Building a CYBER CENTER

with Community ART

Presented, 5/5/2000, University of Maryland - the "Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace" Conference

CYBER CENTER DEFINITION
A "Cyber Center" is a website that attracts an audience to itself and to its growing community through its original content. Its attracts links to itself by helping to sort and present links to many of the related websites of its extended community in an entertaining and useful manner. It contributes to building community by creating opportunities for discourse and interaction similar to the BBS's of the eighties but on a global scale using graphics as well as text.

Get Started Building for Diversity

The World Wide Web is growing from two distinct directions. Major corporations (dot.coms) are building empires stressing paid advertising while non-profit social groups (dot.orgs) focus on building virtual communities of networked sites. The Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center is very interested in building and sharing a vibrant network of agencies and individuals devoted to diversity at home and abroad. We have a vision and are stepping toward it using time, volunteers and our art in contrast to the mad ad rush for position that characterizes the dot.coms' attempts to stake out their market shares.

The World Wide Web follows Bob Dylan's statement "He who is not busy being born, is busy dying." Growth, learning, change and action are our watchwords. If you are an organization or an individual with an idea for a diversity related website - get going on it! Don't wait to plan it all out. Learn as you go. Let your growing knowledge of site design and of your site needs create the constant change on your website. Be busy being born!

Be Yourself

To build a Cyber Center - be real to be different - build your website out
of who you are.

The Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center has produced "Art of the T-shirt" exhibits in accessible community locations for twelve years. We made it easy for artists to participate asking only that they fill out a simple form and bring us their art on a t-shirt. We achieved diversity by encouraging artists who applied to exhibit by calling them repeatedly over the years. We brag about being "Inclusive not Exclusive."

Our website does not have high tech audio and video or big color image files of the kind many corporate designers with high-speed connections create. We are concerned with communicating with people around the world and know many do not have new computers and that telephone connections in most parts of the world are expensive. Short download times are important to us.

ORIGINAL CONTENT: Hook 'em - Bring 'em Back Alive

All our print promotional materials have been black & white. The cartoon t-shirt figures that we have scattered throughout our press releases and exhibit brochures make tiny GIF files that download in an eye-blink. We call them "T-shirt Art Pointers" and we are using these "Pointers" to build a visual theme on our website. We are giving them away for non-commercial purposes as a hook to create return visits and word of mouth traffic. This may well become a saleable product should they become popular.

Original Community Art
Eight years ago we built a "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" as a way to involve more artists in our exhibits, especially young artists, and to produce art prints we could one day sell to support our activities. We realized we could not afford to teach artists how to print their full color work nor could we promote full color art, so we limited our workshop to teaching how to print black & white images. We defined these as images that will reproduce easily on a copy machine because we were able to skip an expensive step in the screen printing process by using a white paper copy to expose our photo sensitive screens. We have many designs by a large number of artists already on screens and are using these images to build another segment of our site that will continually add images over the years. As this segment adds images and increases its diversity of artists represented, it too is becoming a hook that will draw visitors to return to our site.

Using Community Art to Connect to the World
ART-ACT, the Anti-Racist T-shirt Art Contest Tour, is an out growth of our mission to serve as a multi-cultural arts institution. Like our "Screen Print Workshop for Artists" concept, its stresses black & white images designed for the t-shirt forum. It extends our tradition of community exhibits to the World Wide Web. Over the years because we sought out a diverse group of artists - even without announcing an anti-racist theme in our Screen Print Workshop for Artists - many artists had already contributed images that fit this theme. This made it easy for us to build ART-ACT. It gave us the art from our previous seven workshop years to start the contest until the contest become known on the Internet. Once this year's contest is over we will begin another taking advantage of the publicity we've built up. Our intention is to build an ever growing body of art supporting diversity and attacking racism. This is another on-going hook that is unique to us.

More Hooks
Another original content hook relates to our community computer lab activities. We host a "Website Design and Promotion" SIG. We hope one day to have an active Computer Arts Lab that stresses website design offering free classes to artists who contribute to its maintenance. Our website has a "School" segment for articles on designing and promoting a website that can grow as our community computer lab grows.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR DISCOURSE AND INTERACTION

Under each work of art in our Screen Print Workshop for Artists and our ART-ACT segments is a "Comments" section and a very new "Personal Stories of Racism" section where we invite our visitors to build discussions of issues. This has been a slow process but we intend to build these sections over time.

ART-ACT Notes
We have a newsletter, ART-ACT Notes that is sent out every time we have a new ART-ACT Submission to announce. This has been about every 2-4 weeks. In this newsletter we feature links to the latest art posted, add letters or comments received, invite interaction, and I am telling the story of my 22 year progression toward founding an inner-city art center. ART-ACT Notes will grow along with our site.

