At Tenlegs our mission is to help artists prosper and what better way to prosper than get paid gigs!  Here’s our latest paid Gig for you to consider…

Creative Work the Client Needs:

Client seeks assistance on graphic design and collaborative assistance with developing copy for a one-sheet.

This piece will educate readers about the fledgling Center for Business Analytics at NYU Stern. More specifically that the CBA is the go-to community for organizations interested in networking with peers, attending conferences, sourcing talent and being exposed to cutting edge research related to business analytics or big data.

The most critical audience is our prospective corporate partners, some of whom are data scientists and technologists, others who are managers and strategists.

Other important audiences are faculty who could become affiliated with the Center, press, other big data centers, students, etc. We are building our brand from scratch so this piece needs to express our value to all.

If prospects:
- Ideally, that they become corporate partners.
- If they aren’t quite ready for that commitment, to connect with us and start building a relationship by attending an event.

If other audience members, they:
- Come away with a favorable impression of the brand, sense of credibility and excitement, interest in being involved in some way.
- Remember that we do this work and are a strong voice in this space.

Selected Graphic Designer(s) should be:

• Able to show examples of previous work that is of a similar scope
• Comfortable collaborating with the Client on Copy
• Able to work within the timeline as established in the request for submissions

To be considered submit your portfolio today!

All proposals & portfolios must be submitted by May 31st. Submission materials (including Tenlegs portfolio and proposal) will be reviewed by the client.

Have burning questions about Tenlegs?  What to meet some of the team behind Tenlegs?   Eager to hear about how our community is working with organizations like Volumetric Society of NYC to expand the artists you can interact with on Tenlegs?

Well now you have your chance!  Tenlegs and our partner Volumetric Society of NYC will be hosting a free meetup June 2nd from 6:30-8:30pm at the We Work Labs!

Click here to learn more and RSVP

Earlier this year we posted a unique Tenlegs Gig.  This particular gig was commissioned by artist Jayne Riew, who works in the physical, and she was looking for a digital artist who could help her showcase her work online via a website.  Through Tenlegs Gigs, Jayne met Rachel Joyce and Carolina Blanco of GryphNYC.  You can see Jayne’s completed website here.

This gig brings up the subject of collaboration in art.  Sometimes an artist needs to work with other artist who has different, unique skills in order to get a work completed, or in this digital age, to showcase his or her own work.  Since that’s exactly what happened here, we thought we would talk to both Jayne and Rachel to get their take on collaboration between artists of different mediums.

Image compliments of Jayne Riew. All Rights Reserved.

Why is it so important for an artist to have a website now?

The website is the artist’s portfolio now. A really successful artist has a great portfolio, the right connections, and relentless drive. But without a website you can’t broadcast your work and ambition to the people you want to be connected to. Artists websites also reveal process and share larger ideas–much more than visuals.

What were critical things you were looking for in a site?

An elegant, economical layout. A straightforward navigation. Something that puts the visitor in the mood of my work–so a quiet, calming, contemplative style. Rachel understood right away that formal elements needed to complement the content.

Image compliments of Jayne Riew. All rights reserved.

When you were looking for a graphic artist to collaborate with on the site, what was most important to you?

First I needed to see samples of her work. Rachel’s portfolio demonstrated an understanding of visual composition and a logical and intellectual style. Second I needed to be satisfied that this was someone who wasn’t flaky, that she would deliver the job in a timely manner. Third, I needed to connect with her on an emotional level. We were going to conduct all our meetings by phone and I had to be sure she would “get” me.

Do you have any projects coming up that you would like to tell people about?

Right now I’m developing a project that explores the unseen but all-powerful workings of the female cycle. Disposition and behavior that is driven by hormonal fluctuation fascinates almost everyone. The bodily and emotional needs from week to week in a woman’s cycle, depending on whether she is ovulating, menstruating, or somewhere in between, almost demand to be illustrated on a page. They are fodder for humor, pathos, tragedy—the raw material for much of the world’s great art. But maybe Paris chose Venus because she was ovulating and Juno was bloated. Such narrative twists are worth investigating!

Image compliments of Jayne Riew. All rights reserved

Seven on Seven 2013: Keynote by Evgeny Morozov from Rhizome on Vimeo.

Art has had a long, complicated history with technology, and it seems that we’re in the midst of a moment in which the art and tech communities are intersecting in new and exciting ways.  Maybe it’s because the tech world has recently become bicoastal and set up shop in New York, and maybe it’s because contemporary art has become part of mainstream culture in the last 10 years, but we’re seeing increasingly high-profile collaborations, such as the Google Cultural Institute, the Creators Project, and AOL Artists.

