Year: 2015

I am proud to say that one of my blog posts is a citation on the 2 Legit 2 Quit wikipedia page. Now the question is: can you take the 2 Legit 2 Quit challenge? Can you watch the entire…

What did you think of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens? This blog post is meant to be a place where my friends and family can talk about Episode VII. SPOILERS, VERY DEFINITE SPOILERS, LIE AHEAD To be clear on which…

Two monumental cultural events are about to happen in the same week: Star Wars is releasing episode VII: The Force Awakens The Art Institute is about to exhibit their largest donation of artwork ever. 44 monumental modern artworks were donated…

Where do you go to find inspiration online? Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Flickr? Websites? Possibly a combination of some of those? I’m going through all the artwork and artists that I’ve faved the past year. That means re-looking at all my…

How many photos did you like on Instagram this year? I liked 945 Instagram photos in 2015. How do I know? I built this collage and counted the number of photos. How do you make a collage like this? Sign…

Take all the articles you’ve read the past year. Imagine if you could automatically build a list the author names who wrote most of those articles? Would you find that sort of service helpful? On my content strategy blog, I…

The Tate Museum published an interesting 17-page report, “Tate Website Audience Segmentation” (PDF file) Number of people that use the Tate website before, after, and during a museum visit: 38% of visits to the Tate’s website are to plan a…

What facts and figures would you like the Museum of Contemporary Art to share with the public? The museum has a webpage with various facts and figures. Data points like: 21% of the words in their collection are named “Untitled.”…

The @museumhack Instagram account liked my recent ewok photo, so I checked out their account. It’s a lot of entertaining cheesy spoofs on modern artwork. Things like Spider-Man sitting inside a Norman Rockwell painting. A photo posted by Museum Hack…

The first item on this list is mysteriously covered up by the other sheet. What could it be saying? “Find stuff to s_______” This is a fun game: how would you complete that phrase? Here’s a few ideas: Find stuff to…

You might follow some of the top Chicago art museums on Twitter, like The @artinstitutechi or @mcachicago. But what about the other visual art organizations? I compiled a Twitter list of 49 visual art organizations in Chicago. Please feel free…

Ever run out of ideas for what to write about? My cousin Peter was experiencing writers block for his blog. Here’s how to build up a list of ideas to write about. 1. Keep ALL your blog drafts in one…

Ben Katchor has such unique views of urban life. Here he draws the parallel of how the durability of prison construction is eventually adopted by the outside world. Tamper-proof toilets and sinks. Detention grade mattresses with welded seams. My favorite…

How do you check the weather? Mobile app? Watch the tv news? How about twitter? I normally ask Siri what the weather will be for the day. While that is the most direct route, it’s not the most fun. To…

Every week I check a bookmarked Flickr search for street art Chicago. Even though I try to make the search exclude graffiti, I still end up with mostly graffiti images. Every now and then there might be something remotely interesting…

If you could invent a country, what would you come up with? How about a country on another planet or another moon? The Saturn moon Enceladus has been in the news lately, as NASA is flying the Cassini probe over…

Help my class assignments to be exhibited in New York. Please like any (or all) of these three drawings. The drawings with the most likes on the Art of the MOOC Facebook Page, will be shown at the Creative Time Summit…

Asking questions and more questions might help you to brainstorm better. Instead of brainstorming answers, brainexplore questions. Tanner Christenson writes in Focus on brainexploring, not brainstorming, to have ideas: So I recently began experimenting with a new exercise for creative thinking,…

What if our culture made it a tradition that you always took your paper receipt and folded it into an origami? Forget that it would be pointless. Forget the time involved to do with with every transaction. This would simply…

It’s been a while since I’ve submitted a word definition to Urban Dictionary. I’m digging way back to a word I learned as a child, skelbow. Ten years ago, I was shocked to find out that nobody else has heard…

Searching for “a new hope” on flickr yields an interesting contrast of flowers and Star Wars photos.

In the coming weeks, a redesigned spudart.org will be launched. All 25,000 comments will be back on the site–including all the comments from Facebook. I’m also hoping that all the blog posts will be categorized and tagged. Although that feature…

Have a some webcomics you enjoy? How you read these comics? Perhaps you visit each webcomic’s website. Or maybe you rely on the voodoo of Facebook to show (or not show) you the comic. Maybe some webcomics have an email…

Printouts of moon rocks are being found across downtown Chicago. On the back of each printout reads: You Found a Moon Rock! This printout is the exact same size of an actual lunar sample brought back from the surface of…

While going through my photos, this particular photo of July 4th fireworks reminded me of constellations in the sky. Here’s an animated gif of several photos together. Here the constellation twinkles.

OMG. I thought there would be zero results on instagram #gentlemansquirrel but there is this wonderful photo! Enjoying the view from my lady ships window. #snowday #gentlemansquirrel A photo posted by Montery Ephram Darvill (@mrmontydarvill) on Apr 15, 2013 at…

Since I’ve been working with constellations in my art, I did some research to see what other people are doing. Here are 16 photos tagged with constellation.

The textures of the nebulas play very nicely with the urban textures. The rust texture on a garbage can looks just like a nebula cloud. What is so large in outer space is mimic’ed on something so small as a…

I had a feeling something was going to happen while I was carrying around a eight-foot long print of the Carina Nebula.

When you Google a color’s hexvalue, the entire browser should turn that color. A couple other thoughts related to hexvalues: What are the most popular hexvalues used on websites? Certainly search engines that crawl billions of websites would have stats…

photo by marissandrew What would you write in wet cement? Guerrilla artist Uncustomary asks this question. (She answers with “you are beautiful” in her cement) A fun phrase to write in wet cement would be, “Carve your dreams on the…