I started out on Twitter (May 2008) ,not knowing what to expect (like every newbie),and hoping that it might be a good platform for Chordata with short messages on evolution,humanity,the arts and technology.

I’m no stranger to virtual worlds and online community but, in the year or so  when I took a break from such intense cyber engagement,the world of social media applications exploded and it’s all you can do to keep up with the speed of light in communications particularly when you’re trying to make decisions related to where you’ll base your community building efforts.

It takes an enormous amount of time to build real community and while I’ve been doing this,my working partner in Chordata, Richard Meyers has been hugely skeptical about the basis of it all,even the “reality” of it all.

Turns out he may be right in a number of ways although I’m hardly ready to stop now. I hope this post may make some contribution to the debate that’s raging and that those of us who care about this medium can help make the changes that need to occur.

At first,I tried every social community going ,so much so that I can’t recall what half of them are. I understand things like the Twit Army and supported that ,but what happened to it?

I decided to focus on Twitter early on, however,because it felt so much like our kind of town and the people on Twitter are everything. The community’s ability to join together and make things happen like Marielle’s kidney,Stacey Monk’s successful fundraising on Thanksgiving for Epic Change,@armano raising $10,000 in an hour for his homeless,single mom friend…the list goes on and on.  Chordata also was quietly helped pre-Christmas by various Twitter buddies and Nikki at Van’s Shoe Company. This MADE Christmas for a bunch of homeless kids.

Twitter  evolves the conversation  because of the people using it.

Magic Lantern Slide :3 year-old Orange Tree in desert:Can we grow on Twitter or will we be uprooted,our many branches broken?We just want to sit and eat an orange with you in the sun,fix some small things.

In all the current discussion about Twitter,monetizing it,its API versus FriendFeed (Facebook) ,one thing I don’t hear often is how important it is to social change organizations and non-profits. Also rarely mentioned,is that the arts community (music,visual,film,writers etc…) is migrating to Twitter and there are lots of Twitter groups forming. We have much to contribute to any discussions about Open Source,distribution,copyright/creative commons and sustainability and this discussion has been  promising with the use of hash tag tracking and applications like TweetGrid and Tweet Deck.

It has been truly inspiring from my perspective because Chordata’s mandate includes humanizing technology and our motto is Share Your Toys.  The various Twitter  neighbourhoods contribute to both concepts.

Twitter also has an immediacy and ease of use that’s hard to beat (when it works) and is not easily re-created on Friend Feed. There are many moving to Friend Feed and here’s one discussion about why: http://tinyurl.com/jimcffeed  

Rembrandt's LOL Flight From Twitter.

We’re on Friend Feed and Facebook, but after wading through a zillion post Christmas snowballs,,decorations,friend requests,group requests and the relative deadness related to the “feel” of Twitter,it’s still hard for me to get into it. I see how it expands conversations. Right now I feed my Twitter Feed to Friend Feed (which also includes my Blips,TwitPics etc…),but that doesn’t lead to any engagement on Friend Feed.

Twitter for me really is like a village with nooks,crannies,back streets,main streets and everything in between. I picture my Twitter friends’ places and their hearts and minds.

All  of this takes a lot of time and thought and ,while I take that as par for the course if you’re really going to be involved in anything, it concerns me that all you build can be so rapidly lost in ways you have no control over whatsoever. While this is kind of like life (or can be),it also is something that could at least be improved. Twenty Million dollars later and so forth. OK,it’s THEIR business and we’re just the people who helped raise the money on this last round of investment (where each Twitterer was valued at something like $21).

Here’s an important piece by Steven Gillmor on all the technical issues going on presently with Twitter’s “firehose” and throttle down which is affecting many third party developers right now. It also discusses Friend Feed. http://tinyurl.com/twitpipe  This piece by Brian Roy also has something to add on the Real Time Web and technical issues: http://tinyurl.com/realtimeweb

This brings me to my experiences since last Wednesday that have caused almost a standstill in our ability to use any kind of threading,tracking on Twitter as well as tons of glitches leading to not getting any replies,to tweets being sent to an account @bertop (in Spanish ) that I never sent. I was able to see this at least from Social Too’s stats that are emailed to us. I also see replies days later,unfollows where I can’t discern whether they’re glitches or not. I’ve not been concerned with people unfollowing or numbers,but ,in some cases,where you think you’ve built up some kind of relationship and exchange,it’s a bit strange. It leaves you thinking you’re doing it wrong and want to make it better .

