But, as usual, the Whitney delivered in an unexpected and truly great way.  I’m hard pressed to pick my favorite museum in New York City, but the Whitney is surely among the top contenders because of its size and general density of awesomeness – there’s just enough to keep you delighted during any visit, and not so much that serious museum fatigue sets in.  One of the museum’s current exhibitions is Christian Marclay: Festival, and it’s quite innovative: a performance space houses daily interpretations of Marclay’s works by musicians, multimedia stuff abounds, and visitors are encouraged to participate in the creation of a collective musical score.  All of this is cool, but I’m particularly excited by incorporation of Flickr into the experience: visitors are encouraged to photograph the performance space and upload photos to a group Flickr pool to document the exhibition.

Photography is one of those ubiquitous museum no-nos.  And when photography is allowed, visitors usually engage in it for solely personal purposes – to say, “I was there.  I saw THAT.  I kind of now own my own piece/copy of it.”  It’s exciting to me that the Whitney is extending Marclay’s collaborative and community-minded work to social sites – and encouraging visitors to create their own works with it.  It’s so encouraging to see these tools used in such a way.  I look forward to seeing even more of it.

I snapped a few pics with my Droid camera.  They’re not great, but I enjoyed the experience and I’m glad to contribute my few images to this creative effort.

Christian Marclay: Festival @ the Whitney

“We are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on.” – Kim Stanley Robinson

A few months ago, I was having brunch with my ubersmart friend Freyja Gallagher, reflecting on the energy and excitement of SXSW Interactive, and talking about all things digital.  Freyja and I had the same conversation I’ve had a lot with people who work in various digital places and spaces: there just doesn’t seem be very many awesome and productive opportunities to meet and learn from all the cool people in digital media community. There are networking groups, and conferences, and unconferences, and events focused on thought leaders, and the like.  But many of us are looking for a different kind of group experience: one that fosters cross-pollination of interdisciplinary knowledge, one that uses the tools we apply to client projects in the service of social change or creative fun, one that gives us the chance to explore digital culture, and one that gives us opportunities to grow in interesting and meaningful ways.  Building a way to cultivate that experience seemed to be a challenge too good to pass up.

We decided to build Zeitgeist.  We launched it all official-like yesterday.  We put our brains together and summarized our thoughts on the state of digital culture for our blog, and we’ll be featuring more think-y kinds of pieces going forward.  We have a Zeitgeist Social coming up in September, and a whole series of events to follow.  We’ve got our social media channels up and running, so I hope you’ll find us on Facebook and Twitter.  Most importantly, I hope that you’ll come out and share your thoughts.  After all, we might be building one big brain together – right now.

Digital people, come together!

"Together we float through space" by Sam Brown @ explodingdog.com

This is just one of the many reasons I’m excited about Choose Privacy Week, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) to help people understand why and how they should take charge of their digital destinies.  Privacy is an important and complex issue, and I admire that the ALA is trying to open up more dialogue about the way that private companies and the government alike are using digital information.

Here’s the Choose Privacy Week video, featuring authors Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow (hooray!):

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

… Proving once again that librarians are rock stars!

Now that I’ve finally had some time to sleep, finish up client projects that were out in orbit while I was in Austin, and sort through my notes, I’d like to share some highlights of the big adventure…

Festival Time at Fogo de Chao!

Fantastic people.  I was blown away by all the talented folks I had the opportunity to meet.  I am among the many people I know who scrunch up my face at the term “thought leader,” but it was great to meet and chat with so many pioneers, big thinkers, and intelligent designers, communicators, and artists.  Nokia put together a great, low-key event at Moonshine on Friday that was great for cultivating conversation, and I was lucky enough to get to spend a few nights at the Entrepreneur Lounge at Fogo de Chao, but I also really enjoyed the random conversations that popped up folks at panels, parties, and Austin locals.  I arrived home in Brooklyn completely wiped out, but really invigorated by all the great conversation.

Stellar panels.  It’s really rare to attend any kind of conference and not come away feeling panel regret.  I’m pleased to report that the panels I attended were almost universally thoughtful, challenging, and – most of all – useful.  Howzabout that?  (The big exception to this observation is, of course, the lackluster Ev Williams’ Twitter keynote, but the blogoverse has already weighed in on that a-plenty.)  Here are some of my highlights from the panels, along with links for your reading enjoyment (and learnin’!):

Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy and publicity.  This was an astonishingly good talk to kick off SXSW.  Boyd called out Google and Facebook on their recent privacy fails and challenged tech companies that claim that privacy is dead as a convenient excuse for violating the privacy of users. Boyd’s conclusions about the ways that everyday users understand privacy and the way that companies (often intentionally) misunderstand privacy are provocative and important.  I really appreciated, especially, the following assertions:

• Taking something public and making it more public is a violation of privacy;
• Our current state is public by default and private by effort; and
• The public-by-default environment is not the great democratizer.

This was a much-needed consideration of privacy implications, and it will have great impact on the way I regard privacy issues going forward.

Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change panel with Beth Kanter, Holly Ross, Amy Sample Ward, David Neff, and Kari Dunn Saratovsky. This was one of the best panels I’ve ever gone to at any convention I’ve ever attended.  Not only was the content for the panel thoughtfully crowd sourced (hooray for using your own best practices!), but the audience participation and resource sharing from panel, audience, and twitter stream was first-rate.  Rather than try to summarize all of the awesome content, I’m just going to point you directly to the resources: Beth’s recap of the event featuring the slide show and the twitter stream with abundant case studies and sharp comments.  This is an absolute must for anyone in a non-profit organization (or, heck, a for-profit organization) who is looking for models for crowd sourcing and creative, results-driven examples.  This is also a great example for anyone looking to put together a kick ass SXSW panel in the future.

The conversation at the Duh…It’s Like Tech for Girls panel with Alison Lewis and Syuzi Pakhchyan was also very engaging.  Focusing on the intersection of DIY craft, fashion, and technology as a way to get girls more engaged with technology, Alison and Syuzi facilitated a sometimes heated conversation about girls and technology.  Clay Shirky’s keynote on Sunday morning was well worth it, although the crowd that managed to make it looked seriously zombied out from the Saturday night parties and daylight savings time change.  Shirky explored the idea that abundance breaks more things than scarcity does, and discussed the ways that technology has introduced a really challenging amount of abundance into our lives. And, of course, the always hilarious Peter Shankman provided a useful and entertaining talk on self-promotion.

Ice Cream Man with Bessita

Slinging with the Ice Cream Man.  A huge highlight for me at SXSW was the opportunity to work with the Ice Cream Man and his team of ice cream slingers.  I am super excited to see if he smashed his own record and gave out 15,000 free frozen treats.  And, I have to say, during the few minutes I was actually slinging popsicles at Fogo de Chao, I really felt like a rock star.

Austintatious Food. Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all the delicious food I consumed while at SXSW: Korean tacos from the TaKorean truck (I’m seriously still dreaming about those), cheese balls from Fogo do Chao (Ehren, shortly after becoming mayor of Fogo de Chao on Foursquare: “I’m going to need to become mayor of my gym when I get home…”), tacos from Gueros Taco Bar, and breakfast tacos from a hole-in-the-wall place called Vic’s BBQ that our cab driver took us to on the way to the airport.  I could go on, but this is making me hungry…

Tripp the cab driver says, “Never eat BBQ at a place where all the chairs match.”

Thanks so much for hosting all of us data-craven nerds, Austin!  I hope I get to see you next year!