Rhizome has been a pioneer in the art and technology space since its founding in 1996. In April, the fourth edition of the Seven on Seven series paired seven teams, each with one artist and one technologist, to complete a project within a day.  Keynote speaker Evgeny Morozov set the tone for the afternoon with a call for artists to remind the tech world that efficiency should not be our only goal, and that we can employ friction and conflict productively in what he termed “adversarial design” to build products that “seek to be problem makers, not problem solvers.”  Teammates Dennis Crowley and Jill Magid’s discussion touched on this, imagining software designed for awkwardness instead of “surprise and delight,” such as a map that gets you lost, forcing you to discover something new in your city.

Many of the projects, including constantupdate.net, giphnosis.com, and friendfracker.com, responded to what teammates Fatima Al Qadiri and Dalton Caldwell termed “infobesity” or “data dread” – the state of constant, low level anxiety caused by continuous notifications, alerts, and updates.  Matthew Ritchie and Billy Chasen’s project, dabit.org, gives 50% of the charitable donations collected on the site to one of the donors, chosen at random daily.  It’s a reminder for us to be charitable to each other, and a way to add some gambling to your philanthropy (the site is now suspended pending non-profit status, but was fun while it lasted.)

In the end, the day was a reminder of how much artists and technologists have in common (it was also a reminder that gifs are basically Paul Pfeiffer videos).  Artists and technologists create new worlds from nothing, live ever so slightly in the future, and bear the battle scars of entrepreneurship.  Check out the archived videos from previous years, and stay tuned for this year’s edition online.

At Tenlegs, we’re a huge believe in collaboration between artists.  We do it ourselves by working with other arts organizations to find other ways for artists to connect and prosper!  Meet our latest collaborator, CultureHub.  We interviewed Billy Clark from CultureHub about their programing and upcoming CoLab Summer program.

Can you tell us about CultureHub as an organization?  What happens at the organization on a day-to-day basis?

CultureHub is an incubator for creativity that connects artists from diverse disciplines and cultures by providing networked environments in which to collaborate, experiment, and explore. We grew out of a 30+ year relationship between La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City – which is one of New York’s preeminent experimental and international theatres – and the Seoul Institute of the Arts, which was the first arts school in Korea. La MaMa and SeoulArts were looking for new ways to collaborate, build their relationship, and extend their respective global networks, and the internet seemed like the perfect way to do this. We incorporated independently in 2009, and have grown to include partner hubs in Manchester, England and Los Angeles in addition to Seoul, and have held numerous programs involving hundreds of artists from dozens of countries.

Day-to-day activity at CultureHub runs the gamut from live networked performances for hundreds of people in the La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, to research and development in the studio with resident artists and technologists, to testing out emerging 3-D imaging technology.

Who runs CultureHub?  What are their backgrounds?

I run CultureHub with a pretty tight-knit team – we’re like a family. Our Production and Media Coordinator Lindsey Medeiros and our Technical Director Jesse Ricke both came out of the Masters in Media Studies program at the New School – Lindsey’s is into political and media studies, and has curated a bunch of our programs and designed a networked game for the New Museum’s “Ideas City” Festival, Jesse is a musician and media artist and teaches at CUNY City Tech. We have a development and administrative manager who comes from a performance and theatre production background and came to us from La MaMa, where she worked in the Development Department. My background is as a performer and experimental theater maker.

What are some of the most innovative things that CultureHub has done?

Building on a long tradition of innovation – the founder of La MaMa, Ellen Stewart, was a pioneer in both creating new types of spaces for artists to work in and also in bridging international communities. The reason we started CultureHub was to extend her vision and we saw an untapped potential to use digital technologies to that end.

In some ways what we’re doing isn’t that new – the idea of networked collaboration & artmaking has been around for decades – Nam Jun Paik experimented with it in 1977 – but there are very few places that are dedicated to researching and developing the skill set and practice for this type of work – most of them are in very closed systems, we’re doing it in a more open and transparent way.

We’re working in a very experimental vein while being really rooted in community. An example is we’ve done a project with musicians in four different countries performing to an interactive visual score that changed based on audience movements within our space -  we’ve also facilitated a collaborative play reading about violence against women between Guatamala City and New York using a $30 piece of hardware. At our essence, we’re trying to build bridges to connect people from diverse disciplines, cultures, and locations.

What are the most critical things that an emerging artists needs?  How does CultureHub help?