Community and Multi-Cultural Art Issues Mailing List
When we find support or earn enough to build a staff, we will begin a mailing list around community arts and multi-cultural issues. This will fit with our website segment which posts the "Chicago Cultural Plan." The "Chicago Cultural Plan" is a document created from grass-roots contributions by Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's Administration. It was buried after his death by the Daley Administration. We unburied it. Its 103 suggested improvements to Chicago's cultural life offer many opportunities for discussion around community art and urban policy issues. We have added several new suggestions of our own that we would like to hear discussed. One question I would like answered is why in the richest country in the world artists can work for over a decade building a track record for an inner-city arts center serving under served populations and at-risk youth with creative and needed programs without significant support from any direction? This is typical of independent community arts groups begun by artists.

ATTRACTING LINKS BY SORTING AND
PRESENTING THE LINKS OF RELATED WEBSITES

We have a long list of links on a links page. Volunteers from http://www.idealist.org , from http://www.volunteermatch.org/ , a sub-site of ImpactOnline, and from people who visit our page at help_ara.htm support us by visiting related websites and sending a personalized letter to the site owner asking for a link trade. They write a description of the site they visit which we post with its link on our links page.
Our next project is to sort these links into categories. We will select the best sites and post some of these links in the Related Link sections under our artwork that the sites seem to loosely relate to. Sites that offer solutions to bigotry or suggest actions people can take to counter hate will make up a page of their own. Under each work of art is also a section for links to Related Articles/Essays. In this way we not only will display art related to Anti-Racism or Pro-Diversity but also provide informative links for further research of related issues.

PROMOTIONS

To promote your "Cyber Center" website you should already be announcing your website on your business cards, letterhead, press releases, brochures, phone messages and any other print or traditional communications methods you employ. You should discover your "keywords" and create Meta tags for your page headers (see www.art-teez.org/school.htm ). Register your site with Search Engines. Add a signature to the end of e-mails you send out composed of your site URL, your e-mail address and a line or two about your site.

Off-line promotions - An Art Comments Mail Form
Not everyone is on-line. When we seek to build a community of diversity on the Internet we must deal with the reality of the digital divide. We know most potential contributing artists and much of our audience is not yet on-line. When we asked people to discuss the ART-ACT submissions we have posted, we did not receive many responses on-line. So we made an 8.5x11 off-line mailer form that displays on one side an ART-ACT image and on the other side an invitation to write a comment that can be sent to us for posting on our website below the artwork pictured. We made up samples of this form with 12 different images from our contest and placed them in an art exhibit we hung in January at ARC Gallery in Chicago. We included these comment fliers in our mailing to 700 artists.
On April 14th I visited Champaign, Illinois to join with Native American groups from around Illinois and beyond to protest the University of Illinois "mascot", Chief Illiniwek, and testify to their Board of Directors which was accepting statements regarding their "mascot" on that day. They are still accepting written testimony on this issue at www.uiuc.edu. I gave out 300 mailers with the art of Charlene Teters reflecting on the subject of Native American "mascots." We could have passed out 3,000 at this event.

I have included a similar art-mailer in your packet for you to help us build our discussion. I hope you will express yourself. Naturally, if you would like to discuss a different image than the one you receive, you can visit our website and e-mail us directly. We also have initiated a new segment inviting personal true stories of racism for posting on our site. You will find this segment presently empty. You, the public, must fill this void.

Don't Bury Yourself Online - Live in the Real World

Actions like those above promote our arts agency and our website, offline and on. I recommend you do not confine your actions to your website alone. Combine it with actions in real space and you will reach a broader audience. At the Building Democracy Conference sponsored by the Center for New Community (www.newcomm.org) which tracks the far right in Illinois the story was told of a hate group's attempt to create a national action relying on the Internet to organize a response. They got twelve organizers to attend. We must not make their mistake. Personal contact is still the most effective organizing principle in building a community of diversity. Be human. Thank you.

USEFUL LINKS FOR DEVELOPING AND PROMOTING WEBSITES

Search Engines

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/whatsnew.html
Free Newletter that is well known.

http://searchengineforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi
Webmasters discuss Search Engine issues.

http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/searchengine.htm
Articles on Search Engines.

http://www.virtualpromote.com/
Free Newletter with promotion tips - plus much more.

http://www.techmailings.com/
Free Newletters sorted into categories tech & web help topics.

Internet Promotion

http://www.online-pr.com/
Great source for media links and public relations needs.

http://www.newsbureau.com/tips/
Articles on dealing with the media to promote your website.

Website Maintenance

http://www.netmechanic.com/
Check your links, HTML, page load time, and spelling.

http://www.linkpopularity.com/
Link Popularity - Check out what sites link back to yours.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Free software to check all the links on your site.

Chris Drew
<mailto:umcac@art-teez.org>
Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center
http://www.art-teez.org We dress Chicago and the
Internet in t-shirt art. Come get some! 773/561-7676