Notes from the “Future is Co-” at Xindanwei: Coworking in China, America and the World

Posted on August 11, 2011 by An Xiao

Had a lovely discussion this weekend at Xindanwei to discuss “The Future is Co-”, a look at the future of coworking, collaboration and collective creativity. I wrote recently abotu Xindanwei’s coworking model in Hyperallergic, and in a way, the panel was a way to continue that dialogue. What added to the event was that Tony Bacigalupo had come in from New York to join the discussion and share his thoughts. Tony co-founded New Work City, one of the more popular spaces in New York, and it was in his space that I first discovered the concept of coworking (with a hat tip to the fabulous Julia Kaganskiy for introducing me). It was in Shanghai that I discovered Xindanwei, and that’s when I realized coworking was so much more than a New York thing: it’s a global wave, as these hubs of creativity pop up around the world.

So we all got together. The panel included Tony from New Work City; Liu Yan and Chen Xu from Xindanwei (which means New Work Unit); and Ricky Ng-Adam and Min Lin Hsieh from Xinchejian (New Garage), the hacker space that grew out of Xindanwei. Silvia Lindtner and I moderated, and Lawrence Wang live blogged on both Twitter and Weibo. So many thoughts swirling in my head, but here’s what’s been sticking so far:

I was first of all struck by the role of diversity and synergy in coworking spaces, whether in Asia or North America. Tony mentioned in his talk that coworking spaces create accidents, by bumpling people into good ideas and sharing these ideas. Liu Yan noted a more deliberate approach at Xindanwei, as she actively introduces people with each other. The diversity cuts across many angles, from diversity of nationality to diversity of profession. At a hacker space like Xinchejian, this might mean bringing in hackers of different kinds, from software programmers to roboticists to urban farmers. The point is to find that magic spark of synergy that a more homogenous group wouldn’t be able to provide.

Secondly, I’m thinking about the role of the community vs. the role of the coworking space organizers. Aaajiao, one of Xindanwei’s founders, talked about cutting of all the branches and just focusing on building the tree. Tony brought up the analogy of the spider, which has a head, and the starfish, which has a decentralized nervous system. These analogies help get at a key point: the ideal coworking space is, perhaps, leaderless. Up until that point, however, coworking spaces do need more active leaders, as Liu Yan pointed out, especially in a new market like China where people might not be familiar with what services a coworking space can provide, and what they can expect. And I’m guessing that, in any space, some form of leadership will always be necessary. But ultimately, if the space is driven more by the community than the the organizers, then it’s safe to say the space is successful.

Thirdly, I’m thinking about the business models that coworking spaces can develop. Because as much as it’s helpful to develop a rich community, coworking spaces still exist in brick and mortar buildings, and that means rent, especially in expensive cities like Shanghai and New York (the former is actually now ranked as more expensive to live in now). What are the models for success? At Xinchejian, there are classes and events, and they sell kits and badges to support their expenses. Xindanwei offers tiered access, everything from a one-year membership for people like Emlyn Wang, who’s building her business from within the space, to people like me, who pass through Xindanwei only briefly and intermittently, but appreciate the community there. A robust and active membership is obviously the goal, but it isn’t quite enough; each space has to find its own way to grow funding and build a sustainable business.

And fourthly, I’m wondering about how we can connect all these international coworking spaces together. I felt there was such a unique energy on Sunday, to have people from China, Canada, Taiwan, Austria and the United States talking together about coworking in Shanghai and New York, and other spaces they’ve seen. But how can we continue this dialog? There’s social media, of course. The coworking wiki and Google group allow for ongoing discussions, and more informal discussions are happening every day on Twitter and Facebook. But surely there’s more to be done. Tony brought up the idea of the Coworking Visa, which I really took to. Having traveled to so much as of late, I’m finding that coworking spaces offer a excellent “entry point” into a new city, as I meet like-minded city natives who can introduce me to different sides of their hometown better than any guidebook could.

