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Archives for July 2014

New Public Art Foundation

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After talking with Gary about my project, I decided to take a formal approach to my project. The projects I work on will be operated out of a parent entity. I have decided the entity will spin out experiments to test the feasibility of graffiti and street art based programs.

The entity will be called the New Public Art Foundation. Kawandeep’s New American Public Art was a point of inspiration. The naming selection was important at this point. The name captures the longterm vision.

I will release my first public project this Monday.

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Back in the mid 90s, I lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, for three years, and I took the #7 train into midtown Manhattan almost every day. The #7 ran all the time and the short ride into Manhattan was a breeze. I paid $700 a month for a spacious studio, which was half of what I would’ve paid in Manhattan. But here’s the thing: Not once in three years did my many Manhattan friends come to visit me in Jackson Heights. One pal even told me, “I’d sooner take the train to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, than Jackson Heights, Queens!” It’s literally only six or seven miles from Jackson Heights to Times Square, but as I once read: “Yeah, it’s only seven miles, but psychologically that’s the longest seven miles in the world.”

Response to question: New York City: Why do people pay expensive rents in Manhattan when there are far cheaper apartments a short subway ride away?

/2014/07/10/back-in-the-mid-90s-i-lived-in-jackson-heights/

Micro-experiments in shell entities

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Gary mentioned on Monday that some companies experiment with user interactions by firing up experimental apps. They drive paid traffic to the apps to calculate the user interaction’s success. After the user interaction is well tested, they integrate it into their primary product.

I set up a series of IFTTT recipes today. They watch Twitter and Reddit for tags graffiti and street art hash tags. When they find the tag, they retweet the image through twitter. I’m getting a lot of engagement from strangers through passively running these scripts.

The quality of retweeted content is low. I could improve this system by filtering what I actually repost. I could go as far as require manual selection of posts. I am finding value in identifying the kind of people who engage with the tags I am interested in.