Saturday, September 10, 2011

This Is Awesome

Amanda Forest Vivian has an idea that I think really rocks, and one that I definitely want to be part of.

It's a website for people with disabilities to post pictures/videos of their art, with each person getting their own site where they can showcase their art however they want:


Crazy House is the name of a book by Henry Darger, an outsider artist. Outsider art is a hard-to-define category, but many people labeled as outsider artists have psychiatric or developmental disabilities.

Crazy House the website is an imaginary house where you can have your own room. Which is to say you can apply to be hosted on the domain which I have yet to buy, and then you could make a site for your art. All of these sites would be linked to from the main page, and would make up the Crazy House.

It's perfectly worth asking why this is necessary when there are so many places on the Internet where you can upload and share art. I'm not really sure why I want to make the Crazy House, except that I like the idea of sharing an imaginary house with other people instead of just having a lot of usernames on different huge websites. I also like the idea of an art space that is somewhat centered on disabled identity.

I would like to buy the Crazy House domain with other people for two reasons. First, it would be cheaper, and second, I would like the Crazy House to be something that isn't dependent on one person, but on several people. If anyone is interested in buying the Crazy House domain with me, please email me at awf.vivian at gmail (I'm hoping to figure this out by November or December).

If anyone can't or doesn't want to be part of buying the Crazy House, but would like to room in the Crazy House, sit tight. Hopefully I will be back in November or December telling you how to do so. And please signal boost.

I don't know if I have any readers who aren't also readers of Amanda's blog, but I thought I'd try and signal-boost anyway.

I also think the idea of a smaller, self-selected group of artists having a website to showcase their art together is a cool one, and I also like the idea of each person having total control over what their own site looks like. With Flickr or other image-sharing websites, you're restricted to showing your images one at a time in a slideshow, which can take away from the effect if you've got a series of related pieces. This also gives people room to have things together on one page that are in different formats, like art, video, music, animation, whatever else.

(I am a little intimidated by the prospect of having to build my own webpage from scratch, since I don't know anything about programming, but I figure I can probably learn what I need to. My dad has built a webpage for me before, to showcase my jewelry, and I learned a bit about how to do it by watching him. It doesn't look super hard; just something I've never done before.)

2 comments:

nominatissima said...

When the time comes, I would love to participate. My creative outlets play a big part in my identity as an autism blogger and autistic person, so I will sign up, even if it costs money. That project is worth it.

Anonymous said...

I also think this is a good idea as well. It will provide an outlet for us to share artistic expression of ideas,viewpoints and emotions.