Here are a few tweets from the conversations, using the hashtag #xdw:

[@sharism]: this sharism # coworking project s also facing challenge in China,but I believe this brilliant idea, guys just need a bit more time
[@yunnia]: @ CXu : creative clusters are about property, @ xindanwei is about community & creativity
[@lawrenceyeah]: sharing is a key character in modern society , esp new tech makes it far easily, effectively to connect ,share reproduce
[@yunnia]: @ theliuyan coffee layer and events as channel to speak to people from all kinds of backgrounds, people bring in own social networks
[@serenitygao]: ” @ LawrenceYeah : # xinchejian 新车间 a special hacker space – good place for kids to spend holidays

As Silvia and I were preparing for this discussion, we both struggled to find a word that encapsulates the rapid growth of coworking around the world. It’s not quite a “movement”, which suggests strong leaders guiding the way. Coworking spaces are very much ground up, sparked by seeing successes in other parts of the world, but tailored to the unique needs of the city. Xindanwei, for instance, was started after Liu Yan observed successful spaces while she lived in The Netherlands, and New Work City emerged as a result of Tony Bacigalupo’s earlier work with Sanford Dickert at CooperBricolage.

Ultimately, we decided on the word “wave” to describe the rapid growth of coworking in different parts of the world. It feels right to me, and it suggests an idea that’s successfully finding implementation across contexts and cultures, a result of the growth of the creative class and freelancing community in a given city, and a real-world analogue to the connecting, synergizing effects of digital social media. According to Wikipedia, coworking as a formal practice really started taking off in 2005, which means the wave is just a few years old. What’s next? How can we develop these spaces? How can foster more creative dialogue across spaces? Things are just beginning, and that’s pretty darn cool.

Morse Code “Tweets” on Sina Weibo

Posted on August 2, 2011 by An Xiao

My friends, the telegraph has arrived on Sina Weibo. Remember that Morse code project I did for the Brooklyn Museum a while back? Beijing artist Yang Jian (杨健) discovered it on my web site and as a result started posting Morse code on his Weibo account.

I’ve spoken a lot about how I’ve been pushed out of this project (and that’s a good thing). I started the commission thinking it would be mine, but in the midst of it, two years ago, the audience took over and started tweeting back to me and to each other in Morse code, eventually leaving me out of the circle. I’ve seen it pop up in Facebook posts and Flickr accounts. This is my first time to see it on Sina Weibo.

This is what I find so cool about social media art–when done right, it leaps from the artist-originator and takes a life of its own, and it adapts as necessary to different media, different languages and different contexts. Social media art presents new opportunities for art to be co-created, co-developed. Why is that? Because the barriers to entry on social media art are much lower. Just as social media in general encourage participation, whether in journalism, filmmaking or politics, so do they encourage more ready audience engagement in art. But it’s not just engagement–it’s taking the project and making it one’s own.

So what did Yang Jian say? Well, normally, I’d just put a link to the Morse code and the translator and let you figure it out, but this time he’s actually posting in Mandarin.

Morse code translation site: http://t.cn/hcobT

It’s not practical for China to make leaps and bounds.

Learning to listen to Morse code.

I spoke with him about it, and he said he’s been looking for something like this. He’s using the translator to improve his listening skills for a video he’s trying to interpret (it apparently contains Morse code). Looking forward to seeing what Yang Jian comes up with.

Two Days in Seoul

Posted on July 4, 2011 by An Xiao

Two days in Seoul last week, packed with meetings, meetings and… did I mention meetings? My first time in Korea but not my last.

Got me thinking about the different modes of experiencing a city. On one extreme is being born and raised and knowing it like a local. On the other extreme? A rushed, 30-minute layover in the airport.

Somewhere close to that end of the spectrum is a couple days of business meetings and seeing the city through a cab, a Google map, a GPS.

Texting in the Philippines, Sustainable Design in Malaysia, and the Southeast Asian Design Community

Posted on June 30, 2011 by An Xiao

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Have a new photo essay in Design Observer this week. This time, I’m focused on Manila’s rich SMS/texting culture, and how that influences the design of storefronts, public space and even Starbucks trinkets. Did you know that the Philippines is the world leader in texting per user? In the United States, users send, on average, 420 messages per month. In the Philippines, it’s 600:

Statistics are interesting, as are anecdotes. But what does this look like on the ground? The last time I visited the country, it was 2005, and texting was already firmly established. When I returned a half decade later, I found it’s become an institution. After trading business cards, we trade phone numbers, and a lot of follow-up is done over text messages. An entire text messaging dialect has arisen just for texting that even native speakers have trouble understanding (think of “lol” “brb” and “g2g” applied to almost every word).

