Good Days

I'm on a packed train and it's really alive. Usually, a noisy train annoys me to no end, but today I'm enjoying this. There are three large groups of people and they're all having a great time. Families, tourists, parents, children. Smiles on everyone's faces.

It's a beautiful late-September day and everyone is wearing it on them. It's on me, too. How often do I blind myself to these moments. How often am I superficially annoyed by someone else's good time?

I live in NYC because I love the hustle and bustle. I left Indiana in part because it never moved. The Midwest has a snail’s pace, which is just right for many people. Not for me though. The thing is, a hectic city like New York comes with noise and commotion and the worst of the worst. It's all a part of it. I need to be better about being negatively affected by those things. I could even choose to revel in it. Maybe wave to the driver with the nothing-but-bass-at-200dB music playing. Maybe give some change to the Mexican guitar player on the subway. Maybe take the Jehovah’s Witness flyer with a smile.

I share this city with all these people. I don't remember that enough.

The Visitor Engagement Initiative Commences

The news about our project at the museum has finally started to break. It went out first in the Wall Street Journal. Shelley then posted a longer explainer on our Tech blog. There's still a ton to talk about, and there'll be many more posts to link to. I'll try to collect the best ones here, occasionally. I'll also be writing for the Tech blog, myself, from time to time. Some, or all, of those posts I might repost here sometime later.

I started at the Brooklyn Museum January 2nd of this year. Shelley and Sarah had already been testing paper, analog prototypes for what would eventually become the VEI — which actually might be branded as Ask. As in Ask Brooklyn Museum. We didn't get to actually conceiving of the digital version until February or March. Design began shortly thereafter.

It's been at least 6 months that I've been working on this. Feels great to have it out in the open.

Feenster

This morning, I pulled down the Jason Fulford book *Crushed* and it reminded me of all my old photos. All those photos I took in 2005 for my old (defunct) photoblog Feenster, when I had been trying my best to find my inner Fulford. Fulford is amazing.

I had been locked out of my Flickr account for a couple years. It’s not worth talking about, except to say that when Flickr required a new Yahoo account for login, it caused problems which grew exponentially. But, today — today I finally broke in. Broke in and downloaded all the stuff and went through those old photos again as if for the first time.

I uploaded the best 80 of the few hundred photos which once lived at feenster.com to brianfeeney.us. They're here for you now, if you scroll back through the Photos section far enough. Feenster started in early 2005, a sister blog to Matt Brown’s much better unsharpen.net. Taking photos for it was my first experience of art as work as melancholic, zen practice. I'd walk around Bloomington with my camera, snapping photos with my eyes open but my mind turned off. Then, later at home, I'd find the shots with any magic in them, open up Photoshop, and toy with color collecting late into the night.

I can't say if these photos actually contain any all those old feelings in such a way that anyone else might find them. But *I* can see myself in them. I'm in those photos, even while I'm on the other side of the lens. I know I'm being sentimental. They're my photos and I put a lot of myself into them that year — 2005. It was a good year.

Just Keep Writing

Finally got into the flow of writing posts again. Part of it is the app, Writer Pro. It’s exactly the app I had slowly been conceiving of in my mind, and was *this close* to designing and possibly prototyping. Still, might, actually: if I’m going to try my hand (and my brother’s) at designing an app, there’s no better place to start than a text editor.

Writer Pro allows you to take notes and leave them in a notes folder. When you’re ready to actually start expanding that note into something more like *writing*, you move it into the Write folder. And then from Write to Edit, and from Edit to Read (where Read is really Ready To Publish). It’s great to be able to keep that flow within one app. I’ve needed to use so many apps to accomplish this previously. I take notes in either Vesper or Notes. I use Notes for longer writing. And at some vague point, those writing drafts move into my CMS, but once there it’s so hard to decide if they’re ever finished or not.

Let’s poor one out for Editorially. It closed in the Spring, but it was well on it’s way to solving writing for the web. If it had lasted long enough to have produced an iOS app, I likely never would have thought to look for another place to write. It was so good.

