#open homes photography san francisco address

[achuzhoyphoto]

Website : https://www.achuzhoyphoto.com/

Address : San Francisco, California

Alex began his professional photography career as a wedding and commercial photographer, later expanding into fine-art photography. Alex worked with several men’s fashion retail stores in San Diego and was published in local magazines. His commercial photography career spanned over a decade, after which he transitioned to selling residential and commercial Real Estate. Both careers helped Alex to hone his service-oriented skills while developing an eye for detail. An understanding of residential and commercial Real Estate marketing, and of key selling points, combined with a uniquely fine art photographic touch influence Alex’s approach to capturing powerful images for today's Real Estate market.

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[grupaok]

EXHIBITION OF FORCE

In 2016 Arden Sherman and Julian Myers-Szupinska published “Exhibition of Force,” a review of the reopened SFMOMA, on the blog of The Exhibitionist, a journal about exhibition making, which was taken offline in 2017. We are retrieving that review here, as it speaks to the longer history of the current crisis at that museum.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been closed for major renovations for the last three years. Designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, the new building, a hybrid of the 1995 building designed by Mario Botta and the white wavy tower designed by the Scandinavian architects, opens to the public this weekend.

The impetus for this renovation can be credited, in large part, to the donations of Doris and Donald Fisher, the progenitors of Gap Inc. The fortune accumulated from their clothing empire allowed the couple to become philanthropists, art collectors, and SFMOMA board members. After a long-bruited (but eventually abandoned) plan for the Fishers to build their own museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, the family negotiated a hundred-year “loan” of their vaunted collection to the museum, as well as a massive donation to a capital campaign that would allow for a $305 million building expansion to accommodate it. The museum subsequently raised a comparable amount to bolster its endowment and operating costs. The revamped institution held a sequence of opening events in April and May — press and member previews, a glitzy gala — that culminates with its May 14, 2016, reopening to the general public.

Bay Area institutions keyed a number of events to SFMOMA’s reopening to take advantage of increased visibility and visitors, among them the Parking Lot Art Fair at Fort Mason, various gallery openings and performances, and the Open Engagement conference at the Oakland Museum of California. That last, an annual conference of socially engaged artists and activists, took “power” as its theme. This was partly an homage to the history of organizers and radicals in the Bay Area (e.g., Black Power) but perhaps also a pointed riposte to the current tech boom in San Francisco (i.e., “money power”), which has occasioned skyrocketing rents and a massive reorganization of the city’s social ecology over the last several years.

The lens of “power” is a useful way to think about the new SFMOMA’s elaborate and overwhelming opening gambit. Take, for example, the architecture. When Mario Botta designed SFMOMA’s downtown San Francisco building in 1995, he took seriously the task of making a space where people were not intimidated and where art would be the star — even if the stately black marble of the Botta atrium and staircase was ultimately a peculiar way to enter (the new museum keeps the Botta marble but replaces his staircase with a lighter zigzag). The Snøhetta addition, too, focuses on the art, but does so at a massively enlarged scale: the new SFMOMA is two and a half times its former size and has more square footage than the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a city ten times the size of San Francisco. The result is something like a sprawling, seven-story, two-building mega-mansion: a huge feat, but one that feels endless rather than bountiful.

This building squares with the city’s new ambitions for itself. The two buildings hitched together, the somber Botta and the sleek Snøhetta, signal a sort of timetable of the city’s own history, and track an extreme influx of money in recent years. Such an architectural “twofer” confesses San Francisco’s specific brand of preservationism while also trumpeting its will to international and institutional power — and precisely in a neighborhood historically referred to as “skid row.”

The contents of this building, the expanded collection, signal a different sort of power. Museum collections are of course vital ways for regular viewers to see historically important works of art, and better that they are available to the public than squirreled away in collectors’ homes. And of course a museum’s holdings become a fundament of the institution’s identity. But this issue is complicated in the new SFMOMA by the branding of the works to particular donors — especially the two floors allotted for the Fishers’ collection and the one for Peter and Mimi Haas. Interestingly, the Haas works represent another fortune derived from jeans: Peter Haas was president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co. from 1976 until his death in 2005. This means that pretty much anyone with a pair of pants in their closet has something like an investor’s share in the museum’s collections.

These galleries retain the blue-chip outlines of their moneyed collectors. For the Fishers, this means postwar American and German abstraction, almost universally by white men, barring a single room of paintings by Agnes Martin. And for the Haases, it means rambunctious pop by a somewhat more diverse cohort of artists — a collection that feels rather more familiar for an “international museum.” And like the architecture, these collections too exhibit a certain divided personality: given pride of place in the new galleries, they nevertheless reproduce the tastes and purchasing strategies of their CEO collectors, whose predilections may not always align with the museum’s own “objective” priorities — though at SFMOMA the two priorities have now become hard to disentangle.

This is especially true with the Fisher collection. If their unambitious love of Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol is vindicated by the history of art, it is vitiated by redundancies among big sign-value works throughout the museum, both within each floor and among the various “exhibitions” in which these artists make repeat appearances. The works become hard to distinguish from one another; each one signals the same sign-value, of importance plus ownership. Making one’s way through the museum one is constantly struck with déjà vu. In which room, or floor, did I see the blue Kelly painting? Did I already see that Warhol? What should we gather from these recurrences? That is, except for the co-presence of all these treasures.

The works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, many installed in the same spot as before the renovation, are varied in comparison, and feel distinct from the Fisher trove, not least because they have a greater number of works by artists of color, and by women. The galleries devoted to photography are excellent, too, and include works by younger and more experimental artists. And the works on view from the museum’s Campaign for Art initiative — assembled since 2009 by a wider range of donors, and including three thousand works to date — incorporate more pieces by living artists and artists from California, some of whom donated their own works to the collection.

Such works have a reason to be here. More so, at least, than those resulting from the Fishers’ proclivity for Germans, which, in a perplexing turn, gives SFMOMA particularly strong holdings in postwar German artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer. But why exactly do major stores of these artists belong in San Francisco, aside from the Fishers’ fascination with them? Kiefer in particular is poorly served by being so abstracted from the German history in which his Wagnerian dramatism has ambiguous force. In San Francisco, and presented without mediation as such, they read as merely apocalyptic decor. One can only wonder why corporate CEOs have an affinity for this stuff.

Two more aspects of power come to mind. One is that of audience: Just which public does this new museum address? With admission set at a steep $25 and tightly timed timeslots for gallery access, will this institution appeal to a local audience, or largely to tourists for whom this sticker shock won’t matter so much? Major expansions at other institutions have not reliably led to expanded audiences, local or touristic, and it is not sure what will happen in this case, either. SFMOMA’s free admission for those under eighteen is a salutary countermove. Even better is an ongoing collaboration between the education and curatorial departments under the rubric of Public Dialogue, which aims to build partnerships with community galleries and public libraries. Such programs promise to continue the vision of the museum’s founders, which hoped to make the museum a vital part of the cultural life of city residents. But this is a long game, and it is hard to tell just how much it will engage Bay Area audiences on a deep and meaningful level.

And this affirmation of “city residents” rests on an anxious precipice in today’s San Francisco, where citizenship and residency are increasingly attenuated. Perhaps, given the extreme dislocations that characterize the city today, with warehouse districts now serving as tent cities for homeless post-residents, the museum ought to hold a “displaced residents day?” One has to wonder what they, or we, should think about when looking at a work like Charles Ray’s Sleeping Woman (2012) — which, as the wall text helpfully explains, speaks to how homeless people are frequently ignored or invisible in society. Ray’s work calls to mind another “gap,” that between rich and poor, between those included in San Francisco’s current boom and those ejected from it. This disparity is hardly invisible in San Francisco these days, but rather is a harsh and inescapable part of daily life.