The needs for emerging artists have shifted in recent years because now everyone can be their own producer in whatever field and use their own networks for distribution, which is kind of amazing because now you can produce a piece of work and distribute it all over the planet. But the reality is that in order to do that you need a very diverse set of skills. So you’re not only the singer/songwriter, you’re also your own sound engineer, you have to do your own marketing, edit your own videos, etc. – even Keith Richards self-distributes when he’s not making music with the Rolling Stones.

So the idea with the CoLab is to bring young people at the high school level, or just coming out of high school, and to capture their imagination at this key point in their development to bring them into an experimental space and introduce them to ideas, tools, methodologies that might open up their minds to diverse avenues and possibilities. I know that when I was in high school I had a teacher that brought me into the theater program –  I was doing experimental theater and I didn’t know it, because I didn’t have any context for what that was – and it’s often our mentors that help us set a course for our lives. It was our hope here that we could bring people into a professional art making environment where they can connect, ideate, prototype and pilot their own projects and ideas and in the process learner the broader skill of collaboration. As the name entails, it’s a Collaborative Laboratory for emerging media makers. The ability to collaborate is essential.

Tell us a bit about CoLab summers, what does the program entail?  What mediums does the program cover?

The CoLab summer program is a free, 8 day intensive from June 24 – July 2 in our studio on Great Jones Street. The modules are:

“Poetry, Beatmaking and Found Sounds:” Led by Hip Hop Artist and educator Fabian “Farbeon” Saucedo and a professional sound designer and recording engineer, students will learn to write, record, and mix original compositions. A session getting them out of the studio and exploring the soundscape of New York will cover sampling, sound remixing, and using “found sounds” in recording.

“Motion and Animation:” as mentioned, this workshop will be co-taught by puppeteer/choreographer Federico Restrepo and digital artist/animator Nick Fox Gieg. Students will tell stories using movement to drive animated avatars created using a number of technological tools, including the Xbox Kinect.

“Urban Gaming” students will take their cell phones, IPads, tablets, and digital cameras out onto the streets of New York to design and develop their own interactive games.

“kinect_hacks” allows students to hack and analyze the inner workings of the Xbox Kinect to create their own interactive sound and 3-D video projects. This workshop empowers young people to feel ownership of the technical devices that are so prevalent in their lives.

Who participates in CoLab both as attendees and teachers?

One of the main ideas behind the CoLab is to work in a collaborative way, so we started with the teachers, to create a setting where we were also teaching in collaboration. Since CultureHub is centered at the intersection of media and performing arts, many of our CoLabs combine these two areas.

Students range in age from 15 – 20 in our “student” track and 21-25 in the “mentor” track. They will take classes together and the mentors will receive additional enrichment in leadership and mentoring.

The response so far has been incredible: some students say they never realized the things they were already doing – gaming or hacking a Kinect – could be thought of as an art form. Another student said, “This is everything that I’m looking for.  I’ve just been wondering where I was going to get encouragement to do it.”

Aside from CoLab Summers, what other events are coming soon that people should know about?

We have tons of events year round – performance, festivals, workshops. We’ll be launching our next season in September, so stay tuned!

What’s the best way to get in touch with CultureHub?

Our website: www.culturehub.org, or email info@culturehub.org

Twitter: https://twitter.com/culturehubnyc

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/CultureHub

We love having people visit the studio and we love hearing from people working out in the community, so if you like what you see, or you want to share anything with us, get in touch!

The many designers, visionary directors and actors in theater are our peers to those of us artists in the digital world at Tenlegs!  We’d like to take a moment to congratulate the nominee of this mornings Tony Awards.  Congratulations on a great Broadway season!

For a full list of the nominees

Did you know the best way that you can keep up with what’s going on at Tenlegs is by subscribing to our email?  Check out this month’s edition of the Tenlegs Spark below and then click here to subscribe!

We love to promote artists on Tenlegs and their projects (if you have one, email us)!  This week we’re thrilled to feature photographer Porter Hovery. Porter was one of the first members on Tenlegs, and this month her book “Heirloom Modern” that she took photographs for and her sister wrote, is out for you to buy!

We’ve got a preview of both the book and Porter’s photographs below.  And while you’re at it – go out and buy a copy!

“Our loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is filled with the mirrors, knickknacks, pillows, and paintings that our parents started with in New York (before moving back to the Midwest), along with taxidermy, vintage luggage, zebra-skin rugs, and countless other pieces we have picked up from eBay and shops around Brooklyn and in our travels. We added our own style to the mix, reinterpreting the lessons our parents taught is through a modern lens with a different set of influences and experiences. Our home has become a living autobiography, tracing our family’s roots and telling the story of our childhoods and experiences as adults…To us, that’s “heirloom” in the most modern sense.”