I’ll continue to journal using a .txt file in Notes, stored in Dropbox. Some of thoughts I stumble upon in that free-form writing become posts for the blog, likely skipping the entire Notes to Drafts to Final process. And I hope to get to a place again where I could write blog posts on the fly. Regardless of how this writing gets done, it’s always worth doing. This year’s journal is up to 22,000+ words. And that feels too short. 

No Longer Faving It

Twitter recently changed how their “fav” button works, which has completely broken its functionality for me. The old “fav” button used to be a beautifully simple way for me to communicate myself to someone, meaing some flavor of "I like this", the flavor depending on the context. The new button, however, has an added, latent function. So now it means "I like this and I want it retweeted to someone somewhere sometime." Very few of my Fav use cases fit this new description. I might have Faved my last tweet.

I can still use the Fav button if I wanted to, of course, but now it’s like a Russian roulette fart into someone else’s Twitter feed. I don’t want that. No one wants that.

I long ago cut down my use of Facebook’s Like button, too, also because of the unwanted, latent function added to it. “Liked” posts changes your feed, inviting more randomness and clutter; it's an invitation for brands to single you out for advertisements. No longer does clicking the Like button mean “I like this”. It became to mean, “I like these kinds of things and want to see more of them and also show me brand-related items for sale”. No thank you.

These are two fascinating examples of how design choices can unintentionally break a feature. Neither Twitter nor Facebook set out to break their Like and Fav buttons. They were only intending to add functionality. Admittedly, that new functionality is practically invisible and will never be noticed by most users. But, regardless of its visibility, the additional baggage adds weight and cruft to the feature for those who know it’s there, and it becomes a discouragement.

It must be incredibly hard to design for products that have the scale of Twitter and Facebook, so I don’t begrudge the men and women who worked on these changes. But I do take it as a lesson in how to avoid breaking what works.

Museum Life

At the Brooklyn Museum, the tech offices are on the sixth and top floor (inaccessible to the public). Anytime my eyes get that computer-screen-strain, I can take a fifteen minute break and wander the galleries. It's a lovely perk.

Art is refreshing. I'm really surprised I forgot that. There really isn't anything like galleries full of paintings, sculpture, antique furniture. There's a nice calm feeling about them. Images on the web are no substitute. When there is nothing artificial between the art and your eyes the connection is physical. You can feel it. Some pieces have a magnetism which draw you in and won't let you go. So I let them hold me for awhile, waiting to see what they might say to me. If nothing else, they seem grateful I gave them my attention for a time.

The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Sometimes the lights are out and the galleries dimly lit with only security lights. Walking around with the museum like this gives the art a different kind of life. They have down time, too, just like us.

The Brooklyn Museum isn't a huge one. It's sizable, but it's footprint is surely less than a quarter that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and our collection has a much quieter profile than, say, MoMA. Still, there's a lot of pride here, and our stated mission is wonderful: the goal of our institution is to be a museum for the local community, to exist for the visitor. We downplay our curatorial work and the academic stuff. It's a lovely environment to work in.

There is also the added benefit of meeting interesting people, and being in the mix. The museum had a really great Swoon exhibition up this last Spring and Summer and I met Calendonia Curry in the cafe line as we were buying our lunch. I told her I liked her work. I should have told her that I was in possession of a couple tossed off pieces that she had given to the museum and which had found their way into the Tech office. They are preliminary sketches for what she would eventually install in the gallery, an exhibit called Submerged Motherlands. I had them framed.

These feather/leaf screen prints will be my reminder of my time here at the museum.

The project I'm working on with the Tech team should bring people closer to all our art. It could help them to get a little more out of their time visiting with us. That's the hope, anyway. Working there, I've learned to love art again, and I hope this project might bring people closer to it, too.

Feeeds

A lot of people lately have been talking about RSS and the return of the blog. It seems as if everyone is wary of the end of Twitter, and are preparing themselves for a world without it. Most of us have already abandoned Facebook as a social hub, leaving it delegated as a second-class contact list. If we abandon Twitter, too, where are we going to go? There aren't any other promising social networks out there, and there doesn't appear to be one coming up any time soon. This leaves us looking back to the days pre-Social Media — back to blogs.