Furthermore, moments of strategic generosity as described above are balanced uneasily against the power of money in the museum as it stands (the value of the expanded collection has been estimated at a billion dollars). One must nevertheless mark a circular logic to this extraordinary concentration of value: the Fishers and others gave SFMOMA money to expand, while the very reason the museum needed to expand was to house the Fishers’ “loan.” And so SFMOMA is the channel through which this money coursed, while accumulating comparatively little capital, intellectual or otherwise, of its own, independent of its lenders. In some weird sense, therefore, the power of money in this case may be more marginal than it appears. Perhaps the best we can hope, then, is that this perpetual motion machine now locked onto the old museum might spin off more programs like Public Dialogue, and worthwhile exhibitions off the main, collector-driven concourse — and that there is still a local audience in San Francisco interested in seeing them.

__

Arden Sherman is Curator at Hunter East Harlem Gallery, a multi-disciplinary space for art exhibitions and socially-minded projects located in Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work in New York City. Julian Myers-Szupinska was senior editor of The Exhibitionist, and is a member of grupa o.k. Photo: Charles Ray, Sleeping Woman, 2012, installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photograph by Julian Myers-Szupinska.

[thefranklinoutdoor]

Don't You Stop, We Won't Stop

EC Brown  Lise Baggesen Rodrigo  Lara Zendejas

Reopening: Sunday, September 6, 2020 

2pm to 4pm

Closing: Saturday, September 19

“Hot topic is the way that we rhyme Hot topic is the way that we rhyme One step behind the drum style One step behind the drum style Carol Rama and Eleanor Antin Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman You’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but Don’t give a damn I’m listening anyway Stop, don’t you stop I can’t live if you stop Don’t you stop Gretchen Phillips and Cibo Matto Leslie Feinberg and Faith Ringgold Mr. Lady, Laura Cottingham Mab Segrest and The Butchies, man Don’t stop Don’t you stop We won’t stop Don’t you stop So many roads and so much opinion So much shit to give in, give in to So many rules and so much opinion So much bullshit but we won’t give in Stop, we won’t stop Don’t you stop I can’t live if you stop Tammy Rae Carland and Sleater-Kinney Vivienne Dick…” - Lyrics from Hot Topic by Le Tigre, 1999

EC Brown

My wife Catie’s annual Krampusnacht event last December included a holiday market, and I presented a bin of paintings on chipboard that were folded like heavy 45 sleeves—with mulch+foliage+ploymer record shapes that became too encrusted to fit inside. The images invented an old psychedelic Krampus underground—militant and Luciferian. Dolly appeared as a surprise digression in the wee hours before the deadline. For the past seven years of Krampusnacht, I have sidestepped the European relics in favor of thoughts about American undercurrents—rowdy, sexual, heretical, and perilously savage. But I like to imagine that the deeper magma is something propulsive and generative, rather than malignantly atavistic. An inevitable rebellion against civilized living. With Edra’s prodding, I’m pursuing the Dolly tangent: imagining a history in which the liftoff of her solo career was profoundly controversial—to the point that an enclave of armed male consorts developed around her. Perhaps her audience had detected a Luciferian bent in her, that would need time to transition to a more acceptable yet radical Christianity. EC Brown: I prefer a collision of illustrative image-making that begs attention to narratives, and physical formats that shift these works into roles as implements or tactical objects addressing spaces and situations. Images have been a tempered fever-dream drawing from 1960s–70s aesthetics, pop occultism, science fiction, Modernist architecture, biomimetics, industrial photography and observational cinema. Often they are absurdist historical revisions. Since 2005, I have mostly operated in Chicago’s domestic artspaces. I co-organized Floor Length and Tux (2009–2014, with Catie Olson) and COMA (2006–2008, with Annika Seitz). I periodically organize a roving series entitled ASCII (2011–present). Since 2015, I have been conducting a discreet series out of my home entitled Tascam.

Lise Haller Baggesen

Interpersonal relationships, intergenerational and intersectional eco- and cyber- and xeno- feminism, reproductive justice, therapeutic aesthetics, color field painting, sci-fi tie-dye, hippie modernism, bio-punk, grunge, glam, and disco, are some of the vernaculars that inform my body of work. Since graduating in 2013 from SAIC’s department of Visual and Critical Studies, this organic body has manifested itself in a hybrid and polydisciplinamorous practice, including writing, audio-visual installations, textile-, and sartorial works. Mother is a noun and a verb; I regard my practice as a sourdough, a gestation of material, out of which individual works, texts, and shows are wrought, while the mother remains, active. Lise Haller Baggesen is a Danish born, Amsterdam raised, Chicago based, interdisciplinary artist. Her hybrid practice includes writing, installation, performative, sartorial and textile-based work. She is the author of Mothernism, and exhibits internationally, most recently with the multimedia show HATORADE RETROGRADE: THE MUSICAL, which premiered at SoEx in San Francisco in 2019 and will travel to G400 in Chicago in 2020

Rodrigo Lara Zendejas

I create memorials—fragmented, mischievous, and imperfect realities that reflect both a formal

break from traditional shape, while presenting an assemblage version of our collective social and political thoughts, concerns, and hopes. Although I was trained in the traditions of classical art, my pieces now are not always clean. Or finished. Or beautiful. My work holds the memory of an intimate process of becoming. In some bodies of work, I present obvious nooks and gashes, broad, quick strokes, and secretive, featherlike fingerprints, all of which aided in the modeling of the clay during the process of bringing the subject to life. It is this visceral and intimate approach to materials and form that drive my subjects of memory and memorialization through all of my works. When considering the human form and its relationship to memorialization, immediate thoughts of bronze statues at historical sites come to mind. My fascination, however, is in the way that memory—with its inherent, ever-changing fluidity—disrupts our ability to fully or truthfully freeze, or memorialize people, moments, or perspectives in history. Instead, it is our momentary glimpses of memory and hindsight that drive how we understand the present. As a Mexican immigrant to the United States, my works often rely on my own fragmented memories and stories of home, my direct experiences with fervent Catholicism, and other’s heroic (yet common) anecdotes of border crossing and acclimating to living in America. However, while my memories and relationships to patriotism, politics, my background, and my longing for the familiar certainly influence my work, it is my interest in the process, the poetics of the materials, and the action of sculpting that motivate my continued practice. Born in Mexico in 1981, Rodrigo Lara Zendejas received a MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013. And his BFA from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. He has received several awards including: Proyectos Especiales FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) Mexico City; Emerging Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York City; Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico City; Extraordinary Abilities Visa, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Artist’s Grant, Vermont Studio Art Center; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, 2013 SAIC Fellowship Competition; PECDA Estudios en el extranjero,Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes; the International Graduate Scholarship, SAIC; and the John W. Kurtich Travel Scholarship, SAIC Berlin/Kassel, Germany; among others. He won the first price in sculpture at the National Award for Visual Arts in Mexico in 2010. Lara held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in the state of Mexico, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas, among others. He has been in such residencies as the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ragdale, Cross Currents: Cultural Exchange, Mana Miami, and Rogers Art Loft. Currently, Lara lives and works in Chicago.

THE  FRANKLIN

3522 W. Franklin Blvd, Chicago IL 60624 

Cell to text: (312)823-3632

Hours: Saturdays 2pm - 4pm  and by appointment 

COVID-19 update: The Franklin (outdoor project space) is accessible at all times while the exhibitions are on view. The side front and side gates will be open for easy access. No access to indoors (house) at this time. The Franklin Collection is on view by appointment only.

Online: http://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com

Instagram: @thefranklinoutdoor

[phalloplastytime]

Phalloplasty Consultation with Dr. Chen & Dr. Watt

Here is what I remember from my experience going through my consultation with Dr. Chen from GU Recon (his private practice) and Dr. Watt from the Buncke clinic in San Francisco, CA, USA. My apologies for the length, I wanted this to feel kind of immersive for those of us still in the waiting process because stuff like this helped me. Also - small content warning I do use a couple anatomical terms.

For those of you unfamiliar, Dr. Chen is a urologist and Dr. Watt is a microsurgeon.

My partner and I traveled down to San Francisco to stay for two nights. We flew in on Thursday evening and flew out on Saturday evening, not wanting to be gone for too long and rack up even more expense on the hotel bill. If I had planned ahead several months ago, I would have tried to stay at the Quest House during this time but I didn’t realize a short stay was potentially possible. 