My photos look at the culture of “load na dito” (which means “load up your phone here”), and what it looks like on the ground when a country is saturated with texting.

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And then there’s my chat with Zara Arshad for A Good Week, a weeklong “Global Celebration of Good”. I looked at how good design can encourage ethical/sustainable action, and I focused on two wonderful initiatives in Southeast Asia and China:

When good design meets good living, magic happens. ULTRA, a Malaysia-based fashion label, combines high-quality design with sustainability. They recently unveiled 10 items that can serve as the majority (or all) of your wardrobe for a year. JeepneED aims to provide much-needed science education to rural Philippine schools, modeled after the colorful “jeepney” designs used as public transportation throughout the country.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these essays come after I spent a couple months in Manila. Southeast Asia isn’t generally on the radar for folks outside the region, but I’ve been finding exciting examples of innovation in design and sustainability. We Are ULTRA, of the world’s most creative sustainable fashion collectives is based in Kuala Lumpur (and one member in Shanghai), where they’re seamlessly blending sustainability, quality design and social media outreach. And Txtfire, the world’s first SMS-based dispatch system, arose in Manila, as a response to a hampered fire response system.

Whether in formal or informal design, Southeast Asia hosts a number of exciting developments that work well in the region and could be applied anywhere in the world. I’m really excited that I can share just a bit of what’s going on with a broader audience. Stay tuned for more…

At the Old Drum and Bell Towers in Beijing

Posted on June 26, 2011 by An Xiao

Swung by the Old Drum and Bell Towers area this weekend to see Chak Man Lei’s tango dancing, as part of Stephanie Rothenberg’s Travel Office, an art installation/performance art intervention she’s set up in Beijing. The area reminds me a bit of Brooklyn, a historic part of Old Beijing quickly gentrifying and attracting “hipster” types of both Western and foreign persuasions. Lots of interesting artistic projects.

Afterward, I wandered around the park nearby, my head filled with thoughts of what intervention in public space can be, whether in the physical public space or the Internet public space. And I started to notice a very Chinese use of public space, the intergenerational, interspecies (with dogs) play I rarely saw in one compressed place, except in parts of Griffith Park and Park Slope. Here are some pictures.

The Chinese hackeysack, or jianzi (毽子) is what I see the most. As with the hackeysack I see in Venice beach, you can play in groups or by yourself.

Badminton, also known as yumaoqiu (羽毛球).

Those advanced in years preferred to line dance to some very cheesy music.

We used to play this when I was little and we called it “Chinese jump rope”. It’s one string held taut, and we jumped over
it or did cartwheels.

Biking is of course popular. These kids left their bikes and went… somewhere.

Pogs! Do you remember pogs? They’re still quite popular amongst Chinese kids.

This happy, 10-year old pug happened to be on a leash, but most dogs ran around free. It was also a dog park in that sense.

15 Seconds of Fame Everyday: Twitpic vs. John Baldessari’s Your Name in Lights

Posted on June 20, 2011 by An Xiao

This month, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is hosting John Baldessari’s Your Name in Lights, his popular commentary on that famous “15 minutes of fame” concept. In this particular installation, it’s reduced to 15 seconds, and broadcast in Museumplain, Amsterdam and simultaneously on the Internet. You can register here to be part of the fun.

It’s a good piece, certainly interesting, but I was struck by a Twitpic posted by my friend Rebecca Taylor, who has nearly 3000 followers on Twitter. While the museum’s livestream showed her “fame” reached 16 viewers, her Twitpic of the event reached more than ten times as many. Social media have upset the balance: we’re getting our 15 seconds of fame every day.

What follows is a short email interview with the museum about the show:

How did Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam link up with John Baldessari?

There is a relationship between John Baldessari and the Netherlands; his first European show was held in the Dutch gallery Art + Project plus he exhibited a two room solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in the early 1970s. Exhibitions followed at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. The Stedelijk also has several works by Baldessari in its collection.

For this year’s Holland Festival – the largest theatre festival in the country, the Stedelijk sought a work that is a cross over between visual and performance arts, preferably a very visible, public and interactive work that we could show at the Museumplein where the museum is located.

