DIGITAL ART

Airport

This is the Whitney Museum's portal to net art and digital arts and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. This site consists of gate pages, commissions, exhibitions, resources and collection these five areas. In this site, they provide original net art projects by the Whitney Museum and information about current and past net art and digital art.
Rhizome

This is also an online platform for the global new media art community. They support creation, presentaion, discusiion and preservation of contemporary art that makes innovation by using new technologies in significant ways. They also support almost everyone an access to be their community and could get one year free right to browse Rhizome's content. The the important thing is that this site much focus on presenting the latest new media influences to this communities.
Digital Art, Internet Art, and New Media Art

I think the similarity is that these three definitons are related as art to some degree, and also get some connections between themselves and new technologies such as computer, Internet or other stuffs. Digital art is art created on a computer in digital form. It can be purely computer-generated, or taken from another source. Internet art is art or cultural production which uses the Internet as its primary medium. Artists are not necessary to choose internet as their subject, even thought they usually get in to this popular topic. New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, robotics, and biotechnologies.
I Love Bees (ILB)

ILB is a alternate reality game(ARG) that served as a real-world experienece of, and a viral marketing campaign the Halo 2 video game. Like all ARG, ILB is aslo a cross-media game that runs through fiction game world and reality world during playing ILB. The game is started when he or she gets a plastic honey bears in the mail by the previous person in this game. Then, Halo 2 advertiswment will show up at screenings, then player will use their curious to visit the website and get a confusing characters and sentences. As a mystery game, users start to communicate with each and share their thoughts as well. ILB would be considered as Internet art from above definition.

Virtual World

Virtual world is a representation of our real world in some sense. Virtual world's designers simulate the real world rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, communication and so on to their users. The players will take the responsibility to play as a specific character by one login account in this created world, which seems quite same to our real life but actually virtual.

Actually I couldn't say that I really enjoy living in the virtual world so much. Personally, how to playing games is a question for me, because I am so bad about playing computer games since I was a child. I prefer to read, exercise and meet friends in person to have real communications and practical experiences. So before I took this course, I almost know nothing about these virtual games, but now I have got a little experiences and touch in Second Life. Maybe I am opinionated and fogyish, still I do not have so much interests about it. I can remember that after 1 hours hanging around in a small island of Second life, my headache force me to log off. I felt that is even harder than living in my real life, well this is only for my personal case. Of course, I can't refute that there are thousands of players enjoying living in their virtual world and I do believe they must have their reasons to do so. I think most of them would like to have a quite different life experience in this created virtual world, to implement their dreams in the virtual world, to communicate with stangers or acquaintance, to get relax and so on.

However, many people like living in virtual world, since they think that will easier and more private than living in the real life. I am thinking that the virtual life never leave with player's real life. For example, in Second Life, almost players use English as the communication tool, so which has required that these players have to know English. If you want to buy a house or an island, you need to buy and could pay for the money from your real life which is not virtual at all. So in some sense, virtual worlds never apart from our real life.

Folksonomy, Flickr and Me

After reading these links, I would like to conclude or kind of copy the definition of folksonomy from the reading. Folksonomy comes from the combination of the words folk and taxonomy, and the term folksonomy means “people’s classification management”. Thomas stated that folksonomy is tagging that works, which contains three tenets of this term: tag, object being tagged and identity for clarifying tag terms and providing for a rich understanding of the object being tagged. The Process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate. Flickr is an example to this.

Flickr is one of photo sharing web services and an online community platform. Users can get free space in Flickr to upload their own photos or images and share with almost everyone (if you setting your Flickr for public use). Other users can also leave their comments in your Flickr space and in some sense to get contacts, feedbacks or reflections from viewers. But the interesting thing is that Flicker allows photo sunmitters to categorize images by using tags, which will be easy for searchers to get images about a certain topic. In Flickr’s site, it also provides a quick access to images tagged with the most popular keywords, which viewers can get the information quite conveniently.

I t created an account in Flickr two days ago, but I have not uploaded any images until now. Well, I think I will share my images and photos in my Flickr soon^^