We are fortunate to be able to use the public transit system offered in SF, which is pretty good in my opinion. They have buses, trolleys (cable cars?), and an underground/train system. We utilized this to make our way over to Castro street, where the medical office building and also the hospital are located. 

Without any plans for the day we went ahead and headed over about 3 hours early because I had seen that there was a dog park right nearby. We sat and watched local dogs come and play and have a break in the middle of the day and we ended up meeting an older gentleman whose dog wouldn’t leave us alone asking for pets. It was pretty great, and nicely calming as I was pretty nervous before the consultation. We then got some food at the local cafe on the corner. It was actually pretty good. 

We realized we still had time to kill so we decided to hike up the hill to the Buena Vista park where we looked out over the city and rested for a bit. There’s a path that has some disturbingly friendly squirrels on it.

About 30 minutes before my appointment headed over. Inside the medical office building, Dr. Chen’s suite is right across the hall from the Buncke clinic. I wasn’t sure where to go to check in, so we walked all the way down to the entrance of GU Recon and saw the door was open. Inside the waiting room was fairly spacious with comfy seating and plenty of random coffee table books to peruse. There was nobody else there at the time. At the receptionist window was a sign indicating to check in over at the Buncke clinic, so we quickly hopped across the hall. 

The Buncke clinic waiting room was much smaller and was actually quite crowded for a Friday afternoon. I checked in and they asked for my ID and insurance card (even though I had sent in pictures), and they didn’t ask for any kind of copay or payment. I suspect I will receive a bill at some point for the specialist copay from my insurance which is $30. Hopefully.

They instructed us to head back over to Dr. Chen’s office to wait, so we went back over and started looking through a photography book. At this point I was still about 25 minutes early to the appointment so I was ready to wait however long it would take. 

About 5 minutes later, Dr. Chen himself appeared behind the reception area with pizza and Starbucks in hand, apparently not expecting anyone to be in the waiting room. He noticed us right away and began apologizing for the wait. He explained the schedule didn’t indicate whether or not we were having a phone consultation, so he just assumed it was going to be over the phone based on my address. 

This whole interaction solidified every good thing I had heard about Dr. Chen, and I immediately felt so… normal. That’s the best way I can describe what I felt. I felt like I had known Dr. Chen for years and that he was.. reachable. Human. 

He told us it would be a few minutes, and sure enough a few minutes later Dr. Chen and Dr. Watt appeared at the door and we made introductions. My partner came with me because I wanted her to hear what the doctors had to say and I wanted another pair of ears listening, and also because I wanted the doctors to see that I had support. 

We went down a narrow hallway and went into Dr. Chen’s office, which hosted another comfy couch which he had us sit on while he and Dr. Watt sat across on office chairs. They each had some papers (my medical information). The room was somewhat dimly lit, but calming and comfortable. 

The consult started with Dr. Chen confirming my reason for the visit (seeking phalloplasty), and he asked me how important it was to me to stand to pee. I explained that my personal goals were 1 - Sensation, 2 - Stand to pee, 3 - Aesthetics, and 4 - Sexual function. Which, again, are personal goals and it is completely valid to have other priorities with lower surgery. This is my own journey. 

We then went over my medical history, which is fairly short, but Dr. Chen was thorough and asked me about my minor eczema, asthma, and migraines. Dr. Watt was quietly taking notes and listening during this time. Next, they asked about any trauma to either arm and I basically explained how my right arm is essentially immediately disqualified from being a donor arm. In my specific case, I broke my right arm when I was 18 months old and had to have a surgical repair. This repair didn’t heal correctly and now my arm when extended is quite crooked. 

This has put some strain on my ulnar nerve and gives me hypersensitivity in my palm.  Further, I had a different surgery on my forearm which involved an incision and left me with a scar right in the middle of the graft area. This could compromise the blood supply, so we pretty much immediately dismissed my right arm as an option. To top it off, it is my dominant arm for most activities. I kind of would have preferred to keep my left arm nice and clear of any scars, but I think having 1.75 properly functioning arms is preferable to only 1 functioning arm in case my right side nerves ever gave out. 

Next, Dr. Chen went on to explain his portion of the surgery - he starts with the vaginectomy and then relocates the end of the urethra to the natal phallus using labia minora tissue. He then mobilizes this and relocates it to the other side of the pubic bone to come out to the site of where the neophallus will be placed. At some point during this discussion, Dr. Chen explained the complication rate and he was both realistic and optimistic about it. He said the vast majority of complications that happen are fixable. Further, the most common complications often heal on their own. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but he said of the patients that do have fistulas, only around 20% of them end up needing a surgical fix. Strictures don’t show up right away, and usually occur within the first year. 

While Dr. Chen does the work down below, Dr. Watt explained his team mobilizes the RFF and prepares it for the new location, using the tube-in-tube method to create the urethra and phallus. Dr. Chen places a foley catheter through the neophallus and into the relocated urethra to line everything up, and he sutures everything together once the microsurgeons connect the blood supply and nerves. Dr. Chen then places the suprapubic catheter and the RFF site is covered with the split-thickness graft from the leg.  If requested, Dr. Watt would place integra on the RFF donor site before the split thickness graft (not staged like other teams).

They then explained what recovery typically looks like - 5 nights in the hospital, including 4 days of strict bed rest and then up and walking on day 5.  If you’re able to walk well enough, you get to leave to recover elsewhere. They then check up every week for four weeks before sending you home. During your 1 week post-op visit, Dr. Chen removes the foley catheter from the neourethra complex. You start your peeing trials just before the 3 week checkup, and if you’re able to empty enough of your bladder the SP catheter can be removed. If you have significant fistula(s), an additional week for healing may be allotted and the SP catheter retained for that time. 

Dr. Watt then did an exam of my arm, performing the Allen’s test to see if my hand receives enough blood if the artery they harvest for the RFF is removed. The test seemed really quick, but I guess with how fast my hand refilled with blood he was very confident I was a candidate for RFF. He indicated that no further testing of my forearm blood supply was needed. 

He examined the hair on my forearm, which turned out to be really funny because while he was looking at it he guessed that I had undergone electrolysis up to about 6 inches down my forearm. I laughed a little and explained nope, I just haven’t grown hair there in my ~5 years on testosterone. He gently pinched/grabbed the skin to see the thickness and said they’ll likely delay my glansplasty, and when he looked at the underside of my arm where the urethra graft would be taken he said I was basically hairless there and that any electrolysis at this point would just to be to remove hair from what will be the outside of my phallus, which is optional and he said I can always shave or use something like Nair. 

I then had a chance to quickly look over my questions to try to find any that hadn’t been answered. They were pretty thorough so the most I asked about was about Integra because I was most curious about it. Dr. Chen then explained that he needed to do a quick visual exam of the genital/mons region and we walked across the hall to an exam room.

He apologized for the discomfort and had me just quickly drop my shorts while standing. All in all I think it took about 5 seconds of exposure. When we got back into the other room he reported to Dr. Watt something along the lines of “minor prominence” of the mons. I checked my questions one more time and asked if they had any testicular implants that I could feel, but Dr. Chen explained that he had a patient waiting that was somewhat urgent and he promised that he would show me next time. He was very polite about it and I understood, and all in all I think the consultation took about 30 minutes. 

We said our nice to meet yous and goodbyes and Dr. Chen showed us out the shortcut out of the clinic and boom it was over. Despite the quick ending, I still didn’t feel rushed out of there and felt like they really took the time to make sure I understood the surgery and that my possible concerns were heard. 

All in all I left feeling really good, which for me was everything. I was actually excited about the future. Also, they said they would be forwarding my information to the phalloplasty team about our consultation, and that they should be reaching out to schedule with me. What ended up happening was I emailed Logan with a follow-up question and after we emailed back a forth a couple times, Logan asked me if I wanted to set my date. So now I am officially on the books for Left RFF Phalloplasty and words cannot describe how much joy/relief/excitement I feel about it. 

Like, I still can’t believe I get to do this and I don’t know when reality will set in. But for the first time in months, I am hopeful and optimistic about the future. 

Edit: I forgot to mention that Dr. Chen also will perform a scrotoplasty during his part of the procedure.

