippopotamus), a reptile that no longer roams the earth (dinosaur), iconic American pop culture imagery (Statue of Liberty, Santa Claus), transportation that you don't use in everyday life (space shuttle, locomotive, tank), a princess (no prince available) and a skeleton (subtle death reference). These are the available options. Pick one and learn how to draw it using easy, step-by-step instructions from the little boy, who guides you through the process.

After you and your child have completed the instruction on one screen, press the arrow to move on to the next one. To get more complex - to add color, that is - select the little white hand in the bottom lefthand corner, and you'll see a few paint palettes. Change the color of the line itself, or just color in the image that you are drawing. If you miss an instruction, hit the refresh arrow and the app will replay it.

And when your child is done drawing, they can email the image to themselves or you, or just save it to the app. There is no option to share on Facebook or Twitter - besides, what would a five-year-old be doing on Facebook anyway? Eventually, kids can go ahead and free draw if they'd like.

This app is fun and simple to use. Of course, you get what you pay for: It only costs $1.99, and there are not too many things to learn to draw. After a week or two of play, you can choose to ignore the app and move onto the next.

Art of Glow (free)

For kids who love shiny, sparkly, neon fun - this app is like a sparkly rainbow for the eyes - we present you with Art of Glow. There is a full version available for $0.99, but we decided to review the free version. If your kid loves the free version, spring for the full. If not, just stick with this one-trick pony. (Though be forewarned, if you want to see a pony, you will have to draw it yourself.)

With a few swipes of their fingers on the screen, kids can create a glowing, pulsing visual effect that will probably hypnotize them and their friends for a few minutes. The default shape is a circle, but Art of Glow gives users the opportunity to switch that up. Choose a heart, a snowflake, a star, a pulsating cornucopia. Change the color of that shape, selecting from a dim-looking palette of red, green, orange, yellow, purple and three shades of blue. Pink and white are not on the color palette. After doing so, tap away on the screen and bring those images back to the screen, adjusting for amount, size, life time, speed and blink. Add more shapes, creating bodies, landscapes or just plain magical landscapes. Or keep it minimal and clean, using only a single finger swipe. After all, less can be more. These aren't images you are supposed to save - show them to people, then leave the app.

Because of the variety of shapes and forms, Art of Glow will keep kids engaged for longer. This app isn't trying to teach kids how to draw so much as it's focused on the visual effects produced by each sparkle and twist. (In other words, your child can go to a rave without actually leaving the couch!) The full version brings in the ability to shoot a quick video. If your child is intrigued by the regular version, drop $0.99 on the full.

iLuv Drawing Santa (free; full version $0.99)

iLuv Drawing Santa teaches kids about the art of consumerism. Christmas is the biggest consumer holiday of all time - and it's important that we teach our children this around 5-6 years of age. Here's how the app works. Tap on "Learn to Draw," and you'll be directed to a variety of images to draw: Santa Claus, a snowman, an elf and a gingerbread man are among the many things that you and your kid can learn how to draw. A woman's voice guides you and your child through the drawing process, complete with instructions on where to draw each line. You can color your image in and add a festive background of your choosing. Save the image to the app's drawing book or to a photo. Or share it via email, print it or share it with the makers of this app.

Even if you do not quite draw within the lines, the app doesn't penalize you. Besides, it's hard to get things just right, especially over the holidays.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Calling the mini animations "doinks" actually makes sense. They are not quite video animations or GIFs. Doinks only take a few moments to make, and they can express a moment that you may not be able to say or even write. Because why should images stand still when they can move, ever so slightly?

Doink is recommended for ages 12 and up, which is almost the same age range as Facebook's 13 and up. The free version of the Doink app is targeted at preteens, and to comply with COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), it does not allow for a community Web component at all. Doink Express is aimed at a wider demographic, and the social community Web component is a big part of that.

Using homegrown images, "props" (sticker-like drawings provided by Doink), various colored brushes, text, shapes and sounds, users can create their own doinks, or mini-Web animations, and share them in an Instagram-like stream. Users can like them with a heart, or leave a comment, which builds community in an innocuous kind of way.

"I have seen guys in their 60s making anniversary cards for their wives, girls in their teens lamenting the loss of boyfriends," says Doink CEO Karen Miller. "It really runs the gamut of ages and genders."

In terms of usability, animations are fairly simple to make and share out to the Doink community, Twitter, Facebook or all of the above. The Doink stream features all of the users you follow, and functions much like the Instagram stream. There's also a news component and Doink staff picks. Refresh the stream as often as you wish; or leave completely to go create your own doink.

Depending on what type of visual imagery you prefer, you may want to animate actual photographs that you've taken with your smartphone camera, or you might want to just draw and animate thick, pixelated lines. Create your doinks, and then build your community.

During the past few days, I've discovered various small, miniature animals standing by water wells. I took photos of them using my iPhone camera, and then decided to turn them into doinks. DoinkExpress is being used in 88 countries around the world, and 40% of the users are outside of the U.S.

Other animation platforms such as Xtranormal focus more on templates and conforming to what's available. You've probably already made your own Xtranormal and emailed it around to your friends at the office, or shared it on Facebook. GoAnimate is more focused on helping users create viral videos for work or school. Much like Xtranormal, it functions more as a meme-maker (if you're lucky) and less like a homegrown community of fellow makers. It's a curious situation.

