Posts from art

There is a new cultural institution being built in NYC right now, the first major new cultural institution built in NYC in quite a while. It is called The Shed and its mission is to be “The first arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture.”

I have been fortunate to have had a ground floor seat to watch this come together and observe the team led by the Chairman Dan Doctoroff and CEO Alex Poots make something that is equally ambitious and futuristic.

The CTO of The Shed is Kevin Slavin, who is well known to folks in the NYC tech community. He’s an entrepreneur, academic, and technologist.

In this video, made by Y Combinator, Kevin talks about how to get “brilliant people to surprise themselves” which is something Kevin and The Shed are going to have to do frequently in order to live up to their mission.

About 3:15 into this video Chris Burniske asks an interesting question about how the CryptoKitties team thought about designing the kitties and the next ~four minutes are a revealing discussion about how blockchains may change the way digital art is created and sold in the future.

I backed this cool pothole art project this morning.

This is the very kind of thing that our portfolio company Kickstarter makes possible.

Like last year, our portfolio company Kickstarter is starting the new year off with a Make 100 campaign.

The idea is simple. Make 100 of something and fund it on Kickstarter.

Here are a bunch of live Make 100 campaigns

And if you want to do a Make 100 campaign, you can start here.

Make 100 campaigns are fun because they are typically low budget affairs.

I backed a bunch of them today and look forward to seeing them come to life.

I support a bunch of artists on Kickstarter’s new Drip service.

One of my favorites is Shantell Martin.

She draws her dreams and makes music and shares her work regularly with her backers.

It’s great to get a little bit from her on a regular basis.

Check out her page and maybe back her and see what that is like.

UPDATE: AVC regular Kevin Marshall just joined Drip today. Good timing. I backed him too. If you want to do the same, you can do that here.

Eyebeam is a “a nonprofit studio for collaborative experiments with technology” which is based in NYC and has been connecting artists with technology for twenty years.

Eyebeam is moving into a new studio and is doing a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to raise funds for some extras. They have already reached their minimum funding target of $15k but if they can reach $20k, they will be able to “purchase live-streaming equipment to enable event programs to be accessed globally.”

I backed this project this morning and if you are a fan of Eyebeam, like me, you can back it too right here.

I enjoy rich media art and I’ve always wanted to figure out how to display it in an easy way.

We have some rich media art displays in the USV office. We have an Electric Objects and a Meural. They are nice, but they are proprietary systems and at least one of these companies has folded already.

What I’ve always wanted is the ability to showcase rich media art with standard off the shelf hardware.

So when we recently replaced an old TV with a new one, I took the old one and put it on the wall in my home office.

And when the Gotham Gal got a new Mac Mini, I took the old one and mounted it to the back of that display.

Then I cleaned up the old Mac Mini (basically a factory reset) and then launched a browser and went and found some art.

There is a lot of rich media art on Vimeo and you can put a playlist together and run it in full screen mode in the browser.

Here is my display doing that:

I also have been playing around with Sedition Art’s Art Stream service. It’s a subscription service that lets you stream twelve curated works of art that are updated weekly on your display at any time.

Here’s my display doing that:

There are some services out there that are based on Chromebit that I am interested in trying. I got a Chromebit and am working on setting that up. I will report back on that once I get it working.

My conclusion is this. If you have old displays and computers that you don’t need anymore, they are easy to turn into rich media displays. You should try it. It’s great.

“generally it reflects a misunderstanding of humanity”

To back this project, go here.

The Gotham Gal is an investor and Board member of Rock Paper Robot, which designs and manufactures furniture for modern living environments. Their newest design, The Ollie Chair, is coming to market this year and they are running a Kickstarter campaign to pay for the manufacturing of the chair. It launched this week and has already passed it’s initial goal of $80k, but I know that they would like to raise more than that, and they already have. It’s an awesome chair and an awesome company. If you want to get an Ollie Chair and/or support this campaign, the Kickstarter is here.

Here’s the video. It’s great and well worth the 3mins.