[architectnews]

Laurel Heights 1, San Francisco Residence

Laurel Heights 1, San Francisco Building Project, CA Real Estate renovation, Californian Architecture Design Images

Laurel Heights 1 in San Francisco

Jan 5, 2022

Interior Design: Feldman Architecture

Location: San Francisco, northern California, USA

Photos by Paul Dyer

Laurel Heights 1, SF

A Bay Area couple with three young children purchased a unique corner lot on the edge of San Francisco’s Laurel Heights neighborhood with rare views of the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge. Having worked with the Feldman Architecture team previously on a home in Potrero Hill, the clients for Laurel Heights 1 presented their vision of a refreshed, unique, modern home, which later evolved to include an added primary suite that takes advantage of corner views, and interiors inspired by their colorful art collection.

The Feldman Architecture team first worked to address an originally awkward entry sequence by distinguishing the home’s orientation – clarifying a modernized front façade facing north with a graceful entry sequence covered by a metal awning. The original lot provided very little outdoor living space; the design focused on inviting in misted views with the use of expansive windows, creating the effect of an airy glass box hovering just above street level.

The original structure lacked privacy from the taller neighboring multifamily unit, and the wedge-shaped side yard often felt disrupted by street noise. The renovation enclosed the side yard with a carefully designed fence that maintains a sense of privacy and mitigates street noise while preserving bridge and ocean views. The paneled wood fence varies in opacity and adds visual interest to the front façade while creatively protecting an expanded entertaining area clad with heated furniture and a hot tub for foggy San Francisco evenings.

The design reshuffled the floor plan on the main level – three kid’s bedrooms and two bathrooms, along with built in storage, occupy the eastern corners. An open sitting room, dining room, and kitchen with newly installed windows face northwest- introducing natural light and giving the home’s public spaces distinctly San Franciscan views.

The materiality is light and natural with drops of color – an indigo kitchen backsplash and seafoam powder room tiles foster a playful vibe. In the dining room, a built in, custom metallic cocktail station glows with inset lighting, and plush green chairs complement bold art from the client’s collection. Pieces from painter Shaina McCoy’s A Family Affair series provide a jewel toned material palette from which our interiors team drew inspiration for furnishings and finishes.

The lightly perched additional story adds a primary bedroom, green roof and foggy bridge and ocean vistas. A lofted home office with streamlined custom casework uses space efficiently and maximizes views from the private workstation. The primary bathroom features a free-standing tub and delicately tiled walls that feel both simple and highly detailed.

This urban renovation provides a transitional take on mixing bold colors with neutrals and utilizes durable materials for an active family looking to take advantage of both a comfortable and modern lifestyle.

Laurel Heights 1 in San Francisco, CA – Building Information

Completion date: 2021

Contractor: Eastwood Development Landscape Design: Steph Kawachi Landscape Design and Loretta Gargan Landscape + Design Structural Engineer: Sheerline Engineering Interior Design: Feldman Architecture Lighting Design: Kim Cladas Lighting Design

Photography: Paul Dyer

Laurel Heights 1, San Francisco images / information received 050122

Location: San Francisco, California, USA

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Peninsula Residence, San Francisco Bay Area, California Design: Richard Beard Architects ; Kelly Hohla Interiors provided interior design photograph : Paul Dyer Peninsula Residence San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Architecture Offices – architecture firm listings on e-architect

Big Ranch Road Retreat in the Napa Valley Design: WDA (William Duff Architects) photograph © Matthew Millman Photography Napa Valley Barn Renewal

American Architecture

Foster + Partners Architects

Comments / photos for the Laurel Heights 1 San Francisco design by Feldman Architecture page welcome

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[armeniaitn]

Armenian businesses record success on international level

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/economy/armenian-businesses-record-success-on-international-level-39700-27-07-2020/

Armenian businesses record success on international level

Armenia is known to be a great country with smart opportunities. In spite of the difficulties in the economy, the government and private sector work hard on developing high-tech and business development. With low taxes, educated and low-cost labor, and an investment-friendly environment Armenia enjoys a favorable position among the countries to start a business and grow globally. As a result a win-win situation is created between growth-minded businesses and developing countries, like Armenia.

Education, Research and Development

Education in Armenia allows to lay solid foundations for the prosperity of the country. Academic educational atmosphere, hard-work and motivation made it possible to reach significant success in many fields for centuries. Armenia has a very high level of education among the CIS countries with a comparably high adult-literacy rate. Recently a lot of universities, companies, foundations make a huge input on specialization in information and communication technologies and business.

Research and Development is considered one of the key drivers of growth in the country. The IT sector has been expanded during the recent years thanks to the research and development branches in Armenia by global tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, National Instruments, etc.  Government and sectoral representatives have been implementing a number of new initiatives for revealing and developing R&D potential. The key focus has been on new educational initiatives, which are believed to boost the country’s technology and R&D.  An outstanding example of which is TUMO– a center for creative technologies offering education centers for teens specializing in technology and design. Four TUMO centers operate in Yerevan, Gyumri, Dilijan, Stepanakert in Armenia, 2 international centers in Beirut and Paris. Tumo Berlin is planned to be opened in October 2020 and TUMO Tirana, Moscow and Tokyo are on the list. The International network of TUMO centers is expanding focusing on several targets: programming, animation, filmmaking, graphic design, 3D modelling, game development, music, drawing, photography and robotics.

Information and Communication Technologies is one of the most desired industries, so many laboratories, technology centers open in the country and contribute to having high-quality specialists in the sphere. This makes Armenian workforce very competitive on a local level and attractive on international level. Armenian specialists are considered highly productive among global ICT communities, making the sector attractive to foreign investors. Besides Armenia is considered to be a low-cost location for offshore development, where salaries are competitive with those of many outsourcing countries such as Israel or China.

Here you can find out more about some competitive Armenian businesses and startups taking Armenian entrepreneurship to new heights. And given the size of Armenian economy any investment and  profit brought by them is very likely to be significant.

Startups

  PicsArt

Armenia is a true heaven for startups, which is proved by the dramatic number of startups created in the country.Launched in 2011 PicsArt grew from a 10 people startup to one of the world’s top photo editing apps. By 2020 the app was downloaded up to 600 million times, which increased after pandemic, as people had more free time and needed to use their creativity. The number of edits on the platform grew by 15-20% and the number of active users per month exceeded 150 million. The headquarters of the company are both in Yerevan, Armenia and San-Francisco, USA and offices are located in Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo and LA.

Krisp

Some startups have been globally recognized and successful in the age of coronavirus and Krisp is another good example, which was featured by prominent media like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post as one of the top tools to make remote work more effective during the coronavirus outbreak. It is a noise-reduction app, which mutes the background noise during calls making life easier while working from home.

Robin the Robot

Expper Technologies creates robots for corporate businesses intended for providing customer-care. Their most famous creation is Robin the Robot. It is a social robot, companion for children when they are hospitalized and helps them during medical treatment creating positive experiences. You can read on Forbes how Robin the Robot comforts kids in hospitals and helps with Covid-19. They started sales in Armenia in 2019 and now extended to the US market.

Prominent startups targeting international market also include: Arloopa– Armenian project working on augmented and virtual reality, 2D and 3D content, SoloLearn– educational platform making learning programming languages fun, which was included in top 10 fastest growing start-ups in Silicon Valley, CityBugs–  a system allowing city authorities to quickly address issues when citizens report them, Teamable– a recruiting tech company, which helps companies to connect to, engage with and hire top talent referrals.

Service Industry

ProDigi

The opportunity to provide  high-quality remote services (also big thanks to Covid-19) makes Armenian companies very attractive on an international level. The educational background and constant strive for development help Armenia-based companies like ProDigi  digital marketing agency provide services to the UK, US, Canada, Singapore, Hong-Kong and to other major business hubs. It feels like digital knowledge is the sun-kissed apricot of the marketing industry, which the company successfully exports to big markets. The process is accompanied with providing high-quality services with great communication and interpersonal skills which makes the foreign clientele feel at home. Thus, providing services to different countries the company brings economic growth to Armenia by paying taxes and generating in-country value. The business strives to contribute to local community growth by employing fresh graduates and turning them into professionals tracking international trends.