Is It Just ME ?

This is the common question you see every day and this week it was my turn on the wheel once again. Problem is that I can’t get any answers because it all revolves around Twitter’s API. Here’s a link to Get Satisfaction and the issues: http://gsfn.us/t/2gvk  Gone is our ability to access Twitter Search or TweetGrid where we could follow threads ,groups,often see replies that don’t show up in Twitter itself and so on.  As a result,gone is the real ability to engage.

How Twitter search looks now in Safari.

I can get the services when I’m at work (in a public place on an I Mac),but suddenly can’t here. All attempts return an Internal Server Error #500 or just empty grids or columns (in TweetDeck). This is the same across all browsers.

We haven’t been able to participate in things like scifri or fem02 and this has taken away the essential functionality when you are following 1800 plus and have 1700 plus followers. I try to keep up,and have no interest in “broadcasting” and not engaging. This makes it impossible to track. It has eaten up numerous hours and I’m no closer to resolution than when I started.

Here's TweetGrid under the "no feeds" new austerity regime.

I also follow amazing people and so my feed is not full of a bunch of garbage and it’s growing all the time and becoming more relevant to what we’re doing. I need to track it and filter it because of the range of things Chordata is involved in.

Also, behind the scenes ,we have been working on Chordata’s site,a store,various projects that we were about to launch this weekend and I was about to let friends on Twitter know so that perhaps they could help retweet and get the ball rolling(and grab an avatar with “feelers”). Some of what we have been working on is custom designed for our Twitter buddies and I certainly have been designing a fundraising element into it.

I have had to stop and rethink the whole thing (which is time sensitive and meant to coordinate with BIL,the conference running parallel to TED,and even Valentine’s day).

It’s hard to convey how disheartening this is. Ready for liftoff and rockets fail simply because you have committed to one community as your home base in Social Media. How can this work with “enterprise?” That is a joke right now. We may not be involved with conventional enterprise as such,but we ARE involved with ways of exploring this medium and delivering art directly taking the medium into consideration. We are about bringing quality to the table.

I don’t want to migrate to Friend Feed because many will not follow us there…this has been shown time and again. It just does not have the same “culture” as Twitter,and while it has good points,,it fails for me in some essential ways.

I can take this as just part of the process as we grow and learn,but also (literally) cannot afford the loss of momentum. These are hard times for everyone and we need to continue also. We work on the narrowest of margins right now. That’s Ok:We apply ourselves and work at it.

 We’re in a place where the status quo is particularly harsh and this is why I turned to online community to draw support,knowledge and sustenance as we build something new. We want to make this venue link up to all kinds of things on the move these days from co-working to alternative performance spaces. We are breaking new ground here in the desert and have several projects developing that may be good models for others as well in terms of sustaining and  re-establishing the real VALUE of art. Chordata wants to actively join in the conversation. We’re interested in Cognition driven reality.

Early Les Ford Mixed Media piece (1983) hanging in office here.

I’m so interested to know what you all think about this and didn’t want to clutter up the Twitter feed. I hope you’ll comment  and stay tuned as to what I’m going to do about our Chordata launch online party.  You’ll be the first to know (that is, after I know ).(And besides,I may be close to letting Richard win this debate on Virtual Reality and can't let that happen. Think of the face I'll lose...very funny).

I'm going to post this for a short time just for the (dubious) benefit of all those I've come to know on Twitter:You make my day every day. You give me fuel,strength,humor. You give me all the hope I need to feel that big-hearted,thinking,compassionate humans aren't yet dinosaurs.

My New York neighbour and friend for years.

1.I'm LinkedIN to the Hebrides,come from an old family of stone masons on my father's side. He was first generation Canadian and I'm 1/4 Shoshone (through my dad's mother).

2.Had a Black Shirley Temple doll as a child. Spent early years mostly in hospital and Shirley made it through all that with me. She had startling white teeth.