It's painfully easy to set up a blog today. You could use Tumblr, Squarespace, Blogspot, etc., and have a blog up in less than an hour. Most of these products require little to no knowledge of how the web works. It does take some initiative. It takes even more initiative to run your own blog on your own server on your own domain. These are the sites I'm fascinated with. I love having my own website and I love that so many people I look up to have their own as well. I want to celebrate these people, raise them up, give them a higher platform. I want to connect them.

Are there any good indexes for all these popular blogs? I haven't found any. Why wouldn't there be? Is this something that should be built? I'm seriously thinking about it. There may be a very good reason why such a thing doesn't exist. People smarter than me would know why. But I'd love to build this thing.

I've been calling my idea Feeeds (for lack of a better name). I think of it as non-social network. There would be personal accounts, but they don't exist for communication. Their sole purpose would be for building communities, while any and all conversation takes place elsewhere. You would come to Feeeds to see who's writing, but go to their own sites to see what they're saying.

I want to connect people with as little interference as possible. Which means that, for people who have their own websites and enjoy owning their own content, I wouldn't encroach upon what's theirs. There would be no walled garden. I believe in a wild, varied, decentralized Internet. Feeeds would be more like an address book, a place to go to find personal blogs to read and follow.

I want to stress again that I have no intention of building anything that purports to being the next new social network. I don't want the responsibility of owning anyone's content and I don't want anyone to feel like they're giving me anything. But I do want to build something that can help surface all the personal websites and blogs out there which deserve attention and love.

Brent Simmons names RSS as one of the pillars of the web that'll never go away, and I believe that. I also believe we've not fully tapped the power of RSS. There are billions of feeds out, many thousands of which are good blogs languishing in dark unlit corners. I want to take everyone's personal and beloved RSS feeds and show them the love they deserve.

Currently, the best avenue for exposing yourself to the greater world is Twitter. But Twitter is a poor Rolodex for personal websites. It's a terrible index. Even so, Twitter is where I go to find new people in my industry and to find out more about them. But might there be a better way? What if there *was* an actual index online for people with personal websites? There are so many great people out there maintaining their own websites. It's difficult to keep track of them all. And I'd like to.

This isn't about marketing, either. The point of this wouldn't be for promoting oneself. It's merely a way to say, "I'm here." We can't rely on Google to be the hub — its net is far too wide. Relying on nothing leaves the job to word of mouth.

So, again, why doesn't this exist? I suppose, most obviously, it requires buy-in. It needs to be voluntary. People would only engage with this if they chose to do so. Being voluntary, a certain threshold of users would be necessary before it became truly useful. This is so very hard to do, and failing at this has been the downfall of so many web services.

I have other ideas for this. It's a project that I can see growing and becoming something real. I'd love to build it. Anyone care to help? Any and all thoughts about this are welcome.

The Shock of the New is Old

We know that the internet is drastically changing modern life, and its influence grows stronger by the minute. It makes some people anxious, scares others, but also excites a few. Regardless of how you might feel about it, there’s something to learn from diving into the history books. This kind of change isn’t new. It’s happened many times before.

In the first essay of his book, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes compares his contemporary 1980 to the 1880–1930 era when industrialism and the age of mechanics massively altered how people saw their world. He asks, what changed? What did they have in Modernism’s infancy that we lost?

Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore and above all the sense that art in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

When time moves too fast, it becomes very difficult to define. I think we’re living in a very similar period. There is plenty of excitement and innovation and opportunity, but we’re also very unsure of what’s on the other side. We have no idea how this will all flatten out. We don’t know what to call it. As a first attempt at metaphor, we referred to the internet as “The information superhighway”. A good try, but have we done better since then? I’m not sure. The internet is definitely nota highway, though it might have seemed that way for a moment in time. As we learn what the internet affords us, we find it’s much more than just information, it’s also friendships and communications and personal conveniences. Could you possibly wrap all that up into a single metaphor?

Maybe we’ll find the right phrases in another couple of decades. Using hindsight, Hughes was able find some pretty relevant metaphors for the art of the mid-Industrial Revolution period:

The master image of painting was no longer landscape but the metropolis. In the country, things grow, but the essence of manufacture of the city is process, and this could only be expressed by metaphors of linkage, relativity, interconnectedness. These metaphors were not ready to hand. Science and technology had outstripped them, and the rate of change was so fast that it left art stranded, at least for a time, in it’s pastoral conventions.