– Hollister Hovey, from the introduction

Credit line for the book must read: © Heirloom Modern by Hollister and Porter Hovey, Rizzoli New York, 2013. All images are to be credited © Porter Hovey, except archival which are to be credited © Courtesy the Hovey Family, and no images may be used, in print or electronically, without written consent from the publisher. Serial rights are available; please contact Jessica Napp @ 212 387 3436 or jnapp@rizzoliusa.com.

Proclaimed as “the New Antiquarians” in the New York Times , sisters Hollister and Porter Hovey are proponents of an aesthetic that puts Ralph Lauren, the Royal Tennenbaums, and a whole lot of taxidermy into a tarnished silver cocktail shaker and mixes it all up. As the principles of Hovey Design, they work to integrate nostalgia, adventure, and history into the home. In this book, the Hoveys pull back the velvet drapes on the toy soldiers, antique chandeliers, and vintage Louis Vuitton trunks that fill the homes of today’s chicest heirloomists and flea-market lovers, and give readers a visual taste of this eclectic, generation-hurdling aesthetic. HERILOOM MODERN opens up the homes of individuals and couples to show how they use décor to give their residences a sense of history and autobiography. The Hoveys venture into the apartments, cottages, and townhouses of artists, architects, designers, furniture makers, and landscape designers, who seamlessly integrate inherited keepsakes, tag sale curiosities, childhood collections, and memorabilia, and contemporary art. Inspiring in its eclecticism, this book introduces readers to a “new” kind of modern.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Hollister Hovey  is the creator of the history-laden lifestyle blog, “Hollister Hovey.” Porter Hovey is a photographer and real estate agent. Together, the sister are the founders of the interior decorating firm, Hovey Design. Their nostalgia-highlighting aesthetic has been featured multiple times in the New York Times, as well as in House Beautiful, Domino, Elle, and Design Sponge.

Credit line for the book must read: © Heirloom Modern by Hollister and Porter Hovey, Rizzoli New York, 2013. All images are to be credited © Porter Hovey, except archival which are to be credited © Courtesy the Hovey Family, and no images may be used, in print or electronically, without written consent from the publisher. Serial rights are available; please contact Jessica Napp @ 212 387 3436 or jnapp@rizzoliusa.com.

Great news! For a very limited time, registration for our upcoming classes is now 25% off. Great chance to join a small, interactive online class on photography, self-publishing, music production, documentary film, and UX design taught by experts – now with a great discount!

Click here fo learn more & register while space is left!

In case you haven’t heard, Tenlegs has announced five new online art classes for our Spring semester starting April 29th.  Registration is now open and is highly limited!  These classes are at 25% of the cost they would normally be listed and offer students direct interaction with industry pros!

Over the next few days we’re going to introduce you to all five of the teaching artists running these classes.  Today we’d like you to meet Jay Kila, who is teaching Making Music from Home on Audacity.

Tenlegs:  Tell us a little about yourself and you background as a teacher.

Jay:  I’m a hip-hop artist from NYC that graduated from Stanford (09) with a concentration in film and media studies.  I taught the Advanced Filmmakers Workshop while in college; the workshop covered the entire spectrum of filmmaking from preproduction and screenplay writing to postproduction and editing in Final Cut Pro.  In addition to this, I also helped tutor non-English speaking students in math and English and guest lectured several workshops on hip-hop and song writing.

Tell us about your plans for the content of your course.  What will be covered in the class?

My plans for the course are to give everyone a basic understanding of how to create music at home using software and technology that are readily available.  The course will cover creating music with the free software Audacity.  We will go through the step-by-step process of how to create the backing instrumentals as well as recording vocals or live instruments and then discuss how to mix it all together and export a finished track.

Why is now a great time to take this class?

For aspiring musicians or anyone slightly curious about making music, this class will allow you create songs without paying for expensive studio time or equipment.  Investments like studio space or sound engineers at the start of a music career can end up being quite costly, and to those looking to just make music for fun – these costs can definitely be avoided. 

What do students need to have (backgrounds, equipment, etc) in order to be able to take the class?

To take this class all students need is a computer and a microphone.  Most laptops have built-in microphones but if a student does not have one he or she can visit their local electronic store and purchase a USB microphone for under $20.

What should students expect in how you plan to run the class & how the technology is used?

Students should expect a class that is both fun and engaging.  Being able to create music and then hear it immediately after is an extremely rewarding experience.  The technology used is easy to learn and will actually give students a better grasp of other audio software as well and allow students to share their creations with friends and family.