Now consider this: Facebook bought Instagram largely in part because it presented a simple, useable format and had a strong, dedicated community of users. If Facebook is truly going the way of visual communication, DoinkExpress or a platform like it could be the next acquisition. That is, if they're willing to sell.

How will we talk about feminism? What does it mean to "fail," and why shouldn't we fail better? What is love? Why isn't America investing in young black men? And are the people who create change the silent supporters rather than the vocal leaders? In this curated selection of TEDxTeen Talks, the adolescent version of the adult TED Talks, five teens discuss these ideas and how they collide with their own stories.

Natalie Warne Believes in the Anonymous Extraordinaire

Natalie Warne begins her talk with a powerful reference to a picture of her mom as a 12-year-old girl, staring into the eyes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "When I was younger, I would stand on my tippy toes and stare into that picture," she says.

Warne is biracial, and experienced racism at an early age. She describes this in her talk as an identity crisis of sorts. As a result, she wanted to get through high school as quickly as possible. When she was 17, she discovered a film called Invisible Children, which is about the tragedy of Joseph Kony's child soldiers. That's when she also found her passion, and the power people have to fight for change.

Tavi Gevinson's Still Figuring It Out

Style blogger Tavi Gevinson's talk is called "Still Figuring It Out," but based on her talk alone, it seems like this girl has it mostly figured out. Or at least what there is to know right now.

Gevison is best known for her now four-year-old fashion blog StyleRookie and RookieMag.com, her online style magazine for teenager girls. In her TED talk, she discusses her take on feminism, pop culture, her love of fashion and what makes a powerful female character.

"What makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted," says Gevinson. "Instead, you get a two-dimensional superwoman, that maybe has one quality that is played up a lot - like a catwoman type - or she plays up her sexuality which is seen as power. But this is not powerful. Flaws are key."

She speaks honestly about what it means to be a feminist today, a word that for some reason still at times feels difficult to utter. She reassures young viewers that feminism is "not a rule book," and that, rather, it's a "discussion, conversation and a process."

How Tara Suri & Niha Jain Learned to Fail

Why aren't there any books on failing and failures? Why is everything about success and succeeding? That's what Tara Suri and Niha Jain want to know. Sure, there are terms like "epic fail" and the FAIL blog, but in reality, no one wants to talk about failure. Instead, people fear it. They hope it doesn't happen to them.

"In a culture that's all about 'winning,' some people even blatantly recast their mistakes," says Jain, as an image of Charlie Sheen flashes across the TEDxTeen PowerPoint screen.

The two girls chart their epic journey through the failure they experienced the previous summer when all they were trying to do was succeed. They wanted to change a community where 85% of women had been forced into prostitution. They had another plan. And it failed, in a good way.

"If we want to be game changers, we have to fail loudly and proudly," says Suri.

Curtis Kulig Is Obsessed With Love

"Love me, love me, love me," Kulig tells the TEDx audience. "Say it to the person next to you." Everything is about love.

Obsession is usually talked about as a bad thing - but for this adolescent, it was his obsession with love that got him here in the first place.

"My obsession has turned into my profession," he explains.

Perhaps you've heard of him. His simple "Love Me" logo can be found across the world, from spray-painted dumpsters to bottoms of skateboards to stickers, on Michael Stars T-shirts and Victoria's Secret materials. He's not a graffiti artist or a tagger. He's a culture maker, a message creator.

"I am writing 'love me' till my hands hurt," he says.

Khadim Diop Knows Frankenstein

Fifteen-year-old Khadim Diop is going to be a star. At age 5, he decided that he wanted to change the world.

His lyrical poetry walks the line between slam and rap, perfectly delivering a single message: "I am the promise of tomorrow," he says, fierceness in his eyes.

"Am I not worth the fight? I am the future."

These five teens are delivering just that, coupled with grace, eloquence and attitude. They are our future culture leaders.

"Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers," writes Alison Gopnik for The Wall Street Journal. "Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals."

"I'm seeing kids skipping more traditional and print-based applications and going right to the Internet, and I'm seeing that as young as two years old." says Jennifer Jolly, digital lifestyle parenting editor for Tecca.com. "They are integrating the hands-on with the visual for a multi-sensory learning experience."

Many apps are designed specifically for the iPhone, while others work on both the Web and an iPhone, iPod and iPad. (There are plenty of apps for Android, but in this story we will focus on Apple iProducts.) And as kids and parents alike become more familiar with switching between multiple devices while storing their data on the cloud, they are also relying moreso on the Internet for instant answers.

Web apps such as SpaceyMath help kids put their math skills to the test, competing with other kids in a multiplayer space. Using an arcade-like, gameshow-esque format, this Web app encourages them to learn math skills while having fun.

"My daughter, who is in fifth grade, turns to the Internet for help," says Jolly. "Math isn't my strong suit. I can figure out the answers, but preteens today are doing math in a completely different way - in a way that integrates technology." For iPad math apps, check out MathsInsider.com.

Activity apps such as GeoPalz are an easy way for parents to keep track of how much and how often their kids are exercising. In an age of all screens, all the time, this could actually function less like parents-spying-on-kids and more like a good check to make sure that kids are getting up and moving around. GeoPalz is essentially a kid-friendly pedometer that parents clip to their kids' shoelaces. Kids earn free prizes the more they exercise. Aside from using Web apps to collaboratively work on math and exercise, another important element is collaborative creativity.