So much parallel here. So much. “Linkage, relativity, interconnectedness.” “The metropolis.” “Process.” These metaphors feel right, don’t they? Not just for that time, but also for this time. After a few decades lingering around in the suburbs, we’re moving back to cities and placing priorities on social needs. It’s history on repeat.

I like knowing that history repeats itself, that we can always go back into books and find parallels to whatever new is happening today. Because nothing is truly new — everything has a precedent — and we can learn from them if we pay attention .

No Dancing

Are You Creatively Satisfied?

Every interview from The Great Discontent includes the question, "Are you creatively satisfied?". It's an amazing question precisely because of the same reasons it's a terrible question. It defies a real answer, but yet usually everyone comes to the same conclusion: "No. I mean, yes. I mean, maybe. Actually, it depends. Sometimes." The interesting thing isn't so much the final answer given, but in watching how the respondents wriggle in getting there.

I ask myself a version of this everyday, more or less indirectly: "Am I doing what I want to be doing?" If the answer is no, then I sit and write out my thoughts until I find out what the reasons might be. The next step is to make moves to correct my path. Right now, I feel like I'm working too much. I have a full time job and I'm working on a couple websites on the side. My time is a little more constrained than I'd like it to be. What I want to do next is to play around with photoshop again, make some collages and pretty images, maybe a poster or two. Thinking this through, whatever the answer, helps me become more optimistic and renews my interest in the world around me.

Creative satisfaction, for me, is determined on a timeline. It's not about being perfectly happy with my work right at this moment, but over a period of time stretching between a few months in the past and a few months into the future. It's hard to feel satisfied if you don't like the work you've recently done, or if you aren't excited about what's coming up, and it's not very helpful to worry about liking the work today. Today is for working and getting things done.

Satisfaction is a general feeling. It comes and it goes. And it touches down just as lightly as it blows away. Because of this, I do what I can to invite it into my life, but I don't struggle to make it happen. The goal, i think, is a matter of zen practice, being satisfied with being unsatisfied. The goal is too keep asking yourself the question.

A few of my favorite responses from TGD:

Frank Chimero:

I think this question is bullshit, man. I know that this is sort of the namesake of the site, but the reason I think it’s bullshit is because the way you frame a creative practice should not be in terms of whether you’re content or not. I think everyone has a window of approval for their work; sometimes that’s years and sometimes it’s months, days, or hours. Your approval of your work metabolizes no matter what, and it doesn’t matter how good you are. That’s why I hit you up on Twitter recently to say “What if we’re thinking about this all wrong? What if contentedness about your creative work is more like eating?” . . . It doesn’t matter how good the meal is. A few hours later, you’re going to be hungry again. Maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied is not because the burger you just ate was bad, but because you’ve already eaten it—your body processes it. Doing the work makes you better, so of course you’ll be dissatisfied with what you’ve already done. You’re better!

Jeff Veen:

I hope I never am—why would I continue to create if I was? But at the moment, I can’t think of anything to change. Right now, I get to work with some of the most talented people I’ve ever met in a culture that is tight and supportive—and only vaguely political—with what appears to be, after spending so many years in a startup, almost unlimited resources to achieve what we have set out to do. I put all those things together and it leads to a lot of satisfaction, though I don’t think you should ever be creatively satisfied. The only time I want to feel that way is when I’m recharging in anticipation of doing more stuff.

Aaron Draplin:

Fuck yeah, I love what I do. I worked all weekend on a logo, like a dumb-ass. I got to go in and present it today and I couldn’t get in there fast enough. You sketch and sketch and sketch and come up with something. I am proud of what I came up with and I hope they pick it. If they don’t, what are you gonna do? You fight to make something better that they’ll love the next time you present. . . . Yeah, I’m too satisfied. You know how you eat too much and you’re too full, like at Thanksgiving? I feel that some days. I’ll leave work and go home so full and exhausted. I’m so proud of that shit.