Digital Caramel

A related experience also gained Digital Caramel, which successfully manages to  provide digital services to most of the CIS countries and Russia. Besides the agency now is considering entering Western and Asian markets. This industry allows it to have a headquarter office in Armenia and easily conquer new markets by breaking the old rules and language barriers. The company services are entirely targeted to the international market, which results in contributing to the country budget. Importantly, the creation of new employment opportunities and jobs is exclusively done in Armenia increasing to the number of new workplaces.

Arara

The economical development of the country is closely connected with the tourism industry, which recently has been strongly hit by the coronavirus outbreak. Armenia was booming as a cultural travel destination and the hospitality was on a very high level, which allowed travel agencies like Arara Tour to expand their services to the whole Caucasus region and Central Asia. Operating from head offices in Armenia, Georgia and Central Asia the company organizes tours directed to 8 different countries. In fact bringing the profit to Armenia from tours to Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan. Despite the massive fall of the international tourist arrivals, the experts in the field are optimistic and hopeful about the recovery of industry. So does the agency with perspectives on opening new branches in Ukraine and Russia.

IT and Advanced Technologies

As you may have noticed most of the startups were IT startups, which indicates the favorable business climate that IT companies enjoy in Armenia and explains why it is called “The Silicon Mountains”. Armenia has extensive experience, with large multinational IT companies having operations in the country (Microsoft, Intel, Synopsys, Oracle, Cisco, National Instruments, etc). Most of Armenian IT companies specialize in software development like

SFL

SFL is a software development and consulting company which brings digital transformation to a number of businesses on the globe. Using innovative technologies the company delivers personalized multichannel user-experience with higher lifetime value. Founded in 2006, now the company has headquarters in Yerevan and Chicago with over 100 specialists.

10Web

10 Web is a complete WordPress managing platform with a full suite of tools from cloud hosting to page builder to easily design, develop and launch websites, as well as manage, optimize and maintain existing websites. 10Web supports tens of thousands of clients ranging from small businesses to global enterprises. Company hosts over 1,000 websites and its products have been downloaded over 20 million times.

Successful investments and collaborations across different industries in the international market suggest that Armenia is a prefered destination for global players. The country’s potential is being effectively used, but the numbers and success indicate even a better future.

Read original article here.

[abujaihs-blog]

American Institute Of Architects Announces The Best Housing Designs Of 2019

The American Institute of Architects recently bestowed a series of awards to the winners of 12 exceptional residential designs. AIA's Housing Awards program, now in its 19th year, was established to celebrate the best in housing design for new construction, renovations and restorations. Awards were given in the following categories: one- and two-family custom residences, one- and two-family production homes, multifamily housing and specialized housing. This year’s recipients were selected by a five-member jury that evaluated projects for demonstrating design excellence. The jury evaluates whether designs are sustainable, affordable, durable, innovative, socially impactful, meeting client needs and addressing the natural and built environment. Here are the 2019 Housing Awards recipients and jury comments: Category 1: One- and Two-Family Custom Residences 

BATES MASI + ARCHITECTS Georgica Cove, East Hampton, New York | Bates Masi + Architects: Each structure of Georgica Cove has an independent mechanical system allowing it to be shut down when unoccupied.

This allows the livability of the house to expand and contract whether the owners are alone, hosting dinner guests or have a full house of overnight guests.

JAMES BRITTAIN Mirror Point, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia | MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Mirror Point is expressed as an elevated, 80-foot long extruded fish shed, supported by a steel aedicule and a board formed concrete entry core. The building is precisely sited using existing topography to maximize Southern passive solar energy and views to the lake. Tropical Cyclone Fani Hits The Indian Coast

ERIN FEINBLATT Off-the-Grid Guesthouse, Central Coast, California | Anacapa Architecture and Willson Design: The rooftop is planted with native grasses, and the house is made of sustainable building materials such as steel, concrete and glass. The home is completely self-sufficient and includes its own sewage treatment as well as an on-site water supply and a rooftop photovoltaic system to meet all energy needs. Category 2: One- and Two-Family Production Homes

JOHNSEN SCHMALING ARCHITECTS Oak Park Housing, Sacramento, California | Johnsen Schmaling Architects: Oak Park Housing is a compact infill development on a long-vacant lot in Sacramento’s Oak Park district. Designed as prototypical single-family homes around an ambitiously stringent construction budget to position the homes at the lower end of the market spectrum, the interior had to be organized in compact volumes with uncompromising spatial efficiency, avoiding any gratuitous square footage that would balloon the unit size without tangible functional or experiential benefits.

SAM OBERTER Tiny Tower, Philadelphia | Interface Studio Architects: Tiny Tower places a 1,250-square-foot home on a 12-by-29-foot lot, whose similarly scaled neighbors are currently used as single-car parking and rear yards for the adjacent houses. Although it measures only 38 feet in height, Tiny Tower is organized like a full-scale skyscraper. Category 3: Multifamily Housing

Bigwin Island Club Cabins, Baysville, Canada | MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Although formally dramatic, the cabins employ standard construction techniques, including typical gang nail trusses for the roof. This strategy, one of drawing upon local knowledge and expertise to reinterpret the vernacular, results in unique buildings that can capitalize on the economy of their construction. This is locavore architecture that is made of local materials and construction methods.

Bill Sorro Community, San Francisco | Kennerly Architecture & Planning: Bill Sorro Community provides an ambitious combination of energy efficiency, air-quality, storm-water management and grey-water re-use. The sustainable aspects reduce ongoing costs, which makes funds available for other uses.

DAMIANOS PHOTOGRAPHY Jefferson Park Apartments, Cambridge, Massachusetts | Abacus Architects + Planners: Residents are supported by a physical environment that provides privacy, a sense of community, connections to nature, places to play and gather, and a sense of joy.

The central drive connects directly into the surrounding neighborhood street grid, while the four courtyards provide a child- and community-friendly environment safely sheltered from traffic.

COREY GAFFER Lofts at Mayo Park, Rochester, Minnesota | Snow Kreilich Architects: The Lofts at Mayo Park has helped to improve the experience of a population critical to Rochester’s economy: medical patients traveling to the city for treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Beyond providing unique housing options, such as large bathrooms, full kitchens and flexible leases, tenants describe the interiors and connection to nature as calming.

DAVID SUNBERG/ESTO Pierhouse, Brooklyn, New York | Marvel Architects: Pierhouse condominium building performs as an extension of Brooklyn Bridge Park, a verdant backdrop recalling the high, sandy bank of pre-colonial Brooklyn Heights, screening urban noise while facilitating waterfront access. Category 4: Specialized Housing

BRUCE DAMONTE San Joaquin Villages, University of California, Santa Barbara | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, and Kevin Daly Architects: The overall site and individual residential unit designs needed to complement the predominantly Spanish-style architecture of the university and surrounding communities. The team satisfied this requirement by offering a modern interpretation of local architectural motifs such as tower elements, loggias and exterior stairs.

BRUCE T. MARTIN Skyline Residence Hall, Waltham, Massachusetts | William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc.: The Skyline Residence Hall “C” shape opens to views of Boston. Because of this arrangement, views are democratized. All students have access to the view over the Quad, which would not have happened had the building been placed at the hillcrest instead of the open space. Source: Forbes Read the full article

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/business/samsung-reveals-galaxy-fold-and-s10-5g/

Samsung reveals Galaxy Fold and S10 5G

Image copyright Samsung

Image caption The Samsung Fold has a hinge built into it

Samsung has unveiled a foldable smartphone – the Galaxy Fold – alongside its first 5G handset and three further Galaxy S10 mobiles.

The Fold will go on sale in just over two months time, earlier than many expected.

The Galaxy S10 5G device features the firm’s biggest-ever non-folding phone display and promises faster data speeds when networks become available.

The line-up also includes the introduction of a lower cost model.

Open-up screen

Samsung said the Galaxy Fold would open up to create a 7.3in (18.5cm) tablet-like display and would be able to run up to three apps at once.

