Tomorrow I will discuss an art gallery/blog website based in part on the discussion we had last week. The site is powered by WordPress MU. This means that you can have your own blog to try the design. The site will allow you to create a gallery/blog yourself. However, to facilitate the discussion, I would like to set up some of these ahead of time. If you would like to try the site tomorrow, please leave a comment below. The site is free and the project is Open Source. Make sure to fill in the email field on the comment form correctly, otherwise you won’t receive a password when I send them out tomorrow. Your email address will remain confidential.
The blog/gallery project is based on simple modifications of the standard WordPress MU software. It contains no code made for Art & Perception themes, past or present.
Sounds, interesting, but I won’t have time to set anything up in the immediate future. It might be a good venue for the following back-burner project based on June’s post on art talking to art and D’s recent comments on curating.
I was thinking of gathering one publicly available image from every contributor on some theme and putting them together, letting them talk and us talk about them. For a certain theme I have in mind, I already have an image from everyone except Rex (and maybe even there if I stretch it–don’t worry Rex, I’ll contact you). Please let me know if anyone does NOT want an image harvested for this purpose, or otherwise objects to the concept.
A better way to do it might be to select a theme and ask contributors to designate their choice of image (or none), which might be something not yet on the web. I’m open to any ideas or reactions on such an individual or group curatorial experiment.
Steve,
This is a neat idea and a WordPress / MU site would be perfect for this kind of thing. If you could describe the idea in a bit more detail I could make a “sketch” using the new system, and imaginary people for the sake of initial design.
It seems like you are saying this:
SOME THEME (and the title of the site)
1. person A’s images and words
2. person B’s images and words
3. person C’s images and words
etc…
The way I would lay this out is to use the gallery or studio section to display the images, and the blog section for discussion (images could be repeated there for the sake of reference). The gallery/studio main page would be the front page. The sub pages would hold the individual’s works. These sub pages would contain links to blog posts for discussion.
Do I get the basic idea?
Steve, I am happy for you to make a choice.
Karl, I would like to try the site tomorrow or Tuesday
Steve,
Forgot to say, go ahead and use an image from me is you like.
Birgit,
I’ll send you the password tomorrow.
Karl,
You’re welcome to play with the idea anyway you like. Your layout concept sounds reasonable. If we want to show words for each image (not necessarily a good idea to ask for these), they could be displayed also on the gallery page by hovering using the title attribute. (By the way, at least with WordPress, I can’t seem to get the title attribute in image elements, but I can in links, e.g. the one to a larger image in Quark’s rabbit.) I’m not sure whether a grid of clickable small images or a scrolling display of clickable medium images is best, but it is important to be able to see at least several images at a time in the gallery.
Karl,
I won’t have time to play with this in the near future either. I am interested to see what others come up with though. And any of my images are up for grabs for whatever you have in mind.
Steve,
A grid of images? Sounds familiar! I designed one version of the “gallery/studio” based on your website ;-)
Leslie, okay, I’ll see what I can do!
Karl,
I’m interested in seeing what you come up with, so if you send me a password, I’ll check in. I can’t promise to help, but I can look. And Steve’s idea seems like a good place to start.