As we follow the practice of John Baldessari, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that he was working on ‘Your Name In Lights’ for the Sydney Festival together with Kaldor Projects. We immediately sensed that this was the project we were looking for. It is community based, interactive and very playful. We did not hesitate and approached the artist. To our great joy and honour he accepted. It did help a little of course that our director Ann Goldstein knows him well from the time when she was affiliated with the MoCA in Los Angeles.

Tell me about a bit about the installation and Museumplein. Do you have images I can post on my blog?

Inspired by traditional mass cultural symbols of celebrity, such as neon lights on Broadway and the marquees of Hollywood cinemas, and even ‘the strip’ in Las Vegas, John Baldessari gives spectators the opportunity for a glittering 15 seconds of fame by offering people from Amsterdam and all over the world the opportunity to present their name on the illuminated L.E.D. sign. He refers to the fact that the need to be in the spotlight, to be recognized and remembered in our culture of celebrity has become a goal in itself.

Baldessari himself has noted that celebrity culture has even spread to the art world and other cultural realms. Your Name In Lights playfully comments on that burning desire for acknowledgement, on the yearning for fame by the masses. Museumplein (Museum Square) is the future cultural hotspot of Amsterdam. All important Amsterdam art institutions are located at Museum Square: Rijksmuseum (National Gallery), Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art.

How does this installation differ from the Sydney installation? What has the reception been like in Amsterdam?

The Holland Festival and The Sydney Festival are both cultural driven organizations which specialize in theatre and performance art and Your Name in Lights was made possible with the assistance of Kaldor Public Art Projects in both Australia and Amsterdam.

The Holland Festival offers people in the Netherlands the chance to experience public works such as Your Name in Lights and brings internationally renowned arts to Holland.

One of the main differences between the Sydney installation and Amsterdam installation is the way in which the work is displayed. In Sydney, the LED screen was mounted on the side of the Museum of Art, next to the museum sign, so people immediately recognized that it was art. Here in Amsterdam, we have installed the work onto the scaffolding, in front of the forthcoming expansion of the Stedelijk, which is currently under construction. This offers the work another dimension, as visitors to the city of Amsterdam may not recognize the Stedelijk under the scaffolding. In this way, the work raises questions (what is this?) and is more enigmatic. \

The Netherlands and Amsterdam also has a large Turkish population and the LED screen here recognizes the Turkish alphabet, so you could say that the work has adapted in relation to its location.

The response here has been brilliant! Amsterdam is renowned for its vibrant and diverse cultural heritage and the work has received lots of press attention both nationally and internationally. The launch last week on June 1st was very festive, with people cheering out loud when their names popped up.

How can participants who aren’t in Amsterdam experience the work? I’m in China, for instance, and I submitted my name. What’s next for me?

The wonderful thing about the work is that everybody can participateand that you don’t even need to be in Amsterdam. Through a live stream via the website yournameinlights.nl one can watch their 15 seconds of fame live, from the comfort of their living room. In this respect the work is both community based and international. We have many names from outside of the Netherlands (MoMA even had it on their Twitter and Facebook) which adds to the diversity of the work. If you have submitted your name, you will receive an email telling you the time and date that your name will be illuminated. The live stream runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week meaning everyone can experience their 15 seconds of fame!

Images come courtesy the museum. Outdoors image is copyright Ernst van Deursen, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. John Baldessari, Your Name in Lights, June 2011, Museumplein, Amsterdam. Holland Festival/Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Christopher Knight and Social Media as a Private Public Space

Posted on June 17, 2011 by An Xiao

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a little about my work after reading the ARTnews “Social Revolution” article: “Social media art involves ‘seamlessly blending the online and offline worlds,’ in the words of L.A. artist An Xiao Mina.” That he called me a Los Angeles artist is an honor, especially right now as I’m based in Asia and wishing I could be swimming in Malibu right about now. He also cited my “widely read” essay on social media art in Hyperallergic.

Knight brings up a good point that I think very few people, if any, have really discussed when it comes to social media art:

A potential limitation: Like the space in a shopping mall, social media sites create the illusion of being public places, when in reality they’re corporately owned and operated. On the up-side, the tension between public and private often provides fertile ground for creative exploration.

This is an important distinction to make, and it’s a tension that I think is hardly touched on in the growing practice. Except for one artist whose work has been censored and shut down on a regular basis, many artists haven’t yet acknowledged that the public sphere of social media is actually very easily controlled and managed. This is part of what makes social media different from previous net art; it’s based in large, corporate-owned spaces, rather than the relatively free, wild wild west of the 1.0 Internet.

