Creative Cogitation

UPDATE June 21:  I sur­vived a week­end of push­ing myself away from the com­puter.  I wish I could say I got a lot done, but I didn’t-I felt like I was miss­ing some­thing.  It was hard-I admit it I am now a social net­work­ing junkie.  I logged in once on Sat­ur­day and then by Sun­day I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had not seen before; one per­son com­plained it was hard to fol­low my tweets as they did not remem­ber what I was respond­ing to a day later.  But on Sun­day I only logged in one more time and got off within 10 min­utes or so.  I have decided 1 time per day is not going to be enough to keep up with my stuff.  Today its busi­ness as usual.  But I am see­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties…  So the exper­i­ment will con­tinue.  Dur­ing the week I need to work on my com­puter, but Iwill only check my social media and email 2 times at most and I will only be on the com­puter when I have to.  Of course all that free time gave me another idea about how to spend more time on my com­puter.  Eek.    More later. 

June 19: OK. I am in com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­load.  I find myself in front of this device all the time.  I spend so much time in my office that I grow cats who get very com­fort­able on me while I am work­ing.  It is not easy to work with a 15 pound feline demand­ing atten­tion, which I guess is their way of say­ing, “Step away from the box…”

Me, work­ing at my com­puter with a help­ful feline in my lap and another on my desk gen­er­ally knock­ing crap over.

I have come to feel like my desk has a grav­i­ta­tional pull that stronger than the rest of the earth.  I am in orbit around it reg­u­larly and it is very hard to pull myself away from it-and I always seem to wind up right back in front of it.  Sure my day job forces me to be here at least part of the time, but more and more I find myself drawn into email, blog­ging, online mar­ket­ing, social media and other elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the point where I believe it is tak­ing too much of my time. 

Resolved, I will start bud­get­ing (limiting) my time in front of the glow­ing screen so that I can get out  and do stuff in the big blue box too.  I was think­ing I would try to stay away from the com­puter all week­end, but I think that is prob­a­bly not real­is­tic so I may just need to get a timer or some­thing to limit the amount of time I sit here.

We’ll see how it goes.  Step­ping away from the com­puter… as soon as I post this, link to it on my web­site and post it to social media-see what I mean?

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

In this fourth install­ment of the Social Media Birds (work­ing title), I have bro­ken down the rigid lin­eal struc­ture of the binary and turned it into a kind of rib­bon shape. The canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing the bit of news; it fills the small can­vas so much that it over­flows it to some extent. I am also play­ing with the col­ors a bit, break­ing away from the blue and yel­low of the pre­ced­ing works.

“RSS Feed” by Jake Beck­man, an orange canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing a rib­bon of binary; it appears to be singing as it lands.

The ASCII binary reads “RSS Feed” from Lower Left to Upper Right, and Top to Bot­tom. In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral in the back­ground as a line of con­flu­ence for other things in the paint­ing. What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about RSS Feed, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

So I have decided to cre­ate a real blog.  The indi­vid­ual con­tent should be a lit­tle more focused than my other ran­dom thoughts posted infre­quently over the years and this forum should also be inter­ac­tive which is new to me.  So far the set up hasn’t been hor­ri­ble.  The basic pro­gram is sup­ported by my web­host.  What remains to be seen is how well the two spaces inter­act.  I could wind up delet­ing the whole shebang.

It has taken a while to fig­ure out how to get the API key, but I even­tu­ally did. If you are won­der­ing, in as much as I cre­ated the blog on my own site, I had to cre­ate a sep­a­rate Word­Press iden­tity.   I am cur­rently exper­i­ment­ing with the design of the blog start­ing with a prepack­aged theme.  I may or may not decide to tin­ker with it.  I am cer­tainly capa­ble of cre­at­ing the code, but I am rather more inter­ested using in the plug and “pray” aspects of using Word­Press at the moment.

This blog will really be a ran­dom foray into my topic du jour and that could lit­er­ally cover any­thing.  If this works out I might invest in some­thing that will simul­ta­ne­ously update MySpace, Face­Book etc.  Let me know what you think if you dare.  Or if the social media aspect of blog­ging is not your cup of tea, have a read, then just browse my web­site AKAJake.com.  Art, after all, is the dis­til­la­tion of a few of my thoughts du jour.

AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!