3.First Jobs: My very first job was taking care of writer Laura Hobson's (Gentleman's Agreement) grandchildren.

Most Humorous Early Job: Assisting Stewart Mott who had a farm (with COWS etc...) on the roof of a New York co-op building he owned.

4.Played Harmonium for Allen Ginsberg as a teen and hung out at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Active with WBAI radio (Pacifica) in New York and the Free Music Stores/Global Music Radio Show.

5.Was on performing crew of the Clearwater also as a teen.

6. Biggest Thriils: Steering the Clearwater into South Street Seaport, Manhattan; Looking through an electron microscope; studying Chartres Cathedral with English Guide Malcom Miller (up on the roof with the gargoyles); my present e-ticket ride with angel/devil partner in crime R.

7.Saw Japanese tourists' glasses shatter while they were looking at the rose blooming in dead of winter that's supposed to be a twig from the "crown of thorns." This is at Glastonbury in the UK. Was on an early science track (biology/Rockefeller Institute etc...) which leads me to the(conditional) FACTS of Science but also an acceptance that anything is possible even if there's no explanation.

My dad on the radio,grandfather and uncle, aforementioned Shirley Temple doll,cousins.

8.Have and rejected Academic background too:Social History of the Arts pedigree. Not an institutional person although I've started plenty of organizations.

9.Studied East Indian music for years: Tabla,Vocals (in Bengali...the songs of Tagore).

10. A Swami (Acharya Vishvatma  Bawra. I called him Yogi Beara but his name means Universal Soul) lived in my UpLyme house. I married a Cockney/Jewish/Gypsy/Sitar and Sarod player when still in late teens in the UK. My favorite book at this time was "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism."

11. OK...so it's more than ten. Know Ley Lines. Lived in 17th Century farmhouse in South of England which had ghosts. Have ghosts now and maybe "black water." Can dowse for water pretty well.

Rev Kirpatrick (Clearwater Crew),Joan Baez,Pete Seeger (Clearwater),On the street(sign says THINK)

,in South of England (holding sitar) at experimental school, with the gypsy.

LOST AND FOUND DEPARTMENT

Who is this girl ? Where did she go?

Over the past two years or so, I have been wrestling with many things and guess on the stress

list, I've got every single one of the biggies: I am facing down brain tumor number two plus CNS Lymphoma. I'm weathering a divorce (marriage of 18 years to an artist) wherein ,like a hurricane touching down,I lost businesses,all income, medical coverage, and have fought to hold on to the property here. I've traversed the wilds of family law court,bad lawyers,bankruptcy court,looking for a "real job" (to save property) which only illustrated that as an older,degreed and experienced woman,I'm essentially unemployable. Whoopee.

BUT :

I'm pretending to be twenty again (not via Botox) knowing what I know now. Everything old is new again. It's not about the money (although money would help with the energy drain on miscellany to keep lights on and machines whirring). It's how to make something with what comes to hand. I have more materially than most people on this planet AND my carbon feets are still waaay too big.

YOU FIND OUT:

We make ourselves. We can change. Everything changes. We're here to give and then give some more. 

We learn about love which is bigger than we might think. Our family is also bigger than we may think.

NB: When whining to myself and slapping myself  upside the head with "not good enough", I recall what artist Alexis Smith said when she was turning forty. She said something like "why not just like the work I do and say it's good rather than bad ? The goodness and the badness of it will be judged when I'm dead (or not),so why not just proceed as if it's good " (enough) ? It will never be perfect. It's just a song.

Finally, in regards to my carbon feets: I waste too much paper and use pencils too much. I lust after a digital pen and if someone wants to trade me a pen for a vintage Donald Duck pencil topper,I would love you forever.

More official facts are available somewhere in all this mess under Chordata>Info.

Good (enough).

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. ” Albert Einstein

I think about this a lot because  it is key to understanding the creative process and leads to breakthroughs in thought patterns. I always remember Tom Waits saying that when he sits down at the piano his hands want to go to the same place every time and he has to "slap those hands."

One of the things that is a problem with institutional  settings  is that these environments are generally the antithesis of a place that stimulates  creative thought.

