Not Just an Online Gallery

Hi Evolvers, last week I blogged about an idea to create an open source collaboration with the art community here on Evolver. I'm just writing up this second blog to flesh out more of the ideas and details behind it.

First of all to be clear, this is not just about sharing your art, this is about creating a product. It's an open source product, one that will benefit the community and the artists at the same time.

I'm sharing this with Evolver because for some time I've been making my own prints, and I've been experimenting with digital art for a little more than a year now, and since I plan on sharing all my art anyway, I might as well be doing this with like-minded folks. So you can count on me at least making up these prints and working out the product, because I'm doing it for myself anyway. But I'd encourage everyone else to do the same, because if we collaborate we can create a kind of expression that is more than each one of us individually.

In order to coordinate with other artists, everything in the gallery will be 4x4 square, to make the display easy (and the printing cheap and easy). River mentioned that the square is a symbol of manifestation on a physical level. So for artists that are limited to a certain location or in the digital world, it can be a way (the only way with the technology we have) to manifest on the physical plane and be shared with people across the globe, and a visible manifestation of our community, and the diversity in our community.

We will use the Creative Commons Licence to enable this collaboration.

Every artist should be aware of the legal details before proceeding. You might want to design a few special prints for this purpose to be shared. Then you can post them up in the flickr group, Evolver Open Source Cyber Gallery. My work has a large number of different images blended together, many become unrecognizable, and I try to give credit for all the important ones... usually with links in the description. Public Domain images I don't give credit for, and certain other images don't require attribution as long as you don't use it by itself.

I've been checking out some of the "Green" printing sites on the net, and many of them seem to be offering fairly good veggie ink/recycled paper prints.... usually 4x6 postcards and usually in bulk quantities. The bulk quantities thing makes it hard to get variety, but it might be feasable in the future if this was a specially coordinated thing every month with the spores. In other words, there are submissions every month and maybe 49 or so prints are selected, printed up for cheap, then sent out to every spore. But for now I might just try printing up regular postcards or prints. That's what I would suggest for everyone here who is an artist, try it yourself but if we agree to work on the same side project at the same time and talk to each other, we can make something bigger.

Please ask questions! Anything is appreciated.

Below is a documentary that might provide some background as to what inspires me to share art an use the Creative Commons licence. It doesn't embed so you have to wa

Cheers!