Blog

Greetings, and welcome to the Memetic Arts blog. With this first post, I am cracking the proverbial champagne bottle against the hull, sending our ship out on its maiden voyage across a vast ocean to far away shores. Thankfully, those shores are known, and our mission is clear. But for those of you who are visiting for the first time, and have probably never heard of Memetic Arts, here’s a synopsis.

As our logo indicates, Memetic Arts is a publisher of digital media. More specifically, we’re focused on media borne from the convergence of art, music, science, and technology. There are many names for this type of art and its variants: “Generative Art”, “Visual Music”, “Digital Kinetic Art”, and “New Media Art” to name a few. And sure, you can throw in the dreaded “Multimedia” and “Virtual Reality” labels as well. Each of these categories connotes a particular approach, yet at the same time, a given artwork could easily fall within all of them at once, so the categorical boundaries are not always useful or clear. What is clear, though, is that the market is growing rapidly, both in supply and demand, and will continue to do so as new technologies, such as Augmented Reality, Flexible OLED Displays, and Wearable Computing, come to bear.

If you were to google any of the terms above (“generative art”, for example), and begin to surf around, you’d soon realize that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of artists, musicians, composers and coders out there who are using computers to create some very amazing works of art. Art that goes largely unexperienced by most of us, for all the same reasons that most art goes unseen — you either aren’t aware that it exists, you can’t get to the location to experience it (viewing it on YouTube doesn’t count), or you’re put off by the gallery atmosphere and cost of acquisition. So we have a classic opportunity to meet a consumer need (albeit a perhaps unperceived need) with an affordable and accessible source.

We’ve carved out a sound strategy for closing this gap, and it begins with the establishment of our in-house studio that we’re calling Studio-M. It is designed to be a membership organization, free to join, but with the expectation that members will participate by licensing selected work to Memetic Arts for use in the context of various applications and services. The artist retains all rights, of course, and is entitled to a royalty under a standard agreement. In certain cases, artists may be asked to collaborate on special projects, for which they will be compensated via royalty or a flat fee.

The simplest example that I can offer as an illustration would be nooflow, our soon-to-launch service that will enable anyone with a net-connected viewing device — preferably a dedicated flatscreen — to select from a catalog of digital kinetic art and “run” it on their screen. While the primary target is residential homes, there is obvious appeal to corporate settings (lobbys, reception areas, etc.) as well. The beauty of this is that the viewer gets to experience the artwork in its native digital format, running just as it would were it shown in a gallery or museum. Even better, the user can select another piece if their first selection is no longer desired. And of course, the author of the selected works collects a royalty for use of the piece.

This is just one of channels that we’re developing. We have a number of mobile apps in the works, as well as a completely new platform for creating and performing ‘visual music’. We’re also producing an interactive documentary that revisits the works of John Whitney, one of the forefathers of the Motion Graphics field, whose work actually served to inspire the creation of this very company.

So if you haven’t picked up on it yet, we’re passionate about Digital and Electronic Arts. We want to bring them to you, and we want to help the creators thrive. And we’re going to do that by building some really cool stuff. My goal for this blog, therefore, is not so much to sell you — I don’t think I’ll have to do that — but rather to share new discoveries, decision points, and milestones, as well as to present and explore topics stemming from the inevitable philosophical and aesthetic considerations we’ve encountered during our own creative process.

So I look forward to sharing our thoughts, ideas, and progress with you, right here, as we learn, grow, and hopefully help to enrich the lives of our customers, our artists, and our communities. And of course, you are invited to participate, either through the blog’s comments, through e-mail (info at memeticarts dot com), or any of the various social media sites with which we participate. The company will not survive if we don’t listen to you, our customers, employees, partners, and collaborators. I am grateful that we have so many channels for direct feedback, and I invite you to use them frequently.

Thank you, and we’ll see you in the blogosphere. . .

Richard Rodkin
Founder / President
memetic arts, inc.