As Knight explained in an email to me, it’s all part of a larger trend of privatization. He pointed me to this Politico article by Matt Stoller, who starts with a story about the publicly-founded Hoover Dam and then points out that

The real infrastructure trend in America today is privatizing what is left. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica has been holding hearings on privatizating Amtrak’s Northeast corridor – ostensibly because private capital can more easily bring in high-speed rail.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback just turned over arts funding to the private sector, making Kansas the only state without a publicly funded arts agency. Cities across California, meanwhile, are trying to outsource nearly all municipal functions. Chicago famously sold its parking meter revenue to a consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. The Arizona Legislature sold and then leased back its state capitol.

With regards to the privatization of the Internet, and the responsibilites therein, Ethan Zuckerman wrote about this issue brilliantly. His post is focused on politics but it applies to anyone engaging with contemporary mainstream social media:

Hosting your political movement on YouTube is a little like trying to hold a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it’s not – it’s a private space, and your use of it is governed by an agreement that works harder to protect YouTube’s fiscal viability than to protect your rights of free speech. Even if YouTube’s rulers take their function as a free speech platform seriously and work to ensure you’ve got rights to post content, they’re a benevolent despot, not a representative government.

Whether in China or the US or any other country, it’s important to remember that art engaged in the public spheres of Twitter, Facebook, Skype and others is art in a private-public sphere. The Internet may have started out as a government project, but today this private-public space is subject to unique norms and regulations that don’t fully apply to private or public separately. My social media art collective, @Platea, touched on this for a week with Co-Modify, a performance in which we pretended to be sponsored by companies for a week. But I think there are more, interesting tensions in this arena that haven’t been explored too deeply yet.

You can read Knight’s full post here. Image above is my own, from Sanlitun Village Beijing.

Loren Munk: A new art world paradigm?

Posted on June 13, 2011 by An Xiao

In addition to physical-world places like Roberta’s, Facebook has become the popular hangout for artists and art world types engaging in dialogue about changes in contemporary art. Recently, James Kalm, aka Loren Munk, posed a question about the “new paradigm” of the art world. He received a ton of responses, many of which were interesting, but I honed in on the brief dialogue he had with Hrag Vartanian, editor in chief at Hyperallergic (emphasis my own):

Loren Munk: Like it or not, the current art world is being replaced with a new paradigm. I’m studying Fluxus and The Situationist International for ideas that might be useful in empowering artists in the future. Any other suggestions?

Hrag Vartanian: Curious where these thoughts are coming from, Loren. Did anything trigger it?

Loren: I, like a lot of artists (yourself included) have been thinking about this for years. Watching this latest Bushwick Open Studios weekend forced me to realize that there really are changes happening. The web and loose alliances of … artists are making a great impact. The idea of an “Artist Union” has been tried and failed many times. Great art exists in a rarefied psychological environment, it’s not just a commodity. One of the greatedt challenges is in its monetization.

Hrag: I wonder then if artists should be more comfortable with the idea of being artists, artisans and designers at the same time. In the Renaissance it was common for artists to design objects, buildings, etc. but now there is a sense t …hat it’s too commercial or being a sell-out if you make commercial objects, etc. though I think that is changing more and more. When I recently read the stat that Kickstarter is the third largest comic book publisher in the US, it made me wonder why contemporary artists aren’t doing more to engage a global audience directly. Imagine if Kickstarter was bigger than any commercial gallery for artists. I think the key is to move away from one off luxury objects into something that a crowd could experience (and pay for) or something you can reproduce.

Loren [not responding specifically to Hrag]: I don’t agree that “there being no good solutions”, there are however, no easy solutions. A lot of this requires artists to get out of their studios, take charge of building their own reputations, not relying on the “media” and forming their own networks of support.

Their conversation got me thinking about a few things. Well, one thing: money. And why it’s often such a taboo subject in the art world. At a recent talk I gave at Mindshare Los Angeles on social media and art, someone in the audience asked me how the work sells. So far, I’ve been fortunate in that my work supports itself; through a combination of commissions, talks, writing and other support, I’m able to pay back any costs of my work. Projects like the Gwangju Design Biennale provide a livelihood while continuing to challenge me creatively. But I’m a lucky one. I know so many artists who have to work second or third jobs to make ends meet, and these jobs often have little to do with creative fields.

How can artists tap more into online networks to raise not just awareness but funds? A few years ago, I used Kickstarter to raise nearly $1000 to support an installation on the Brooklyn waterfront. As with comic books, could it be that the next major funder and exhibitor of art is a site like Kickstarter? As Loren said, maybe it’s time for artists to “take charge”, not just of building their reputations but also their funding base and livelihoods. Maybe there’s more to Facebook and the Internet than raising awareness, having conversations and engaging in performance.

ARTnews, Creator’s Project, and Why Social Media Art is Important

Posted on June 4, 2011 by An Xiao

I’m thrilled to appear in “The Social Revolution: The Art World on Facebook“, a cover story by Barbara Pollack for the June edition of ARTnews:

“Artists who have been working with the Internet and with new media since that genre began are interested in participatory systems and social networking,” says Lauren Cornell, the curator of “Free.” “What is new is more advanced technologies and new applications connecting masses and masses of people. It’s really just a progression.”

An Xiao, an early adapter to Web 2.0 and the founder of @Platea, a collective of online art makers, would disagree. “I think social-media art is a new genre of art,” she says. “It blends many different things. It blends performance art because it is people interacting socially with each other. It blends visual art because Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and the rest all rely on very visual elements. It blends net art, but it is in more of a public space than traditional net art.”

Personal art aside, this is an exciting moment for the emergence of social media art. ARTnews is one of the oldest arts publications in the States and reaches a large, mainstream audience not necessarily tuned into the goings on of us art tech nerds. It’s difficult to say if social media art has come into its own yet as a practice, but it’s certainly on its way.

There haven’t been many social media art commissions from non-digital art organizations. Pollack mentions a few, including the Brooklyn Museum commission, 1stfans, that I helped kick off. It was the first time a major arts organization not focused on technology had commissioned art on (not just about) mainstream social media. Independent curators like Hrag Vartanian and Olympia Lambert have commissioned work (and I’m working on an exciting new project that I can’t talk about yet with two indie curators as well). And then there’s Creative Time’s Creative Time Tweets:

Twitter has expanded the definition of public space, providing a rich environment where-140 characters at a time-revolutions are organized, the banalities of everyday life are shared, and artists create site-specific interventions. Creative Time Tweets, a series of three commissioned Twitter performances, explores Twitter as a viable place for art that engages audiences, promotes dialogue, and intersects with the physical world.

Why is it important that social media art be commissioned by non-digital art organizations? It’s because I believe strongly that there’s a fundamental distinction to be made between net art and social media art. Yes, the basic tools are the same. I was there for the Telnet, BBS and Usenet age, and there’s nothing fundamentally different on the technical end with Twitter, Weibo and Facebook. They’re all essentially the same service.

What’s different today is two things: scale and mobile. Mainstream social media today have huge scale, and scale matters. Sina Weibo, the hot microblog service in China, has 140 million users. Twitter has 200 million. Facebook is more than half a billion. Compare that with AOL, once the reigning Internet service provider: at its peak, it boasted 30 million subscribers. Scale matters. Few people knew what Telnet was during its heyday, but everyone knows Facebook. It’s the difference between a blank stare and a glimmer of recognition when you mention a service, the difference between techies and people from all different walks of life (an aside: this is why so many people from Westchester County and northern New Jersey say they’re from New York).

And the other key factor is the introduction of mobile. By putting social media into our hands with mobile phones, we’ve essentially put social media into the streets, the subways, our offices and bedrooms. This means that contemporary mainstream social media aren’t solely a computer-based phenomenon; art on these media leaps from the screen while being situated within it. A recent @Platea performance, Following Piece 2.0, looked at this overlap of physical and digital, as we recreated Vito Acconci’s seminal Following Piece using Web 2.0 tools.

Put this together, and you have the new public streets, a new, global forum for contemporary art in the public sphere. This is why @Platea has commissioned two social media art projects and plans to commission more. One, #PlateaKnit, was spearheaded by Ingrid Murnane and featured in Art in America . The other, Tree-Blogging, was led by Jonny Gray, and featured in the ARTNews piece above. Ingrid lives in Portsmouth, UK, and Jonny in Carbondale, IL, and their co-performers came from multiple continents and countries far from the traditional art power centers. Art on mainstream social media has a way of increasing access, both by geography and the fact that the psychological barrier to entry is much lower (it’s always easier to make a commitment online than in physical space).

Kevin Holmes at The Creator’s Project nailed it on the head, I think, with his recent Creativity Bytes piece (another exciting sign that social media art is starting to reach a wider audience):

As a platform, [situating art on social media] means art works and performances are now accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, in real-time. But as a means of creating art, pieces become participatory, curatorial, social, and performance-based. People engage with the art-the performer, the audience, and the work become one. The artist is the genesis, the instigator, and the art work then sets off on its journey into an uncertain collaborative future.

I recommend checking out Kevin’s piece above, and the ARTnews piece, “A Brief Guide To Social Media Art“, which provides a great summary of what’s going on in the field, and what exactly it means and why it’s different. (He also made me blush in that humblebrag sort of way when he called me “one of the medium’s most well-known practitioners and advocates”…)

Another note. Barbara Pollack’s ARTnews review comes at a difficult time right now in the art world. Pollack, a veteran arts writer and contributing editor to ARTnews, spoke with me about the article back in January, when I had just moved to Beijing. Just last year, she released The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China , and in it discussed the major players, including Ai Weiwei, a huge practitioner of social media art. Ai’s name at the time was just beginning to emerge in the West, and she featured him in another cover story for ARTnews’s May issue. I recommend picking up the book, or, barring that, tuning into Pollack’s lovely interview with Jeffrey Brown at PBS NewsHour. It’s an insightful look into the Beijing art world.

[The magazine images above come courtesy Joanie San Chirico; the others come from web sites. These are NOT on a CC license.]

The Enduring Value of Soho

Posted on June 3, 2011 by An Xiao

A sign outside Jianwai SOHO, a home office complex in Beijing’s Central Business District. The enduring real estate value of the word “Soho” is amazing to me. It apparently started as a hunting cry that became associated with a fashionable part of London. Then New York sprouted SoHo, of course, which has arguably outshone its forebear. Los Angeles has WeHo and NoHo.

On the other side of the world, in Beijing, SOHO stands for Small Office Home Office. It’s a real estate agency, and the name defines some of the most expensive and hip sections of urban China. Its value as a name is so important that it’s not been Sinicized. It’s written 建外SOHO, and it’s the height of Chinese real estate:

SOHO China was founded in 1995 by Chairman Pan Shiyi and CEO Zhang Xin. A leader in China’s real estate industry, SOHO China stands out as a developer of high-profile branded commercial properties in central Beijing and Shanghai. Presently, SOHO China is the largest real estate developer in Beijing. The company collaborates with internationally-recognized architects, translating their innovative designs into iconic real estate which possesses strong appeal to property investors and the local businesses and customer bases they serve.

Soft power. Throughout the capital, even in the parts of town where very little English is spoken, I hear Empire State of Mind and Alicia Keys belting out “New Yooork”. In the West, it’s quite common now to talk about the decline of America and the rise of China, but economics aside, it’s impossible to ignore the enduring value of Manhattan as the model city for developing urban areas.

I’m biased, of course. I used to live in New York. Maybe I’m just looking for and clinging to the familiar signs of home. But it’s hard to deny that Beijingers know more about New York than New Yorkers know about Beijing. And as China rises, then its neighborhoods should eventually start to hold cache, the same way SoHo has globalized more than any other. When will the time come that we in the West call our neighborhoods 朝阳 (Chaoyang) or 浦东 (Pudong), in Chinese script, to symbolize the essence of desirability? When will the names of 李亚鹏 (Li Yapeng) and 张曼玉 (Zhang Manyu) roll easily off the Western tongue and attract more than a million followers?

The other half of this story is the way language spreads. I love that a 17th century English hunting cry has evolved into a word that 21st century Beijingers understand to represent anything but. It reminds me a bit of qiaokeli (巧克力), the Chinese word for chocolate. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word chocolate comes from two Aztec words, namely, xococ, meaning ”bitter” and atl, meaning “water.” These words also date to roughly the 1600s. That I can order a Snickers bar from a central Chinese migrant for whom Mandarin is a second language, because of a word combination developed in 17th century Nahuatl, is amazing to me.