Taking the magazine online

Even in the cacophony of mass media formats, the magazine has long stood out as a receptacle for niches, taste groups and sociocultural communities. Research by the Magazine Publishers of Australia points to magazines' broad audience reach, targeted address and, interestingly, that "magazines prompt online action".

Canvas Collective's layout, mode of address and general ideology are based around this long-valued media format. What we aim to do is translate the magazine for an online audience.

That project has been undertaken in all varieties of magazine media, from Rolling Stone to indie fashion mag Frankie. Our point of difference is to create a community-based hub, so that user-generated content, social media and collaboration play a significant role. Where the content is 'pushed' to our audience, that is, commissioned and produced by our own team of journalists, it will be tailored to the locations and tastes of our target audience - young, amateur artists and the art-interested.

Moreover, our layout plans are directly inspired by the 'classic' feature-based magazine cover style. A small amount of featured images and their related stories will constitute our landing page, rather than a blog-like index of long text. In that sense, we like to think of the landing page of Canvas Collective as a gallery wall.

Paintings at the Neue Pinakothek, Munich (Photo: Frank Kovalchek)

Having said this, a major priority is to avoid that sense of seeing art as a non-interactive subject. There is more to visual art, and to the users of our website, than viewing a work hanged on a wall. That's why Canvas Collective is less Google Art Project and more CanvasPaint.

When artists and art fans want to get involved in the conversation around art, or even take up a brush themselves, we aim to be their destination of choice.

Many hands make light work

Collaboration is one of the great advantages to the online media space. That collaboration can be social, political (for better or for worse) or, in our case, cultural and artistic.

Ever since the servers have been able to handle it, professional and amateur musicians alike have used the Internet to collaborate. Dedicated 'online band' websites like kompoz.com and MyOnlineBand.com serve as social networking portals for the musically inclined. Popular musos in collaboration sell records and win Grammys, it's just how the world works.

But can collaboration work in the realm of visual art? Well, yes and no. Through the long history of art, there are very few famous examples - it's not hard to imagine Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali ending up in a paint fight were they forced to share brush time on the same canvas.

20th and 21st Century technology, though, has opened up avenues to collaboration in previously impossible spheres. Yochai Benkler tells us about the advent of open-source software, and the collaborative development efforts that have grown out of it. Amanda Korman explained in The Berkshire Eagle earlier this year that even authorial collaboration on books has moved online, just as publishing is shaping to do the same.

It's hard to say with any certainty that visual artists are prepared to commit themselves to online collaboration. For that reason, Canvas Collective will not pin our hats on the exercise. Our main feature isn't a collaborative canvas.

But we are determined to offer a platform where cultural collaboration might blossom naturally. That means social media links, plugins, places to upload work, and comment boxes wherever possible.

After all, our website hopes to invite as many young and amateur artists into the artistic conversation as possible. What would our site be if it didn't offer artists the chance to converse with each other as well?

References

Benkler, Yochai (2006), 'Peer Production and Sharing', The Wealth of Networks, New Haven, Yale University Press.

Korman, Amanda (2011), 'Book collaboration goes online', The Berkshire Eagle, 26 February 2011, available http://ezproxy.library.usyd.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/853899607?accountid=14757

Art in everyday spaces

Late last year, while preparing another project, I had the privilege of meeting some Newtown-based street artists and art enthusiasts. Most of these people aren't too forthcoming with their 'real' identities - like many inhabitants of the online space, they revel in anonymity. Their cultural product is more important anyway, and there's always a concern for the legal issues around street art. But turn one or two corners in the Newtown area, and this art is everywhere...

'I have a dream' mural, King St (Photos: Chris Martin)

TV in front of a stencil wall, Marrickville

"It's like a jungle sometimes," Enmore Rd

Some of these works are commissioned and legal, most are not. In an interview, one habitual Newtown street artist and graffiti tagger, Vars, told me the motivations behind his work are simple - that the walls are there, they look pretty boring when they're blank, and nobody gets hurt by a bit of paint.

The Newtown streets have plenty in common with the cultural environment of the online media. There's an infinite canvas of Internet wallspace to be decorated, and you have to go well out of your way if you want be a vandal.

Such is the concept behind our project. Canvas Collective (still a working title) will be the streets and alleyways of the online art community. With the advantages of the online format, we can create an easily accessible hub for artists and art fans to share their works and engage with others'. It's a leisurely walk around the back alleys of Newtown with a detour through the most prestigious national galleries, meeting the like-minded along the way.

And incidentally, even the community of artists painting Sydney streetscapes doesn't always wallow in lonesome anonymity. Just recently, the artist Heesco won the third series of Secret Wars, a live 'paint-off' competition involving some of the city's most talented street artists, and held in the suitably underground confines of the Oxford Art Factory.

It's exactly the kind of artistic community spirit for which Canvas Collective can provide a permanent home.