DoInk.com is a Web and iPad app that provides drawing and animation tools to nearly 500,000 preteen and teen users worldwide. To comply with the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), DoInk.com does not allow kids younger than 13 to engage in community conversation. The Web version has a community aspect to it, and is for kids 13 and up. The app is for all ages, precisely because it does not have a community component - kids cannot share and communicate on there. But they can still make images, like playing with an Etch-a-Sketch back in the day.

"It's interesting because so many schools have cut their arts budgets," says Karen Miller, co-founder of DoInk.com. "And so you get this group of very disenfranchised teens who have nowhere to go to create artistically."

While parents are clearly interested in how to keep their preteens safe online, there is also a self-expression aspect. How are preteens expressing their inner emotional worlds?

"For them to be able to jump in a website, whether its ours or some others, they can create, paint without messy cleanup, they can be expressive," says Miller. "And the No. 1 thing they're doing is expressing an emotion or telling a story."

Looking for more preteen-friendly apps? Check out this list of best apps for kids ages 9-11 on Common Sense Media.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

But what if the very talks that we believe are making us smarter are actually dumbing us down, simplifying complex ideas into snippets of "shareable" information apt for fast consumption? This is why Chicago-based improvisers Seth Dodson and Kellen Alexander created "NED Talks: Spreading Worthless Ideas," a spoof of the popular TED Talk videos. Their show challenges the entire structure upon which TED is built.

"The idea for NED Talks came about after watching TED Talks," says co-creator Kellen Alexander. "We thought that it looked like fun to give presentations, and we figured we should create one for people who like to talk into microphones but have nothing worthwhile to say."

Yet it's clear that Americans love TED, and TED videos have spread far and wide. If they're so stupid and pointless, however, how could this have happened?

Alexander likens the spread of TED Talks in pop culture to the reality TV phenomenon.

"When the first season of "The Real World" started, it was the most authentic. Then it got progressively less authentic because the people that went on the next seasons of the show started acting based on the seasons they'd seen," he says. "So then it digressed into what people see now, which is basically just getting into arguments and hooking up."

TED Talks began in 2006. Now, six years later, TED has become a household, brand name, akin to Apple or Honda. Stories like this piece in last month's issue of The Atlantic suggest exactly what Dodson and Alexander realized more than a year ago, long before this article was written. Writes Megan Garber:

We talk often about the need for narrative in making abstract concepts relatable to mass audiences; what TED has done so elegantly, though, is to replace narrative in that equation with personality. The relatable idea, TED insists, is the personal idea. It is the performative idea. It is the idea that strides onstage and into a spotlight, ready to become a star.

Once seen as a crowning achievement in one's intellectual career, today TED Talks feel more like status symbols, a notch on the bedpost, something to highlight on a resume rather than a truly intellectual endeavor into unknown territory. Or, an inculcation into the cult of social media celebrity.

This is not to belittle some of the ideas put forth by those who have presented at TED. But there's something reality TV show-esque about the whole thing, about recognition in the American social media-ified pop culture landscape. Which brings us back to NED Talks and reality TV.

"Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of The Real Housewives of New York City once said: 'Always know what you want,'" Alexander says.

"I thought that was very inspirational."

Dodson and Alexander will be back for another installment of NED Talks in June 2012. In the meantime, please enjoy this video from a NED Talk by Miami Volt.

NED Talk image courtesy of Kellen Alexander and Seth Dodson.

Erasey Page, a new Web-based project conceived by artist Jillian Mayer in collaboration with Eric Cade Schoenborn, ask Internet users to take back their lives by erasing the Net, one site at a time. At first glance, this feels like just another gimmicky Internet spoof site, an idea that you wish you probably thought of at one point or another but were too busy surfing the Web to actually execute. But look beyond the parody feel of this project, and you'll find something that's a bit - dare we say it? - darker. Most readers of ReadWriteWeb couldn't imagine a life without the Internet, let alone what it would mean to enjoy a more "real-time reactive lifestyle."

Erasey Page isn't live to the public yet, but Mayer gave ReadWriteWeb a sneak peek. The reception for Erasey Page takes places at Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art on April 6. The artist wanted to see reactions to the project in IRL, at the museum itself. It will be live on the Internet in a few weeks.

Mayer greets visitors to Erasey Page. She is smiling, glossy in appearance and demeanor. She opens with a few questions: "Are you tired of hearing about the Internet? Are you bored of things that end in dot-com? Do you dislike the idea of space that's cyber?" Sit and nod your head. The artist agrees: "Me too," she says.

This journey feels like a combination of a late night infomercial mixed with the tinge of a gimmicky product marketing video. But Mayer's idea sticks: Why not try experiencing a real-time reactive environment that isn't mediated by keyboards, glass and various emoticons? A life outside of the Internet and social networks is possible. Like any online game, the choice is yours.

To begin, just click her hand. And remember that you are in full control, Internet user. So before you start erasing sites, sit and think real hard about the site that you most wish wasn't on the Internet. The site that sucks away at least two hours of your day. The site you can't stop checking. The site that you have contempt for. Perhaps it's the site that you can't live without - and for that reason, you hate it.