Image copyright Samsung

Image caption The Samsung fold offers 3 app multitasking

A demo showed off “continuity” features by which the device smoothly transferred from one mode to another. One example involved a small map appearing on the smaller sized screen and then expanding to a larger view when the handset was opened.

The handset is set to launch on April 26 and will start at $1,980 (£1,515). Samsung described it as being a “luxury” item.

Image copyright Samsung

Image caption The phone comes in four colours

“Fold is an experience that gives people who want a phone but also a larger screen with no compromise on the phone experience,” commented Carolina Milanesi from the consultancy Creative Strategies.

“There’s a lot of tech packed in there. And it makes sense to have kept it under $2,000 even if only for the psychological effect that has.”

Galaxy S series

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionWATCH: Hands-on with the new Samsung Galaxy S10

The S10 and S10+ will cost roughly the same as the phones they supersede.

But the S10e means the Galaxy S range now starts at a lower price-point, albeit with lower specifications to match.

Samsung had previously acknowledged that the cost of its S9 range had contributed to “lower-than-expected sales”.

Image caption The S10 family comes in four different sizes, each with a choice of different storage

“Having a 5G variant is strategically important for Samsung as it gives them the jump on Apple and helps maintain the firm’s brand strength and perceived technology leadership,” commented Ben Wood, from the CCS Insight consultancy.

“It also gives the operators a tier-one brand for their 5G launches.

“But as far as consumers are concerned, unless you have a very good reason to buy a 5G phone this summer, one of the other three S10 handsets is probably a better investment, and will be viable for use for many years.”

The launch comes days before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – a trade event where Samsung’s rivals will unveil new handsets of their own.

The overall smartphone market shrank in 2018, but Samsung’s sales saw a particularly pronounced drop-off as Huawei and other Chinese manufacturers wooed away customers.

Manufacturer Global smartphone shipments in 2018 Year-on-year change Market share Q4 Samsung 292.2 million -8.0% 18.7% Apple 208.8 million -3.2% 18.2% Huawei 206.0 million 33.6% 16.1% Xiaomi 122.5 million 32.1% 7.6% Oppo 113.3 million 1.4% 7.8% Others 463.2 million -19.2% 31.8% Industry total 1.4 billion -4.1% 100%

Source: IDC

Cut-out cameras

All four versions of the S10 are distinguished from last year’s models by embedding the front cameras within their displays.

Samsung refers to this as being the Infinity O design, but it is more commonly referred to as the “hole punch”.

Image caption The phone’s selfie camera is surrounded by its screen

The move allows the phones to feature a thinner top bezel without having the kind of “notch” found on many rivals.

It has, however, caused the firm to ditch the eye iris-scanner introduced in the S8.

Samsung says a new ultrasonic fingerprint sensor placed under the screens of the three higher-end phones offers close to the same level of security, and is more convenient to use than a scanner formerly placed on phone backs.

Image caption A graphic symbol tells users where they need to press to provide a fingerprint

It is based on a technology unveiled by Qualcomm in 2015.

All versions of the handset feature wireless charging and introduce the ability to wirelessly charge other compatible devices in turn.

This mirrors a feature first offered by Huawei’s Mate 20.

Samsung demoed the facility at a dual London and San Francisco launch as a way to recharge a new pair of Bluetooth headphones without having to use a separate cable or power mat.

Image caption The phone can be used to send power to the Galaxy Buds’ charging case

Smarter photography

All four devices now feature a 10 megapixel selfie camera and introduce a 16MP “ultra-wide” rear version, which offers a slightly larger field-of-view than our eyes.

The S10+ also has a second selfie camera to help it take depth readings.

Other improvements include:

the ability to detect 10 additional types of scene, so as to automatically adjust the colours and sharpness to suit the subject. These now include shoes, cats and clothing

a “super steady” video mode that combines both digital and optical stabilisation to create the kind of smooth footage that would traditionally have required a gimbal or other add-on stabiliser

In addition, the S10+ and S10 5G now offer up to one terabyte of internal storage, which the firm says could appeal to those shooting lots of 4K video or storing many game files.

Image caption The S10 phones can tell when they are taking photos of a shoe and will adjust the image to suit

“What’s positive is that Samsung has moved away from software that nobody wants – like AR emojis and Samsung Cloud – and has gone back to its roots to deliver market-leading hardware,” commented Ben Stanton, from market analysis firm Canalys.

“So for the premium part of the market, these are good phones.

“But my concern is that [they are still] not innovative enough to stop people from looking down to lower-price bands and being drawn into mid-range products from Chinese companies that are super-competitive.”

High and low-end

The introduction of a lower price tier may help address this.

But trade-offs for picking the S10e include:

a lower-resolution, smaller 5.8in screen that does not curve round the device’s sides like the 6.1in and 6.4in displays of the S10 and S10+

no telephoto “portrait” rear camera

no heart rate sensor

a capacitive fingerprint scanner on its side, rather than the ultrasonic in-screen option of the more expensive phones

Image caption The S10 5G features three photo cameras and a 3D depth sensor on its rear

By contrast, the S10 5G benefits from several exclusive features:

a 6.7in (17cm) display. For comparison, the Note 9 is 6.4in and the iPhone XS Max 6.5in

faster wired-charging

3D depth-sensing cameras on its front and rear. These could be used to offer improved facial scans and photo-background blurs, although details have yet to be confirmed

“The phone had to be larger to feature a bigger battery because 5G [data transfers] will drain it much faster,” commented Mr Stanton.

“But it was also smart to offer a large screen.

“The use cases for 5G aren’t yet defined, but one potential is to stream 4K video rather than HD. And having a bigger screen makes that more compelling.”

Galaxy S (2010):

The original S-series handset was released days ahead of Apple’s iPhone 4, and had a bigger 4in screen and microSD card slot in its favour.

At that point, its main Android rival was the HTC Desire, and although Samsung’s device was lighter, thinner, and had a more powerful graphics processor, some reviewers said it felt less “premium” in the hand than its competitor.

Galaxy S2 (2011):

The second-generation device saw its display grow to 4.3in, its rear camera increase in resolution to 8MP, and its processor move over to a dual-core design.

It was praised for allowing owners to unlock it by pressing the home key, rather than having to press a button on top as before. And although some griped that it still felt plasticky, it sold in its millions – helping Samsung overtake Nokia as the world’s bestselling mobile phone-maker.

Galaxy S3 (2012):

The third-generation model established a trend of including a bigger display but compensating for the growth by shrinking the size of the bezels.

Its innovations included the ability to detect when the screen was being looked at, so as to avoid dimming the image. And it introduced S Voice, allowing users to command music to play and photos to be taken by speaking to it.

Galaxy S4 (2013):

Samsung added further touchless controls to the S4, letting owners scroll through text by making eye movements, and accept calls with a hand wave.

A dual-camera feature also created photos that blended together the views from the front and rear lenses.

Some critics found this all to be a bit gimmicky, and although the handset was a hit, there were reports that its sales fell short of Samsung’s expectations.

Galaxy S5 (2014):

The S5 added a fingerprint scanner, which could be used to authenticate purchases via PayPal.

It also introduced a black-and-white mode to help save battery life. But predictions that the firm would ditch Android for its in-house operating system Tizen proved to be inaccurate.

Galaxy S6 (2015):

The S-series split in two in 2015 with a premium-priced Edge version offering a screen that curved round one of its sides.

A metal frame and glass back gave the handsets a more luxury feel, but they ditched water resistance and a microSD slot to make this possible.

Galaxy S7 (2016):

The seventh-generation phones looked pretty similar to their predecessors, but restored the ability to dunk them in water and slot in extra storage.

Other improvements centred on the camera with better low-light and autofocus capabilities.

Galaxy S8 (2017):

The S8 and larger S8+ ditched the home button, took Samsung’s logo off the front and added the virtual assistant Bixby.

They also gained an iris scanner, which was billed as “one of the safest ways” to keep data private.

After scandals involving exploding Note 7s and the arrest of the firm’s vice-chairman, the launch helped return the firm to surer footing.

