This August, the Conference of Creative Entrepreneurs comes to San Francisco, bringing three days of specific, hands-on programming aimed at helping creative professionals become better business owners. The conference covers both universal issues like small business taxes and intellectual property, as well as grander topics like Creative Collaborations, The Art of Publicity, and Getting More Done.

Oliver and I are on a panel talking about Alternatives to the Gallery for the fine artist.  Gone are the days when art was only available in galleries, museums, and the homes of wealthy collectors.  These days anyone can be a patron, collector or exhibiting artist through the myriad alternative art venues springing up around the world.  In this panel, we’ll talk about inventive ways artists can show their work and get funding for it, from art subscriptions to microfinance organizations to online exhibitions.

With multiple panels every hour, the hardest part will be deciding which session to attend.  If you’re interested in joining us to hone some skills, we’re happy to offer a discount to all of you.  Enter the code TPG15 in the discount code box to receive 15% off any ticket.

Details:

Conference of Creative Entrepreneurs
August 5-7
The Women’s Building
3543 18th St #8
San Francisco, CA 94110
http://www.creativeconferencewest.com/
CCE on Facebook

image by Rachel Robertson, not sure if it’s her work though..

“OutRun” by Garnet Hertz,  South Hall and beyond
FYI this is a video game that you play as you drive around the city.  WHAAAT?

“No Matter” by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, 2008  at the San Jose Museum of Art
They hired Second Life players to create digital representations of 40 legendary objects (Icarus’s wings, Yellow Submarine, Holy Grail, pot of gold) which they then handcrafted in real life.

Solar Pump charging station, by Sol Design Lab and Bike Zoo, outside South Hall
Why doesn’t this exist everywhere?

“Le Monde des Montagnes” (The World of Mountains), by Camille Scherrer, 2008 at San Jose Museum of Art
The screen was a live image of the book on the table.  As  you turned the pages, new worlds would apppear from and within the pictures on the pages.

from “Mapping Non-Conformity: From the Global Border to the Border Neighborhood” by Teddy Cruz at MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana)

Here’s what we’ve been thinking about:

Artist Ingrid Burrington’s work as the CMC does more than offer us a glimpse of urban solitude. It also highlights our increasing reliance on statistics.   The fieldbook plays off of our familiarity with these types of studies.  Whether it’s justifying a political cause or helping to sell a product, the pie chart and line graph have become ubiquitous.  In our frenzied lives a catchy graph can be a stand-in for certainty: instant truth.  These scientific tropes lend the same sort of weight and authority that Ingrid enjoys by making work under the guise of a think-tank.  As the volume of data about the minutia of our lives grows exponentially and it becomes easier to make a case for any particular point of view, what will happen to our faith in numbers?

Along this theme, I just found this article by Rebar over at the SFMOMA blog all about infographics..  Here’s a choice snippet from the article:

Of course this is the point. We’re so awash in data that we cannot make decisions. We have access to enough GIS layers to drown a graduate program without ever giving us a useful conclusion. Just the act of making a simple infographic today is an acknowledgment of this predicament, an ironic avoidance of the databloat of our bullying zeitgeist. The “subjective” infographic is a guilty pleasure: we know it doesn’t represent reality any more than the Harper’s Index represents a statistical analysis. Because we can all enjoy it, it’s not quite masturbation; it’s more like really well-done porn.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

This was developed for part of the London design Festival show entitled, “Gradual” in 2007.