Erasey Page aims to "make your life better" with the click of a button, much like social networks and smartphone apps promise to do. In an Internet of targeted adverting and personalized search, where you are a brand on social media and your privacy is up for sale, life without the Internet might not just be different - it could be much, much better.

As one of a team of two ReadWriteWeb writers covering Facebook (my other half in Facebook coverage is Dave Copeland), I decided that erasing it from the Internet forever would probably be a good call. I type Facebook.com into the bar, and Erasey Page finds it. Using a giant eraser, like one you would find in MS Paint, I went right ahead, literally erasing Facebook from the Internet.

Already, I am feeling less connected to my 1,000-ish Facebook friends, whom I lovingly refer to as my "Facebook Village." I rely on them for smart, informed answers to certain questions I deem important. Ah well, it's too late. They are gone.

"I think you made the right choice," Internet Robot Jillian tells me. "I would have done it, too."

After hearing her soothing, stewardess-like voice, I breathe again. I feel a sense of relief. Never again will I have to type in the Facebook.com URL, login to the world's largest social network, and hope that I have notifications waiting for me to answer. It's almost like quitting Facebook, just without the agony of actually doing it. Erasey Page took care of all that for me.

The artist tells ReadWriteWeb that the actual online experience might be different than the one described above. Stay tuned.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and David Castillo Gallery/Bass Museum of Art.

The National Endowment for the Arts has not funded visual artists since 1993. But it once did fund controversial work, like that of Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio series, which featured images of homoeroticism, BDSM and classical nudes. That body of work was included in a traveling exhibition called "The Perfect Moment," which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. But not for long.

It was only a matter of time before the NEA would stop funding individual visual artists all together. Take, for example, the 1993 case of the NEA Four, which includes performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes. In June 1990, their proposed NEA grants were vetoed by John Frohnmayer because of the artworks' highly politicized subject matter. The NEA Four filed suit against the NEA, and Frohnmayer was forced to resign. Even though the artists won their court case in 1993 and were awarded the grant money, after all was said and done, the NEA stopped funding individual artists.

Today the NEA funds visual arts through grants and organizations that "serve the needs of and enhance opportunities for artists and their audience." The NEA claims that it is committed to advancing the work of contemporary visual artists, but that's not what individual visual artists had to say.

Cleveland's SPACES Gallery, Recipient of NEA Grants

Ask anyone who has received an NEA grant, and they'll tell you that there's a lot of legwork involved. Christopher Lynn, the executive director of Cleveland's SPACES Gallery, tells ReadWriteWeb that the gallery has an ongoing relationship with the NEA. It receives money for the SPACES World Artist Program, an artist residency that brings in local artists from around the world.

"The NEA seems to be on board with it because it deals with issues of cultural exchange and enrichment of the national and local landscape, in addition to bringing in international artists," says Lynn.

Yet the process for getting an NEA is "long and arduous," he says. "It requires budgets (last year's and next year's), images, information on previous artists to recap on where we have been, and proposed upcoming artists." Even if you do receive an NEA, the organization expects the organization to pay upfront, so the entire grant functions more like a reimbursement process. "You get the money at the end of the grant period, rather than get the money upfront, which can be tricky if you don't have the cash function." This reverse-like funding happens because organizations or individuals have, in the past, abused the privilege of receiving money upfront.

Lynn says the best word to describe the NEA is "traditional."

In a lot of ways, Kickstarter is a far easier route than applying for an NEA grant, or any grant, for that matter. And judging by the success artists have had with Kickstarter, it's hard to rationalize not doing it. Except for that whole small government thing.

Artist Steve Lambert: Kickstarter Is a Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem

Steve Lambert raised money using Kickstarter for a project not-so-ironically titled "Capitalism Works for Me." This project, as he says, was "more ambitious than what a nonprofit could do," and there was a limited timeline for the project. So he jumped on Kickstarter, and in only 30 days he was able to raise $16,000. Does this mean capitalism works? Or government is broken? Or neither at all? Lambert asks friends on Kickstarter to make capitalism work for him.

"There were 434 people who now are connected to the project, even if they only gave a dollar," says Lambert of the Kickstarter fund. "Plus there's this accountability to the public - it's not just me being like, 'Hey, this is great!' The idea needs to be supported for it to move forward."

Lambert only turned to Kickstarter after other avenues proved to not work quite as well. "I had tried to do different forms of the Capitalism Works for Me through other institutions and it didn't work," he says. "Some were like, 'No, that's not what we do,' and others were willing to show but not put the money behind it. If you're challenging institutions or capitalism or the government, it's good to be able to go outside of it."

Or, in other words, if you're making work that's controversial and perhaps not as family-friendly, you'll probably have to find alternate means of funding. Take the controversy that Mapplethorpe caused, for example. "The federal government has not given money to individual artists for decades," he says. "Other countries don't do this." When it comes to work like Mapplethorpe's, for example, even if you don't like it, "it has value," says Lambert.

Kickstarter is a short-term solution to a long-term problem, to continued government cuts to the arts.

"We have billions of dollars going into war," says Lambert. "We need to be having that conversation. Kickstarter fills a need; it should always be there. But within the nonprofits, I hear them say things like 'That program got cut so we're gonna do a crowdfunding thing.' And it's like whoa, whoa, what are we doing to fight the cuts?!"

