ReadWriteWeb

ARTorNOT is a user ratings-powered knock-off of trashy meat market site HotOrNot.com. Acting as both parody and social commentary, ARTorNOT asks its users to decide if the content they look at for maybe three seconds is "art." The site itself raises more philosophically inclined questions about who ultimately decides what "art" is - the Internet user, the curator, the critic or the artist.

"'What is' and 'what isn't' art is subjective. Hopefully ARTorNOT will offer insight to artists who would like to know what the internet thinks," co-creator Ryder Ripps tells us. "Like HOTorNOT, all that matters is if you know you're hot, the rating doesn't really matter...we all know who is and isn't hot...we would like to now discover if this applies to art."

ARTorNOT is a project of OKFoc.us, a company founded in September by New York-based creative technologist Jonathan Vingiano and artist Ryder Ripps.

When BRAVO premiered the first-ever art reality TV show last year, pop culture, art, viewers and the Internet got to know each other in a far more intimate, social TV-esque way. Smartphone apps like Google Goggles have fundamentally changed the way we look at art, providing instant information about the work itself. Facebook, Google+ Circles, geo-location service Foursquare, blogging make it possible to engage in discussion around a timely topic, and share and leak news faster. These are all ways that the Internet is changing the user's experience around art.

For the first experiment in looking, go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and then download the Google Goggles app for Android or iPhone. Snap a picture of the art that you're looking at. Goggles will pull up the work of art's history, bibliography of its creator and perhaps even a story of the collection from the Met's mobile-optimized website.

Online retailer Zazzle has launched Realview, a tool that gives users the ability to visualize how posters, prints and canvases will look on their walls before they buy them. The technology behind Realview reminds us a bit of the scanning behind QR codes in the way it connects the digital world and the real world. It's not quite augmented reality because it's not live. Instead, this is a useful tool for anyone who just wants to visualize art on their walls before buying it. Realview does not require a smartphone, which makes it more accessible to the mainstream.

Instagram, the free iPhone photography app that's grown like a weed, has a lot of both fans and critics. Some critics allege that the app's photo filters ruin perfectly good images and will be looked back at later in the photographer's life with regret. Surely there are some great photos on Instagram though, right? I've seen some great stuff posted by others in my experience using it. I wish I was a better photographer myself so I knew how to use the app better.

One group of fans in London believe they've learned to use the app very well and they've gone from geographically nearby to each other, to having regular in-person meetups to what's now perhaps the next logical step: their own gallery art show. Here at ReadWriteWeb we love democratized publishing online and we love art, so we had to take a look at MyWorldShared - a gallery show of Instagram photos that opens in London on October 22nd.

Canvas, an online forum for sharing, remixing and commenting on images came out of private beta recently. The site was built by 4chan founder Christopher Poole (known online as "moot") and is intended as a more interactive, less unruly version of 4chan.

On Canvas, users can upload images, edit directly in the browser and add captions. Once published, they can be remixed and commented on by other users. The site employs a badge-like system of stickers, which can be applied to images as a way of casting a vote. Drag the "LOL" sticker onto an image you thought was funny. Or you can give a cookie sticker to images that "need a little condescending acknowledgement." Stickers contribute to aggregate totals and help determine each image's overall popularity and placement.

An article in the art magazine Frieze talks about "a disconnect between having social media resources and actually employing them to engage various audiences [...]." Lauren Cornell, executive director of the technology-focused art organization Rhizome, writes that "institutions could amplify their educational and social role by publishing - daily and online - a great deal more history, opinion, context and anecdote around their activities, rather than just issuing press releases and visitor information."

I heartily agree and can point to one example of an art museum that is actually doing this, albeit because they were forced to. The Christchurch Art Gallery has been closed to the public since the big February earthquake. That prompted the gallery staff to utilize their blog more, to keep the art gallery 'open' at least in an online way.

How many times have you found yourself in possession of a whole lot of digital content that should be tied to a very specific physical place, maybe even a particular spot in a room, but with no easy way to tie together the two dimensions of online ephemera and real-world location? Maybe that doesn't happen to you very much yet, but if you worked at a museum - it would happen all the time. And wouldn't you like to imagine yourself working at a museum? I suspect you would.

The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.

Recommendation engines have changed the way we think about - and the way we purchase - music, movies, and books. Do you like the Beastie Boys' new album? Then check out Danger Mouse's latest. Do you like Guillermo del Toro films? Then be sure to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies.

However, there's been no comparable recommendation engine for works of art. If you like a particular Henri Matisse painting, there hasn't been a website for you to visit that will suggest other works by the artist or that will recommend other artists altogether.

But that's the aim of ArtFinder, a London-based startup that wants to help make it easier for people to find art that they love. Or rather, that's part of the aim.

Portland, Oregon is known for many things but one of them is its availability of public data. When the local government included listings of 429 pieces of public art in the data it made available to independent developers, Matt Blair took the logical and admirable step of turning that data into an iPhone app. The Portland Public Art Finder makes it easy to discover and learn about murals, sculptures, installations and other instances of art that you can go and enjoy in public.

It's a great way to learn about those works of art you might see regularly but never know the story behind, or to discover new gems in your or a new neighborhood. Blair told Mike Rogoway of the Portland Oregonian, who wrote about the app first, that he had no idea how much art was around town before seeing the data made available. Talk about augmented reality! What city wouldn't benefit from apps like this?

Above: WiFi signal spills gently into the street from an old Oslo apartment building built in the 1890's. Video below.

Wireless communication channels are all around us all the time, but their variable strengths in different places create a textured, invisible part of the urban landscape. A team of Norwegian researchers, arguing that WiFi is "a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities," created the beautiful video below visualizing the strength of WiFi signals around their neighborhood in Oslo. They used a four meter pole that measured signal strength and lit up to a great or lesser degree. Then they took time delayed photos of themselves walking through the snowy streets.

"The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host," writes the team in Immaterials: Light painting WiFi "Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses."