MyCityMyVoice.tumblr.com & Soundcloud.com/MyCityMyVoice

We have expanded our new media network with a tumblr blog that will accomodate our audio/video content and a soundcloud page for MCMV to handle our sounds as we map our neighborhood through story.  Check the tumblr and the soundcloud to follow our journey and share your stories with us as well!

How can My City My Voice improve it's social networking activities?

My City My Voice took some time out today to do some critical analysis regarding our various social networks.  We have Facebook (because it's so popular with our artist and community members), youtube (for sharing video), soundcloud (for sharing sound), and of course this blog.  We are thinking about ways to better share our process with the public and interactively engage people in this conversation about community, art, new media, and our summer themes of story and mapping. 

How can we better use the internet for social media? How do you use social networking and new media tools?

Specifically we've started by trying to find a better way to share our visual art from sketches and collage to digital photos and community maps.  What are the best social networking sites for visual art? Photos?
Is there one that can do both for us?  Give us your top three (free!) visual art/photo hosting sites.

Here are a few that I've found to consider:
Visual Art
http://www.myartspace.com
http://www.artreview.com
http://www.artmesh.org
http://www.artslant.com
http://www.artlog.com
http://www.independent-collectors.com/
http://www.artselector.com
http://www.rhizome.org
http://www.labforculture.org/en/labforculture/browse
http://www.artbistro.com
http://www.deviantart.com/

Photography
flickr.com
snapfish.com
photobucket.com
fotopic.net

This is our primitive form of social networking; mapping paths through string, sound and story.

1st Day of My City My Voice 2011! ( +++check our new QR tag!!!)

We now have a QR tag for this blog, which you can see above ^.  Quick response (QR) tags are a form of bar code that encodes data in patterns with horizontal and vertical lines as opposed to regular bar codes that only have vertical lines.  They are easily read by QR readers that can be downloaded for smart phones such as Android, Blackberry and iPhone to direct the device's browser to a web address or other simple data like text.  We plan to use this new media technology to communicate with the community this summer and promote our public art projects.

Telling our story and mapping our neighborhood becomes easier through the use of new media tools such as QR tags because we can highlight the meaning we derive from our physical world by linking it to the digital realm.  Beyond our blog we will also have our stories and audio art posted on soundcloud.com, videos on youtube.com and visual art hosted by a site as yet undetermined (any suggestions?).  We are planning to explore the various hosting and search sites we use to mediate our online travel experience (blogger, soundcloud, google etc.) and contrast them with the various means of transportation that mediate our movement through the physical world (train, bus, car, foot etc.).  QR tags for our various artistic products will be posted on and around public transportation around our city creating an interactive artistic experience for our neighbors!


Stay tuned!

Looking Back, capturing what we did

In our last week, we collected quite a bit of material.  We've posted the speeches from the final performance, other writings that didn't get performed, and our artists' reflections on what surprised them, and what they took away from their participation in My City, My Voice.

Check out this great content on the "Pages" menu to the right.  If you have any feedback for our project, leave us a comment!

TONIGHT: Our final performance!

Hi everyone out there,

We'd like to invite anyone in the Cambridge/Boston area to join us tonight from 6-8 PM for our final performance.  We'll be performing movement/dance pieces accompanied by orations, poetry, and music that we all made ourselves.  Our larger-than-life burned wood full-body pieces and face portraits will also be on display. 

Join us at: 6 PM, Cambridge City Hall Annex at 344 Broadway, corner of Broadway and Inman street.  We'll be in the outdoor east patio area (pictured).       

View Larger Map

Check us out in the Cambridge Chronicle!

Word is spreading...

Performance Arc

Today, my group had to work on creating a Performance Arc for our final performance. My group was made up of Phoebe, Jennifer, Wahed, and Kaychette. Our group was the “Directors” group. Today, we spent a long time trying to create different Performance Arcs for our performance. A Performance Arc is necessary for a performance because it helps the performers and the directors know what story they are following and what emotion goes with that story. It also helps them figure out what pieces are going into the performance and which are not; also where are those pieces going to be and at what time are they going to take place. What we did was take everything that we are going to incorporate into our performance and we created a story with our material. We took all of the poems and written pieces, and we took all of the dance and movement pieces and put them into a map or a story line of some sorts. It was stressful trying to come up with various different ways that we can portray the same story. It was difficult because everyone had their own idea and wanted to create their own map. But then, there were some people that did not agree with that idea. We all said what we wanted to say and we all took into consideration all the comments and feedback that they got. At the end, we managed to work with each other and we came up with way more than five Performance Arcs that could work. I feel like we accomplished all that we needed to in order to get our work done.

-Yari

Images to Be Burned

Check the evolution: from photo to stamp...Next step is larger-than-life burned images to be displayed on August 9th at the Cambridge Arts Council on 344 Broadway.

Directors Group

Being in the directors group made me feel like I really had a huge role in the event because as a member of the directors group, I am one of the people responsible for forming a story and making a performance arc. The performance arc is very important because it is a range of moods and tones that we want our audience to feel as we perform our pieces. I feel involved because I’m a person who helps decide on important details and decision-making. It was exciting to form the plan and to make it happen. It was a lot of work and just doing it took a lot of deep thinking and reflection, for example at the very beginning, we weren’t sure on how we wanted to make the audience feel, but eventually we figured it out we wanted them to start in a neutral place. At times it was difficult and frustrating because we wanted the best, we wanted everything to be perfect and at times we would get stuck especially when there was something that did not quite fit. The experience overall was a challenging. Everything that we were doing was so complex and it was great having the responsibility to plot everything. The performance is definitely pulling together.

–Jennifer

Full Sized Portrait Burn

There were a lot of frustrations burning my life-sized self-portrait into a large scale board rather than a small board. Carving a picture of me into a small board was easier because I had less space to cover with the burning tool and also because my arms didn’t get as tired as they would using the burning tool. The burning tool is small, like a pen; using it on a large board I felt a lack of motivation in the sense that I was spending a large amount of time on one small part of my portrait and when I stepped back I saw that I still had a large amount to go. My thought process started to shift - thinking I’m never going to get it done. Next time I burn I will be using a blow torch which should cover larger amounts of space. I’m looking forward to this because I will be seeing more progress on my piece and my arms won’t get as tired. I hope that the big torch makes strong marks that show and that I complete my piece sooner instead of later.

-Rudjy

Dancing with Moise

When I found out I was going to work with Moise for the performance, I first thought it was going to be hard because Moise is a dancer and he’s on a different level than me on dancing. The kind of dance Moise does is called krump. It’s about praise, I’ve never seen a krumper do offensive things. Krump is a freestyle dance, with chest pops, stomping, and arm swings. We brought in arm swings and stomps into our performance, but only parts of our dance are krumping. We hop, spin on our arms,and move on the ground a little bit too. When we first started dancing together it was actually easy because he realized that I didn’t dance and we did steps I could do. Then we started adding things that were kind of challenging but I still did them. I learned new ways my body can stretch in ways I thought would be impossible. When I was in the 6th grade I went to this camp and we had to perform at a show. We had to make up a dance, but that one was simpler to remember because that dance was just simple movements. I like this one better because the movements aren’t as simple and I learned more, from a real dancer. This dance piece is for a final performance for the MY CITY MY VOICE project I’m doing over the summer. It’s all about showing my art. If I had some free time I’d love to keep learning dance. But at least I have a few new moves! 

-Jacorey

Music Composition

Today we spent a day figuring out how to incorporate our own instrumental tracks into the show. Ethan and Jacory both have drum experience, and my strongest self identified art form is both classical and jazz flute. There isn’t all that much to do with two drums and a flute that feature both, and don’t divide into melody and back up track. We realized then that we didn’t need to make a song, we needed a beat, a rhythm. We started by picking a topic we wanted to portray. Individuality is something that comes up all the time in our discussions, and it plays a big part in out final performance, so we decided to start by trying to represent this. To demonstrate this musically we thought it would be best to play strong beats, separated from one another; we had the flute play off beat while the drums stuck to the beat. This gave a strong sense of solitude. This wasn’t enough though, to even create a simple beat, something else had to happen. Individuals often collide, occasionally creating conflict. To show this, on the fourth beat of every measure, the drums would leave their steady beat and roll. The flute trilled, ending the trill on the higher note. The flute played the whole phrase high, creating tension, but leaving a pattern rising added to the musical tension, and conflict. The phrase as a whole felt tense, it felt like it was escalating. To where? Even we didn’t know, we would leave that to whatever dance or story was put over it.


The second beat we did we built off the first one. We first brought it down two octaves in the flute part, to relieve some of the tension. Instead of the offbeat pulse we added syncopation, and then we just went with our gut sense. We changed the note patterns, and the drum beat, but if you know what you’re looking for it’s still apparent the beats are related.

Both of the loops were just one measure repeated; one would think that they could be easily overlooked, but the sound that we created definitely plays subtle role in the emotion of the piece done over it.

-Phoebe