Kickstarter is well aware of this problem, too. When ReadWriteWeb originally reported the news that Kickstarter was on track to outfund the National Endowment for the Arts, we also noted something that Kickstarter Co-Founder Yancey Strickler said: "But maybe it shouldn't be that way," Strickler said. "Maybe there's a reason for the state to strongly support the arts."

Queer Filmmaker Wendy Jo Carlton: The Closed World of NEA

Two years ago, Chicago-based queer filmmaker Wendy Jo Carlton needed to raise funds for her indie film about two girls in love, Jamie & Jessie Are Not Together. She turned to Kickstarter instead of a complicated, paperwork-heavy grant because, as she tells ReadWriteWeb, it just made more sense - especially considering the subject matter she was tackling.

"I haven't applied for really big grants probably because they're so daunting - the time and the paperwork, the content that you already have to have such a clear, concise idea expressed in written form, plus you need budgets," says Carlton. "It took a lot of time to prepare for Kickstarter - it's like your own storefront, and you figure out what you want your storefront to look like. And you can be a lot more creative."

As opposed to the Internet, a broadcast-to-the-masses type of platform, the Kickstarter campaign acts as "its own broadcast without being too idiosyncratic," she says.

The NEA isn't exactly focused on connecting to the social-networked masses.

"I associate the NEA with access. You have to do a lot more legwork to understand what kind of language they want you to be speaking. It's like this insider-y thing, and to me, I associate that to upper-middle class background and Ivy League people, and people who know people or they've lived in New York most of their lives and are already connected. That's not my background. I'm a working-class background, and for me it's empowering to know how someone wants you to dance if they're going to be throwing money at you for the dance."

Of course, Americans' tax dollars fund the NEA grants. But that's beside the point.

"It's connected to federal funding, which is taxpayer money, and I smell some right-wing agenda in the comparison because the NEA and Kickstarter are not in the same playing field to compare."

Rainb0wLightening: We Are an ADD Culture. Get Over It.

Akron, Ohio-based artist Chelsea Blackerby of artist collective Rainb0wLightening used Kickstarter to raise funds. But it's not something that she was particularly thrilled about. Using Kickstarter, she was able to raise a quick $2,000 for her sculpture project Dreamscape Memory Cave, a collection of personal memories and stories gathered over one year. They line the walls of this sentimental space. With 48 backers, rainb0wLightning raised the money. But the Kickstarter platform seemed to be more of a burden than a success, at least in terms of community building.

"People are really busy, everyone is demanding their attention, and that's our culture," says Blackerby. "That's kind of what our piece is about. We're asking people to stop their ADD and really slow down and experience themselves."

A project like this doesn't really make sense on the Internet, the exact type of medium that the artist is trying to combat.

"Kickstarter does a good job of making you feel like you had a direct hand, and it's unique in that way because it does take out the middle man," says Blackerby. "But it's kind of like throwing money at the RedCross or a philanthropic organization. You want your money to go somewhere good."

Images via Shutterstock.com and VisitSteve.com, Wendy Jo Carlton and Rainb0wLightening.

After creating username and password on the site, users have full reign to wander about and check out what other users are up to. The main page shows the active GIF creation rooms, a feed of who's doing what on the site. There's also a tiny chat message room in the lower right-hand corner for chatting with the other active users.

Stumbling into one of these GIF creation rooms is reminiscent of wandering into AOL chat rooms of the late 1990s. It's unclear who is going to be in there or what they'll be doing. Users must take a chance on the room, based on its cover photo and how many users have "loved" it with pixelated hearts. The site encourages users to transform into into high-tech hunter-gatherers, finding and building mini GIF creations. Some GIF creation rooms are private, so users can visit but not collaborate. Each room has a tag of public, semi-public or private. It's like a choose your own adventure novel.

I accidentally wandered into the room smoke_weed, where I hoped to contribute a GIF of Snoop Dogg, the first image that comes to mind when I think weed and the Internet. Unfortunately, that room was private. I instead choose to click the little heart button (love instead of like, you know?); so I also got to see who else loved that room.

Super Mario clouds a la Cory Arcangel pop up a lot on homepage of gifpumper.com. The public room mario displays rainbow-colored flashing clouds slowly scrolling across the screen; a radically colored zebra gallops near the top left-hand corner. Nearby, a highly-pixelated Mario flies on bright green Yoshi. A square coded with rainbow colors displays the upside down letters and number "3. THE PIECE NEED NOT BE BUILT," while sharp cuts of blue screen with the original white Mario clouds drift on by. In just a few hours of collaboration from visitors to the site, this room might look completely different.

Gifpumper.com is a fascinating space for creating and collaborating on GIFs, and for discovering other GIF lovers. This GIF-love moment could have been fulfilled by visiting Downcast Eyes at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where 50+ artists and culture-makers displayed their homespun GIFs. But since that moment has passed, why not jump on gifpumper.com and make a GIF, and then collaborate with others?

Images via Eyebeam and GIFPumper.com.

The GIF indicates a full-fledged Internet culture transformation. It suggests the endless possibilities of making and sharing on the Internet. A single image slightly animated has the potential to catch eyeballs faster even than a 10-second viral video or stagnant single image. GIFs show the possibility of the now, as defined by users of the Internet.