Galaxy S9 (2018):

The S9 and S9+ gained new camera features including a super-slow-motion video mode and a variable aperture – allowing owners to control how much light reached the sensor.

AR emojis also allowed users to create animated cartoon characters that looked like them.

But sales were lacklustre, and several months after it was unveiled Samsung acknowledged there had been “resistance” to its price.

Galaxy S10 (2019):

Cameras that poke out of the screen and four distinct models mark out the latest generation.

But there are signs Samsung’s smartphone dominance is slipping…

[thefranklinoutdoor]

Don't You Stop, We Won't Stop

EC Brown Lise Baggesen Rodrigo Lara Zendejas Sarah Beth Woods Felicia Holman

Opening reception: Saturday, February 15 from 7-10 pm

From February 15 to April 25, 2020

“Hot topic is the way that we rhyme Hot topic is the way that we rhyme One step behind the drum style One step behind the drum style Carol Rama and Eleanor Antin Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman You're getting old, that's what they'll say, but Don't give a damn I'm listening anyway Stop, don't you stop I can't live if you stop Don't you stop Gretchen Phillips and Cibo Matto Leslie Feinberg and Faith Ringgold Mr. Lady, Laura Cottingham Mab Segrest and The Butchies, man Don't stop Don't you stop We won't stop Don't you stop So many roads and so much opinion So much shit to give in, give in to So many rules and so much opinion So much bullshit but we won't give in Stop, we won't stop Don't you stop I can't live if you stop Tammy Rae Carland and Sleater-Kinney Vivienne Dick…”

- Lyrics from Hot Topic by Le Tigre, 1999

EC Brown

My wife Catie's annual Krampusnacht event last December included a holiday market, and I presented a bin of paintings on chipboard that were folded like heavy 45 sleeves—with mulch+foliage+ploymer record shapes that became too encrusted to fit inside. The images invented an old psychedelic Krampus underground—militant and Luciferian. Dolly appeared as a surprise digression in the wee hours before the deadline.

For the past seven years of Krampusnacht, I have sidestepped the European relics in favor of thoughts about American undercurrents—rowdy, sexual, heretical, and perilously savage. But I like to imagine that the deeper magma is something propulsive and generative, rather than malignantly atavistic. An inevitable rebellion against civilized living.

With Edra's prodding, I'm pursuing the Dolly tangent: imagining a history in which the liftoff of her solo career was profoundly controversial—to the point that an enclave of armed male consorts developed around her. Perhaps her audience had detected a Luciferian bent in her, that would need time to transition to a more acceptable yet radical Christianity.

EC Brown: I prefer a collision of illustrative image-making that begs attention to narratives, and physical formats that shift these works into roles as implements or tactical objects addressing spaces and situations. Images have been a tempered fever-dream drawing from 1960s–70s aesthetics, pop occultism, science fiction, Modernist architecture, biomimetics, industrial photography and observational cinema. Often they are absurdist historical revisions.

Since 2005, I have mostly operated in Chicago's domestic artspaces. I co-organized Floor Length and Tux (2009–2014, with Catie Olson) and COMA (2006–2008, with Annika Seitz). I periodically organize a roving series entitled ASCII (2011–present). Since 2015, I have been conducting a discreet series out of my home entitled Tascam.

Lise Haller Baggesen

Interpersonal relationships, intergenerational and intersectional eco- and cyber- and xeno- feminism, reproductive justice, therapeutic aesthetics, color field painting, sci-fi tie-dye, hippie modernism, bio-punk, grunge, glam, and disco, are some of the vernaculars that inform my body of work. Since graduating in 2013 from SAIC's department of Visual and Critical Studies, this organic body has manifested itself in a hybrid and polydisciplinamorous practice, including writing, audio-visual installations, textile-, and sartorial works. 

Mother is a noun and a verb; I regard my practice as a sourdough, a gestation of material, out of which individual works, texts, and shows are wrought, while the mother remains, active.

Lise Haller Baggesen is a Danish born, Amsterdam raised, Chicago based, interdisciplinary artist. Her hybrid practice includes writing, installation, performative, sartorial and textile-based work. She is the author of Mothernism, and exhibits internationally, most recently with the multimedia show HATORADE RETROGRADE: THE MUSICAL, which premiered at SoEx in San Francisco in 2019 and will travel to G400 in Chicago in 2020

Rodrigo Lara Zendejas

I create memorials—fragmented, mischievous, and imperfect realities that reflect both a formal

break from traditional shape, while presenting an assemblage version of our collective social and political thoughts, concerns, and hopes. Although I was trained in the traditions of classical art, my pieces now are not always clean. Or finished. Or beautiful. My work holds the memory of an intimate process of becoming. In some bodies of work, I present obvious nooks and gashes, broad, quick strokes, and secretive, featherlike fingerprints, all of which aided in the modeling of the clay during the process of bringing the subject to life. It is this visceral and intimate approach to materials and form that drive my subjects of memory and memorialization through all of my works.

When considering the human form and its relationship to memorialization, immediate thoughts of bronze statues at historical sites come to mind. My fascination, however, is in the way that memory—with its inherent, ever-changing fluidity—disrupts our ability to fully or truthfully freeze, or memorialize people, moments, or perspectives in history. Instead, it is our momentary glimpses of memory and hindsight that drive how we understand the present.

As a Mexican immigrant to the United States, my works often rely on my own fragmented memories and stories of home, my direct experiences with fervent Catholicism, and other’s heroic (yet common) anecdotes of border crossing and acclimating to living in America. However, while my memories and relationships to patriotism, politics, my background, and my longing for the familiar certainly influence my work, it is my interest in the process, the poetics of the materials, and the action of sculpting that motivate my continued practice.

Born in Mexico in 1981, Rodrigo Lara Zendejas received a MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013. And his BFA from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. He has received several awards including: Proyectos Especiales FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) Mexico City; Emerging Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York City; Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico City; Extraordinary Abilities Visa, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Artist’s Grant, Vermont Studio Art Center; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, 2013 SAIC Fellowship Competition; PECDA Estudios en el extranjero,Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes; the International Graduate Scholarship, SAIC; and the John W. Kurtich Travel Scholarship, SAIC Berlin/Kassel, Germany; among others. He won the first price in sculpture at the National Award for Visual Arts in Mexico in 2010. Lara held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in the state of Mexico, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas, among others. He has been in such residencies as the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ragdale, Cross Currents: Cultural Exchange, Mana Miami, and Rogers Art Loft. Currently, Lara lives and works in Chicago.

Flatscreen

Sarah Beth Woods

Hear the Glow of Electric Lights is a multifaceted project that centers around a black and white, 16mm reversal film, which investigates the choreographed performances of 1960s American pop music groups featuring girls and young women. During the summer of 2017, Sarah Beth Woods formed The Rhinettes, a conceptual girl group based out of Prosser High School on the West side of Chicago. Referencing the Supreme’s first nationally televised appearance and Cholly Atkins' choreography, the work reveals the inscription of sound on the body and other material surfaces.

Girl group: (L-R) Alexis Strowder, Yahkirah Beard, Anya Jenkins Cinematography: Brian VandenBos Choreography: Courtney Bradshaw Costumes: Ann Heggans, Sarah Beth Woods

Sarah Beth Woods is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist. Woods’ background as a painter and critical cultural worker has led to an interest in the aesthetics and political implications of modern surfaces and the body, specifically skin and hair, saturated color and shine. Cultural influences derived from formative years spent on the Southwest side of Chicago continue to manifest in the content and aesthetics of Woods’ work, specifically black material culture and women’s conceptual spaces as sites of possibility and transformation.

Activation

Felicia Holman

"Originally created as a commissioned response to Edra Soto’s 2018 exhibition ‘Open 24 Hours’, interdisciplinary artist Felicia Holman presents a reprise of her solo performance—Wassup w/that ‘YAC?! (WWTY). As both a cognac enthusiast and a native of Chicago’s South Side, Holman unpacks experiential / anecdotal support of the formative research cited in ‘Open24 Hours’. WWTY centers the perspective of a Black Gen X’er cis-female cognac consumer. How do historic/ (pop) cultural/ social/ economic factors impact and influence her consumption of “that smooth brown spirit”? Guided audience participation optional but warmly encouraged (21+ only). Total running time: 45-60 minutes, no intermission.”

