Friday, January 2, 2015

2015: What's up

Update May 6, 2015:

Lots of amazing things are going on. We've moved the website (all 13000 pages(!)) to a new host, so that's all good now, thanks to Fabricatorz and Gandi.net.

We are in the process of tidying up just a bit so we can send the archived website to Germany and Poland for safekeeping and academic research access. And it's not just Art Crimes we're preserving, but also many of the websites from the 1990s that we hosted back in the day when there were no hosts, and later when it was just to ridiculously expensive to buy web space. These many websites are great examples of early web history, which is not surprising since graffiti writers were among the very first people serving up photos online.

Just to name one amazing trio of efforts: Digital Jungle, N-Igma, and Location 12, from London UK. Hugs to you @iamdek. From 1995-2002 he published more than 7500 images of graffiti from London and the United Kingdom.

Anyway, there are scores of them, so too many to list right now, but maybe we can make a list of the best ones later on the new website, so you can check them all out. Give credit where credit's due.

Next up is figuring out how to publish more photos faster, so that should be interesting. We hope to start showing new stuff soon and redesign and improve as we go along. That's a good idea all around, I think.

Thanks for your patience.

Love from Susan and the Fabricatorz

More as it develops.

=================previously===============
Jan 2 2015
Happy 2015! 

I hope everyone is warm and safe and spreading love and peace on Earth somewhere.

Why no updates on Art Crimes lately? 

The website is being lovingly rebuilt with modern code, thanks to Fabricatorz! This may take some time, so thanks for your patience. They are working on it now.

Please send thank-you pictures and notes for the Fabricatorz. They are an open-source programming team who have volunteered to help with this giant website effort. If you send stuff to me, I'll make sure they get them. I want them to know how much we appreciate their help.

Why rebuild?

The website needs some future-proofing, and it also was getting difficult to maintain because it lacked a content-management system. The design has some limitations, as you know, because of its incredible age -- 20 years! Thanks to all the contributors who made that happen!.

What will the new website be like?

Well, it will continue to have the photos it had before, but it will be able to do more and be more flexible. It should be possible to show even more photos and graffiti art of many kinds, and to do it faster and better.

We'll have a better, more community-focused website where more people can be involved.

If you would like to help:

We'd  like to talk with nonprofits and/or funding organizations who might like to work together.

Social media support. We may need to set up an Indiegogo and/or a Patreon or something similar later this year [or 2016]. If so, we'll announce it on this blog (or our next blog) and on Twitter @artcrimes1. When you see that call for action, please pass it along in your networks if you can. Posting links from Art Crimes in general is always appreciated.

Please continue to send photos. We're very excited about the photos we will publish in the future, and we're about to organize all the unpublished ones people have already sent so we can post the best of those. (If you want to send more than 20MB of images, consider using something like wetransfer.com to send ZIP or RAR archives (archives are so much easier than individual images). we don't have a dropbox currently, but Google Drive could work.)

Curate or contribute content. It's not a job, it's participatory culture ... collaborative art history! Please get in touch if you think you might like to participate in creating or curating content for graffiti.org in the future. If you're already blogging or photoblogging somewhere, I hope there will be new ways we can connect too.

Thank you! More news as progress happens.

Much love,

Susan
🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