Downcast Eyes at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago began first with the GIF. For the one-night only event, twohundredfiftysixcolors (Eric Fleischauer, Jason Lazarus & Theodore Darst) and TAGTEAM (Jake Myers and Christopher Smith), invited artists and culture makers to show their GIFs in a two-hour computer-based performance art endurance show. Except the bodies on display were not human, they were indeed computer screens, iPads, iPhones, Androids and PCs. The idea here was to show up with a fully-charged laptop or other device that could play GIFs. Drop it on the long table located in the middle of the room, connect it to the museum's WiFi network, play the GIF, and let it run till the battery dies a temporary death. Then power-up and start again, some other time.

"We asked a core group of people to come who we thought should be really involved - who were already invested in animated GIFs," says Downcast Eyes co-organizer Christopher Smith. "Then we extended the call to the public, which I think really reflects the nature of the file format. It's not just artists making this thing, but people who are really into cats and TV shows and movies."

The randomness of artists in this show is purposeful, adding the serendipity element that is quite secondary to the social networked experience. But first, let's get a few things straight. GIFs and GIF culture are nothing new. CompuServe introduced the GIF in 1987 with the aim of providing a color image format for file downloading. The previous format, run-length encoding (RLE), was black and white only.

GIFs, or graphical interchange format, are comprised of a 256-color palette. Limiting the number of colors available in the GIF makes it at once retro and endearing, focused on a sort of lo-fi aesthetic that contrasts the lush image capabilities of the JPG or TIFF. Tagteam began exploring the GIF in 2011, curating TWEEN, a physical installation of around 30 laptops playing GIFs from around the world. Today TWEEN lives on as a Tumblr blog. Taking that one step forward, artists Eric Fleischauer, Jason Lazarus and their curatorial assistant Theodore Darst started working on a 16mm cinematic film on celluloid about GIFs called twohundredfiftysixcolors. The film comments on the journey of the GIF, charting it "from an Internet page signpost, a tool of multiplying Internet memes, and finally a place for considered artistic gestures."

The GIF, says Smith, seems to live in this weird in-between state of Internet life. "They're something you can immediately dismiss as really silly, or like a really trashy meme," he says. "But it does make you wonder and take a closer look."

The 50+ GIFs that participated in Downcast Eyes could fill a small landfill of Internet trash. "This is GIF culture," says Myers. "We just see so much in such a small area that you're hyperaware of the various associations and solutions to the GIF." Adds Smith, "I was really attracted to the kind of trashy quality of it and also being this file format of nearing the edge of obsolescence." GIF culture does not have a single space for existence, though much of it now takes place on Tumblr. Darst spends a fair amount of time there blogging and re-blogging GIFs.

"I don't think there's really one GIF culture," he says. "Basically at the risk of sounding kind of simple about it, I just spend a lot of time on Tumblr. In the new media community, it's this good way to do stuff that's not so serious, doesn't involve extensive community modeling and all that. It's not super complex system of feedback, it's like you make something and it'll get...maybe nobody will reblog it, and then 500 people will."

One of the first artist collectives to actively engage the GIF, elevating it from pure Internet file format to an aesthetic level, is PaperRad, comprised of Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci and Ben Jones. Their lo-fi, DIY aesthetic relies heavily on cheap 1980s pop culture imagery, GIFs and the throw-away trash aesthetic that is so clearly apparent in the GIF. PaperRad's outrageous aesthetic predates the reemergence of the GIF in art culture. Now it's become this accepted, widespread Internet trash that people either tend to love or absolutely hate.

"I feel like in the past two or three years you have kind of GIFs taking this more art/new media role, where that kind of gets talked about as GIF culture as if it's this new thing," says Darst. "I think it's important to recognize that it's not."

GIFs make for a visual explosion of Internet culture, a relic of what once was, a pile of trash that the Internet recycles into new and beautifully paralyzing momentary imagery. The animated GIF is a fixture of Internet pop culture. It's one of those objects that anyone can make, so long as they have access to Google Image Search. The GIF itself plays on usually a short, three or four second loop, re-presenting a very brief animation over and over again. It is obnoxiously mesmerizing, and the subject matter within is usually short, pop-y bits of information - easy concepts to digest and spit out.

The performance at the MCA, which I'm likening to more of a happening and less of a theatrical, staged work of art persay, happened once and will never happen in the same format again. Like a moment of fast commenting and conversation on a social networking site, it happened in the now.

The show itself not only took place in the dining hall type area of the MCA. It was based on people showing up with devices for screening GIFs. It was not live-streamed to the Internet, but there was a quality of online community participation, as friends and strangers uploaded images to Imgur, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook in real-time. The Internet commented, liked, re-tweeted, re-blogged, and sent Downcast Eyes into digital landscape. This angsty Satan-esque look at Mark Zuckerberg appeared on imgur, as did this GIF of a flying eagle Internet Explorer. Other Instagrammed images of the show appear still and frozen in time, like stills from a video art show. Snippets of the show appeared on Jason Lazarus' Facebook. But as for the GIF itself - in many ways, it is similar in nature to the silent, pre-cinema era.

