A few weeks ago I was in Pittsburgh for the Technology in the Arts Conference.  Presumably because I was both a presenter and a member of the conference steering committee, they decided to interview me for the official podcast.  If you’ve got an interest in the subject matter, it might be worth a listen.  I’m the third person interviewed, but the first two have some great stuff to talk about so you should check them out as well.

On a selfish/self-conscious note…  Do I always sound like such a nasally dweeb?  (Please don’t answer that unless the answer is “no”.)

Several of us from Fractured Atlas will be at the Technology in the Arts Conference this week(end) in Pittsburgh.  FA Managing Director Arwen Lowbridge and I will be doing a presentation called “The End of Data Entry: Liberate Your Organization through Automation and Integration”, while Director of Member Services Adam Natale will be teaming with a colleague from Dance/USA to do a session on online learning.

I know this is a niche event, but it seems like everyone I know is going to be there (which is kind of a sad commentary on the narrowness of my world, but I digress…) so if YOU will be there as well, drop me a note at adam [dot] huttler [at] fracturedatlas [dot] org.

Check out Add-Art.  It’s an extension for the Firefox web browser (which if you aren’t using, you should be) that replaces most web advertising with images of contemporary art.  Here’s how the project is described on its site:

Add-Art is a Firefox extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database.

It is a free and open source project, currently being developed at the Eyebeam Development site.

Of the 100+ add-ons available for Firefox, “adblockers” are the most popular. The most current, Adblock Plus, has over 18 million downloads (as of May 2008) since Jan 2006 (currently over 250,000/week). It’s predecessor, Adblock, has been downloaded over 8 million times. These extensions work by preventing advertising images from downloading and replacing the ads with blank space. Their popularity has risen as pop-up ads, banner ads, and ads incorporating sound and animation have permeated the internet.

For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. Add-Art attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads - it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit the New York Times online or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by a young contemporary artist.

The project will be supported by an small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming Add-Art shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the Add-Art site.

With the overwhelming popularity of adblockers, if Add-Art were to attract 5% of existing users, the numbers would be in the hundreds of thousands. Add-Art can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace - all over the world.

Semi-random Note #1: Unfortunately it isn’t compatible with the latest version of Firefox (3.0.1), but they’re apparently working on a fix.  In the meantime, if you’ve got an earlier version, it’s definitely worth giving this extension a whirl.

Semi-random Note #2: There is some debate over the ethics of ad blockers like this.  Critics say that web publishers have a right to display ads and that advertisers have a right to have those ads displayed when they’ve paid for them.  There’s an undeniable logic to this view, and I suppose it could always be enforced in a web site’s terms of use.  However, on a practical level, I believe any efforts to fight this trend will prove futile and that publishers’ energies ought therefore be redirected towards creative solutions that don’t alienate their readers/audiences.  We’re living in a TiVO world.  Advertising had better be relevant and compelling if it expects to be tolerated.

I spent the first half of this week at the Fortune Tech Conference. Usually when I go to events like this they’re totally arts-centric, so it was (mostly) refreshing to be surrounded by folks with a completely different perspective. (Note to Andrew Taylor: thanks to everyone’s obsession with VC-funding and industry gossip, this conference was optimized around informal networking.  It’s not as hard as it sounds, and largely comes down to less programming in a smaller space.)

Yesterday morning I attended a breakfast session called “Is Philanthropy Dead?”  The panelists were Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org, Premal Shah of Kiva.org, and Dan Shine of AMD’s 50×15 Initiative. Despite the deliberately provocative title, the session spent relatively little time bashing the traditional philanthropic model. Instead, most of the conversation focused on the issue of transparency in fundraising.

Best and Shah both credit the transparency of their processes as a primary factor behind their success. The most compelling story came from Best, whose organization gives individual donors the opportunity to fund classroom projects in public schools.  DonorsChoose.org guarantees that donors will receive a packet of photographs and thank you letters from the grateful recipients (and facilitates that process behind the scenes).  Apparently this works as planned 98% of the time.  In the other 2% of cases, however, the teacher reneges on his responsibility to coordinate the thank you packet.  When this happens, DonorsChoose.org preemptively contacts the donor to inform her of the error and offers to “refund” the donation by crediting it towards another project.  Well, it turns out that these “we screwed up” phone calls are the most effective fundraising appeals they ever make, with a large number of donors declining the refund and offering to fund another project.

This experience is consistent with research into consumer behavior which suggests that the most loyal customers are those for whom something went wrong but the company quickly and effectively resolved the problem.  Unfortunately, most of us in the non-profit sector are terrified about admitting failure.  It’s as if the fact that people give us money to carry out our work creates such a solemn responsibility that 100% success is the only option.  This absurd mindset has several negative consequences.  First, fear of failure makes us risk-averse to a sometimes crippling degree.  Second, when failures occur despite our cautious hedging, we’re totally unwilling to speak candidly about the experience.  This prevents us from learning from our peers and advancing understanding in the overall sector.

Transparency is about more than owning up to failures, of course.  It means disclosing information about your organization’s processes, financial performance, and business model.  And, of course, it also means sharing information about your successes in a way that lets donors feel like respected collaborators.

This last category is where Kiva.org really excels.  Kiva.org gives individuals the ability to provide 0% interest microfinance loans to small business entrepreneurs in the developing world.  Lenders receive regular progress reports and - most of the time - get their money back upon the project’s completion.  Shah described the effect of this transparency as being almost addictive.  Many lenders check their loan portfolios daily, obsessively tracking the impact of their support.

It seems to me that arts organizations are particularly lousy at these kinds of transparency.  Part of it stems from a misguided desire to maintain the mystique of the creative process.  For the most part, though, I suspect we just don’t give it any thought.

So here’s my challenge to the field: what would this kind of tranparency look like for an arts organization and how can we build it into our routine operations?

For years now I’ve suspected that some of the summer blockbusters produced by the Hollywood machine were secretly written by computers. The scripts are so formulaic, the characters so transparently designed to appeal to target demographics, that it’s hard to believe any self-respecting screenwriter could be so cynical and calculating.

In the meantime, a business school professor has taught computers how to crank out books by the thousands. Apparently the output is mediocre but sufficiently useful and intelligible to enjoy some “long tail” success.

His company, the Icon Group International, is … generating significant total sales by adding up tens of thousands of what might be called worst sellers. For example, a search at the Galter Health Sciences Library of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University found half a dozen Icon books, mainly in the library for patients and their families.

How long will it be before true “works of art” can be produced by machines? Probably quite a while, but I believe it will happen eventually. After all, the aforementioned robot authors have recently moved on from medical texts to simple poems.