The first week of February is Social Media Week in NYC. Along with Little Big Pictures, we’ll be co-hosting this month’s #artstech event, which is exploring the creative overlap between social media and the arts.

Instead of the usual discussion of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, we wanted to take a look at some of the most inventive implementations of social media we’ve come across: social media art experiments. We’ll be taking a look at how artists are incorporating social media in their art-making practices. You want to talk about creative community engagement strategies? Look no further than this round-up.

The speakers:

Nic Rad is a Brooklyn based artist working with traditional materials focused on social media concepts and conflicts. His project “People Matter” is comprised of 99 media figures at varying degrees of fame, influence, and recognizability. The works will be given away freely on the closing night of his solo show at Rare Gallery in April.
http://www.nic-rad.com
http://www.peoplematter.info

Adam Smith is the Marketing Manager for Dance Theater Workshop and an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists. He produces online video for both organizations. Through the Dance Theater Workshop Twitter account (@dancetworkshop), he & dance artist Jillian Sweeney created the Twitter Community Choreography project, a program that “tweet-sources” dance movement that are performed for the camera.
Community Choreography # 1, Jillian Sweeney
Community Choreography #13, Lauren Sharpe
Community Choreography #16, Tyler Ashley

An Xiao uses social media like Twitter and Facebook as a performance and public art space. Her work has been featured with the Brooklyn Museum, Yale/Haskins Laboratories, The New York Times and ARTNews. She founded and directs @Platea, a global online public art collective, and blogs on art and social media technology for Art21.
www.anxiaostudio.com

William Powhida is a visual artist and art critic born in 1976 in New York. He is known for controversial subject matter that addresses thecontemporary art industry itself as well as combination portraits drawn entirely from memory. In a satirical way, Powhida constructs work deliberately about growing his own fame, addressing the major obstacles facing emerging contemporary artists. Controversial topics have included creating an “enemies” list as well as letters addressed to famous contemporary curators (such as Zach Feuer Gallery), collectors and critics, requesting recognition. He is known for staging acts of destruction to his own work, creating his own press coverage and promoting his shows as being curated under duress.
www.williampowhida.com
williampowhida.blogspot.com
@powhida

Rachel Perry Welty was born in 1962, in Tokyo, Japan. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and a Diploma and Fifth Year Certificate from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Recently Welty participated in group shows at The Drawing Center, New York and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts where her video “Karaoke Wrong Number” has entered the permanent collection. She has had solo shows at Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston), Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York) and will open a solo show next month at Gallery Diet (Miami) in 2010 with work she created as a MacDowell Colony Fellow this past Fall.
www.rachelperrywelty.com
http://www.icaboston.org

Yanira Castro has made dance installations for theaters, warehouses, bathrooms, a cellar, a former bathhouse, a confessional. She is interested in constructing scenarios for people that engage different ways of experiencing live performance. Past performances include Center of Sleep, which placed audience and performers together in an aural and physical installation of mirrors and platforms at Dance Theater Workshop. Her work has been presented by PS122, The Chocolate Factory, XØ Projects Inc, and HERE Arts Center, among others. Her latest dance installation, Dark Horse/Black Forest, has been presented in the public bathrooms of the George Bacovia Theater in Romania; the Daile Theatre in Latvia; the tanzhaus nrw in Germany; the Zoellner Arts Center in Pennsylvania and the Gershwin Hotel in New York City. Yanira is the instigator and director of a canary torsi.
http://acanarytorsi.org