"It's like Edward Muybridge's race horse animations, where you see a horse galloping," says Myers. "You see something so many times over and over again, that that repetition ends up being funny or giving it a different meaning than seeing it once, like you would see in a movie."

The Future of the Culture GIF: James Green, Jessica Westbrook & Kourtney Elam

James Green, Jessica Westbrook and Kourtney Elam are three artists representing a more nuanced look at the GIF today in pop culture. Westbrook's work looks at the evolution of the GIF since those Web 1.0 days. Elam imagines a futuristic female cyborg who straddles today and the future, and Green looks at portrayals of black people in GIF culture. These felt most important because the majority of GIFs on view at Downcast Eyes were concerned with the aesthetics of the GIF itself, or a more mainstream pop culture. To be expected, really.

Chicago-based artist/designer James Green's fast-looping GIF of Kony2012 provides a moment frozen in Internet time of the actions that took place around Kony2012, the most viral YouTube video ever. An image of Jason Russell, a Facebook Like button symbol and Joseph Kony pile on top of one another, flashing in fast succession. It's the rate at which this video became an overnight viral sensation. His JUST FOR FUN piece takes a smart stab at how fast our culture forgets the memory of pivotal Civil Rights occurrences, lumping them into the pop culture imagination. In FUN, he pastes Rosa Parks' face onto a seat in the back of a bus, where she hangs with Rebecca Black. In another animated GIF, Green takes Jessie Jackson's head and places it on top of Nyan cat, which he says "kind of plays off of Rainbow Push Coalition."

Jessica Westbrook's GIF image stems from her experience working in the dotcom era, and serves as an homage to a memory of that time period. The GIF is called Lala.com, and Westbrook says that it's "conceptually something I've carried for a long time, for the past 14 years. You might even describe it as an 14-year piece."

"When I worked as a Web developer in 1998-2000, we'd spend a lot of time developing GIFs," Westbrook says. "So I kept it [LaLa] in my cubicle with me, so there's this association between her and timing and the dot.com experience that I had with animated GIFs, so it seemed like a natural intersection of those interests."

As a disclaimer, Westbrook says that she is 38-years-old, and thus her first experience with the animated GIF took place 16 years ago.

"There was a timing intersection between Web development in the early days, animated GIFs as a way of passing time in the corporate culture I was involved with, and then Lala having a networked presence because she was still on television at the time," says Westbrook." The animated GIF, in its 256 colors, feels like an old blanket, saved from the trash heap for some unknown reason, and then reappearing anew on the screen.

Kourtney Elam's futuristic woman suggests the sort of mind-body disconnect that shows the way one feels living in a partially virtual space. The top portion of this woman's body is directly connected to the television; her legs are positioned below, posed to the side, sits in front of a photograph of old-timey Chicago. A gold frame captures the entire image. The animated GIF suggests additional ideas of the futuristic woman feeling quite at home in this rich urban landscape.

In the world of Internet time and space, viral videos die, cats become famous and everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. The age of HTML5 is upon us, but that doesn't threaten the lifespan of the culturally relevant GIF, a photo standard that is deeply embedded in the Web and the culture of the Web. While HTML5 may give shape and function to the Web, a GIF can live inside of that structure. But will GIFs live on as a mode of cultural expression in the Internet age, or do they have a shelf-life?

"Who knows, HTML5 might say GIFs aren't necessary," says Myers. "I have no idea what the future of the GIF is. They've been around for awhile, and they're super small, and that lends itself to longevity."

Crowd shot image via the MCA Chicago's Instagram.

This is where Hennessy Youngman comes in. The dude is actually not who he says he is, which is a clue that yes, this is a performance. Hennessy Youngman is Jayson Musson's persona, and he shows up in online YouTube episodes of a series he likes to call "Art Thoughtz." Hennessy has taken it upon himself to be an Internet art historian of sorts - or should we say Art Critic - most likely discussing issues of race, gender, art history, the Art World and life. He appears on the Internetz wearing an Angry Birds hat, some awesome bling and a delightfully dirty sense of humor. His latest episode is about how we perform our identities online, which is in and of itself performance art. Pioneering video artist Nam-June Paik would be proud of Hennessy. Here's why.

In Lucy Liggett's essay on museum.tv, she writes that it is Paik who actually challenged our experience, understand and definitions of "television," as it were.

Nam June Paik pioneered the development of electronic techniques to transform the video image from a literal representation of objects and events into an expression of the artist's view of those objects and events. In doing so, he challenges our accepted notion of the reality of televised events. His work questions time and memory, the nature of music and art, even the essence of our sensory experiences. Most significantly, perhaps, that work questions our experience, our understanding, and our definitions of "television."

In Youngman's new video, which is featured on thesocietypages.org, he suggests that performance art is no longer unique and isolated to the few. It is open to the many, to the Internet users, to the world. It is here that we all perform - from the Occupiers to the random Facebook-ers and Twitter users - to everyone who put themselves out there. If we are vulnerable on social media, we will get our 15 minutes of fame. In the same way Paik challenged our ideas about television, Youngman asks us to rethink our experience of social media. Hennessy warns that the video is mad long - it is only 10 minutes long - but I implore you to stick around. I guarantee it's worth that sliver of your hour.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

On the Internet, where variations on the Hey Girl meme live and die, Nicki Minaj battles it out against Katy Perry and cats, dogs and horses vie for the most beloved and adorable pet, it's a wonder to think about how one can and should look at art through the lens of the edited Internet and apps. Taking Berger's ideas for looking as a starting point, how is the idea of looking changing on the Internet and through smartphone apps? In the age of always on apps and the Internet, is it possible to return to the childlike state of looking?