I first heard of Satish Kumar through Resurgence Magazine (he has been the Managing Editor for 30+ years) and then there was an interview in Suzi Gablik's Conversations at the End of Time (which also featured an interview with Chordata co-founder Chris Manes ) where Kumar talked about founding the Small School in Devon, England. His philosophy was "family not factory" and when we look at anything to do with "arts education " today ,Small School comes to mind.

In 1982 Satish, an ex-Jain monk who had settled in the isolated Devon village of Hartland, opened a secondary school for village children.

He called it "The Small School' and bequeathed to it an educational philosophy inspired by Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave. In its first year, the school had one teacher and nine pupils. Fourteen years later, it has five teachers and 35 pupils attending from Hartland and the surrounding villages.

It does this on a total budget of £60,000, with a teacher/student ratio of 1:7. The equivalent cost in the state system would be in the region of £87,500 to which capital, administration, food and transport costs must be added. The average state teacher/student ratio is 1:18.

The low cost and the high standard of excellence at the school arises from the devotion of teachers and pupils which Satish Kumar has inspired. The school is open to all in the community. Parents are asked to help raise just one third of the costs: wealthy individuals and Trusts find the balance.

The pupils shop and prepare their own lunches. They clean, repair, and decorate their school. They have even constructed an extension. The inspectors find little to complain about ("One of the lavatories has to be shared between staff and pupils," they say dissaprovingly) and The Small School rides high in the league tables.

But most importantly the pupils are open-hearted, confident and self-possessed. The Small School is essentially a community school - there is nothing private about it.

Contrast this with the public school system in the USA with emphasis on testing and standard curriculum where the goal seems to be to produce workers not thinkers.

To be continued... 

Art is what puts the human face on technology.

With the awesome gains we have made in science and the almost incomprehensible acceleration of this
knowledge, we still sense that something crucial is missing.

It’s our humanity, gone missing in the vast sea of myspaces and “connectedness”.

Hiding behind the glossy surface of all this technology that mesmerizes us so, we only seem to be more
isolated and the world is ever more war-torn and dislocated.

We forget that information is not wisdom and in this Information Age, the quality of our lives and
relationships with each other and the planet we live on, has deteriorated.

Humans are all lopsided these days.

If we can remember that art is the expression of our deepest emotions, our creative nature, and plays an
essential role in enhancing and illuminating
our lives , we’re halfway home.

It’s like riding a bicycle: Once you learn , you never forget. It may be that the knowledge of how to live a
rich, meaningful creative life (creativity being about problem solving and not consumption) has atrophied
from under-use.

Part of our human inheritance, though, is that self-righting, self-repairing mechanism referred to as
“adaptive resilience.”

Artists have honed the skills and have the tools to help unlock the creative core, the emotional wellspring
in us all.

We started chordata to :
“ Support artists and work that is focused on re-establishing the value of art and,
specifically, creative thought and the creative life in our technologically driven societies.
It is the artist’s emotional, creative intelligence that makes an essential contribution to
human well-being, self knowledge, and wisdom.
Chordata plans to accomplish our goals through : Providing a unique multi-purpose space
for project development, events, exhibitions, performances ; Administrative/Management
support ; Self-sustaining entrepreneurial models and opportunities; Cross cultural
exchanges ; Experiments with crossing mediums and collaborations ; Direct access for the
public to the creative environment (a transparent laboratory).”

These Ten Lessons Art Teaches by E Eisner perfectly illustrate where we're coming from too. The arts are essential and need to be

always included in the conversation/debate we are having these days about WHERE TO HOMO SAPIENS ? I also think that artists ARE specialized although no more or less important than anyone else. It's just that when EVERYTHING becomes a commodity, the core of what a dedicated artist has to offer, gets lost and, in this, we all lose. I'm talking about depth here and human capacity to express emotion and connection to our history...the accretion of knowledge, experience, wisdom. I know...we're in a post Warhol world ...10 minutes you tube fame. There are other cautionary  voices though: Suzi Gablik( The ReEnchantment of Art), Bill McKibben ( Age of Missing Information, End of Nature) are two especially powerful ones.

TEN LESSONS ART TEACHES



The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.

The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.

The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.



SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications