Musings on technology

When I decided to focus on my art, I had no idea how much there is to learn outside of art-making. 18 months+ down the line, I definitely have a better idea!

This week I have been working on preparing some studio notes for Louise Fletcher's Art Tribe. Most weeks members of her group share about their creative journey in a short(ish) video filmed on a smartphone.

Filming on my smartphone is a steep learning curve for me even though I was one of the early adopters of webcams (I set up an online counselling service for a charity back in 2007). I have always worked on big desktop screens though. Whilst my conference presentations were also usually recorded, I neither had to do the filming nor watch and edit my presentation over and over again...

I am usually not tongue-tied, but I currently experience "brain freeze" after about 2 minutes of filming on a smartphone. How come that 2 minutes feel like 20 minutes when you are looking at a small screen?

It makes me really grateful for the countless people behind the scenes who know how to use technology to make us artists shine. I am thinking of the folks at The Holy Art Gallery in London. All I had to do is upload some photos, and the team incorporated the works in an exciting virtual art exhibition.

You can watch the whole presentation here - also check out the other exhibition rooms.

Last week I also heard about a new social media platform called ArtSocial, which is being developed by the Milan Art Institute. Their technology experts are apparently based in Ukraine, so have to deal with more than temporary brain freeze!

A bit more practice will hopefully iron out some of my technology issues. Who knows? I might one day love filming so much that I will start recording video clips for the website and for Instagram!