"Seeing comes before words," writes Berger. "The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." Indeed, the Internet is ripe with stories about how children are interacting with iPads and iPhones. Writes PCWorld nearly two years ago, when the first iPad came out: "I think the iPad will spark a revolution in children's culture...by the time these kids reach middle school, they will have been using multitouch user interfaces almost every day for eight years or more." The narrative has since expanded, and children are at the center of it.

In looking at art, we at once have to become child-like again - approaching the image with zero preconceived notions, seeing as if we knew nothing. We become blank slates, wiping clean our memories and experiences when at all possible. Does using apps and the Internet amplify or make possible this "for the first time" experience? Not in an adolescent way. Rather, in a childlike way.

Seeing Art through Art Museums, Augmented Reality & Map Apps

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta released an app that offers maps of the art museum, a browsable collection of art at the museum, comments on each work of art from members of the community. And then there is the ability to take a photo of a work you see, which you can then either share to Facebook or Twitter, or discuss it in the community that lives within this tiny app. "So amazing in person!" writes a user named Marykh about Pablo Picasso's 1928 work of art Girl Before a Mirror. No comments have been posted yet.

Project Paperclip is the first augmented photography exhibition by Portuguese photographer Nuno Serrão. The app provides augmented reality soundscapes to accompany each photograph in the exhibition. Walk up to the image in an actual, physical gallery space and scan the QR code. Doing so triggers some pretty trippy music that, depending on your current state, could take you to an augmented reality of your own. The effect of scanning a QR code with your phone from your computer screen and experiencing the music is a neat hat trick. But take away the QR code gimmick and translate this to a real world art space, and it has the same effect of walking into a darkened gallery show of video or installation art, minus the full physical effect.

Three years ago the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson", a visceral exhibition of sound, light, color and nature. Science met culture, and reverted back to the elements. Eliasson acts more like a scientist, probing the visceral and translating it into a full body experience for the viewer. This is work that demands a full sensory experience. It asks you to take your time - something that technology does not.

Moss Wall (1994) is a simple, elegiac installation of Artic reindeer moss covering a single wall of the gallery. The viewer is left overwhelmed by the fresh, earthy scent of the moss, and as such is transported to another mental space. Imagine yourself as reindeer, brushing up against the brocolli-like nubs of moss, quietly munching on it underneath a sunny sky.

Beauty (1993) is another visceral experience, of stepping into a darkened room quietly inhabited by mist sprays that spit from a hose on the ceiling. Inside a spotlight shines, making a quiet rainbow visible only to the lucky few. We cannot replicate a full-sensory experience through technology, and especially not apps. But at least we can augment our current state of being.

Installation view, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, MCA Chicago
May 1 - September 13, 2009
Photos: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

Project Paperclip proposes a way to augment reality. It takes a highly replicable Internet photograph of nature, combining it with a QR code and sound emitted from an iPhone app. It is subtly disconcerting, an ominous prediction of the artificial realities we build with the help of smartphone apps and the Internet.

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Google Goggles for Android and iPhone, the experience of accessing information about art changed dramatically. Now you can go to the Met, take a photo of the work you're looking at in person, and pull up a database full of information about it.

More recently, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced an app that guides users to 186 permanent works of art that are installed throughout stations in the city, and a few off the Metro North and Long Island Rail Road systems. Public art is indeed now easier to find, especially if you prefer to ask your phone for directions rather than a person or prior Internet research. Or, more importantly, if you prefer the experience as mediated through an app rather than the idea of just stumbling upon something beautiful which may or may not be public art. The app provides information either by subway line or by individual artist.

"In a setting like the subway," Sandra Bloodworth, the director of MTA Arts for Transit, told the New York Times, "art really does something. It gives a certain amount of dignity to your ride and your day. And this is finally going to be like having the whole collection in the palm of your hand."

The RedEye Chicago reports that the Windy City is indeed one of the top places for street art. Grafrank.com pulls grafitti photos from Flickr that are tagged "street art" and "graffiti." It also features artists who tag and have marked the city with their ink that comes from cans.

"The random tagger or etcher on the subway won't be photographed because most people don't recognize that graffiti as a form of art," said New York writer Jake Dobkin, who launched the tracker. "This is more a tool for high quality artists."

Looking Through the Glass Screen

Smartphones, iPads and social networks provide us with new ways of finding - but they may detract from the actual experience of looking and experiencing in the full-body sense of the word. And even the biggest tech nerds know that.

"So, stuff like this can help educate/self-educate, but it also has the horrible ability to amputate a direct experience of the art," says writer Curt Hopkins. "I don't think anyone should ever allow their first encounter with a piece of art to be mediated by so much as a tri-fold brochure, much less augmented reality, if you can help it. It robs you of that moment of pure encounter and limits how you develop your own sensual relationship with art." To which he adds: "Afterward - or remotely - I think it's a great resource."

But as the child continues looking through the glassy screen of smartphones and tablets, the experience of looking at art will evolve.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.