Felicia Holman “Lifelong”: Chicagoan/ artist and Prince "fam" Felicia Holman is an independent cultural producer/programmer, as well as a co-founding member of Chicago-based Afrodiasporic feminist creative collective, Honey Pot Performance. Felicia creates, presents, and supports innovative interdisciplinary performance that engages audience and inspires community. Felicia’s artistic & professional practices are both are grounded in critical thought, intersectionality, community building & embodied storytelling. Some of her recent projects and career highlights include:

*Featured artist in Jenn Freeman's "The People's Church of The G.H.E.T.T.O" and the 10th edition of Erin Kilmurray's "The Fly Honey Show”.

*Selected as City Bureau's Fall 2019 Public Newsroom Series Curator.

*Featured presenter at Arts Administrators of Color Network-DMV's 2019 Annual Convening (DC). *Featured artist / facilitator at Flux Factory's "Must They Also Be Gods" group exhibition (NYC).

*Facilitating career development programming for emerging artists.

THE  FRANKLIN

Address: 3522 W. Franklin Blvd, Chicago IL 60624 Cell to text: (312)823-3632Hours: Saturdays 2-4pm and by appointment Online: http://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.comInstagram: @thefranklinoutdoor

[sfaioffical]

Nando Alvarez Perez’s (MFA Photography, 2014) photographic installations respond architecturally and materially to space—pushing the traditional experience and scope of the medium. Here, the artist discusses the evolution of his practice, upcoming exhibitions, and more.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your work.

I’m an artist based in Oakland. My studio is in my home. I work full time at Airbnb, and am currently teaching an undergraduate course at CCA. Right now I’m working on photographic installations using a modular framing system I designed myself in conjunction with wallpapers, fabric prints, and carpets.

Your photo practice has been evolving recently: from two-dimensional, wall-mounted prints to a more sculptural presentation. What inspired this new direction?

My thesis exhibition at SFAI was my first in a really public forum and that meant that I finally had to go the whole nine yards on presentation. Mounting, framing, and hanging my photographs myself really opened my eyes to the way that images operate on a wall. I knew I could no longer ignore the elephant in any room that photographs hang in: the room itself, the scale of the walls. Most importantly, I had to address the way photographs insistently point to a world “out there,” but, due to the inherent ambiguity in the images, they can never really have a 1:1 relationship with that world and are filled with multivalent readings. This is what makes photographs so exciting and generative, but, counterintuitively, there’s been a big shift recently in the direction of art photography away from concentrating on vision, perception, and how humans read images towards projects that insist on their own meaning and interpretation from the outset.

The aluminum frames, wallpapers, and fabrics allow my work to respond to space and architecture—to propose new ways for people to actually live with images. They also allow me to flexibly address a larger range of issues beyond the literal content of each of my photographs—in my case, the way photographic objects relate to death, memorials, the kitschy reproduction of art objects, and the remembrance of some failed futurity. They are also, frankly, a quick and dirty way to put photography into conversation with painting, sculpture, and installation art, which is generally a thing photographers are trained to assiduously avoid.

Tell us about your recent experiences at art fairs in San Francisco and Mexico City.

I think it’s hard to be an artist and not have a bit of a bitter taste in one’s mouth re: art fairs. One of my instructors at SFAI compared the experience of going to a fair where your work is being shown to that of a cow getting a tour of the sausage factory. There is an undeniable truth to that: art fairs reduce the hard labor of art making and art thinking to that of mere commodity exchange and no doubt they can be a pretty ugly scene.

On the other hand, fairs draw a crowd. And not just a local crowd, but an actual international crowd of people from galleries, museums, and institutions around the world. They are, without a doubt, some of the only venues I’ve exhibited art at where the “exposure” was well worth the cost of production and in which the contacts I made have led to real, concrete opportunities.

I think it should also be said, and it’s not said nearly enough in art school, that selling your work is not a bad thing. It’s one thing if you’re unashamedly making art that has nothing to do with your interests or ideas simply to pursue a market trend or to be well liked, but to me fairs have been very powerful reminders that when I’m working in my studio I’m not alone in there: I need to consider my audience, I need to consider how the work will be encountered, and I need to consider how to make the booth stand out.

So at both Untitled, San Francisco and Material Art Fair in Mexico City I can say pretty unequivocally that they were well worth the time and investment. It also helped that Suzanne [L'Heureux] from Interface Gallery and the team at City Limits were incredibly supportive of my ideas and they’re the ones who ultimately do the hard work of spending three straight days in the booth trying to drum up interest in the work.

What are some upcoming projects or exhibitions?

Right now I’m enjoying a little break after a whirlwind of exhibitions and taking some time to learn a few new things to bring into my work in the future. I’m hoping to produce a portfolio box for the 2017 SF Art Book Fair in July and I also have an exhibition towards the end of the year at Interface Gallery in Oakland. And then in November I’ll be doing a month long residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.

Learn more »

Image credits: 1) Installation view of Post-industrial Living Situation 1 (Self-centered World), 2017, at Untitled SF; Ultrachrome prints on sintra, extruded aluminum frames, shower curtain rings, silk charmeuse, dye-diffusion print on carpet, 78 x 102 x 72 inches; 2) Remembrance Block 1 for Material Art Fair 2017; 13 x 25 x 27 inches; 3) Post-industrial Totem for Home or Office 7 (Neon Venus Pixel Quartzite) at Under the Willow October Salon, 2016; 60 x 143 x 2 inches; 4) Portrait of the artist. All images courtesy of the artist.

[architectnews]

MIRA Tower San Francisco Condominiums

MIRA luxury condominium community, Tishman Speyer San Francisco Apartments, California Building Images

MIRA Tower San Francisco

Aug 7, 2020

MIRA San Francisco Luxury Condominiums

Design: Studio Gang, Architects

Location: 280 Spear Street, near the Embarcadero, San Francisco, California, USA

Photos by Scott Hargis

MIRA Condominiums San Francisco

Mira Welcomes New Residents Into Its 400-foot Twisting Tower

Interested Buyers Can Now Tour Four Fully Furnished Models in the 40-Story Community

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – MIRA, the new, 392-residence luxury condominium community developed by Tishman Speyer, has received its Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO) and residents have begun moving into their new homes. MIRA has unveiled a number of luxurious models for interested buyers to tour privately by appointment. Located on the 23rd floor of the 40-story, 400-foot tower, the two-bedroom, two-bathroom models have been staged and fully furnished by Jeff Schlarb Design Studio. Virtual tours of all models are also available at MIRASF.com.

Located one block from the Embarcadero, MIRA’s forward-thinking architecture and interiors are designed by award-winning architecture firm Studio Gang, led by Jeanne Gang, the only architect named to the 2019 TIME 100 list of most influential people. MIRA features a distinctive, dynamic tower with large bay windows spiraling up the façade to offer sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, and the city skyline.

“Studio Gang designed the homes at MIRA to be a seamless extension of the architecture, and we’re excited to move our first residents into this beautiful community,” says Carl Shannon, Senior Managing Director at Tishman Speyer. “Our homes offer fresh air, expansive views through panoramic bay windows, and create a dynamic façade that has transformed the neighborhood with Studio Gang’s groundbreaking, forward-thinking architecture.”

Prospective buyers can visit MIRA’s Sales Gallery by appointment, located at 260 Spear Street on the 23rd floor, where they can tour MIRA’s new models, available floor plans, and view options. The Sales Gallery is currently open by appointment. Stringent safety protocols are in place to protect all visitors to the Sales Gallery and model homes and ensure that appointments are private. Sales at MIRA are represented by Polaris Pacific, the West Coast leader in high-density new home residential sales and marketing.

MIRA offers bright, modern, and spacious one-, two- and three-bedroom condominiums and townhouses with large bay windows. The community features amenities such as a courtyard, attended lobby, rooftop deck, private dining and lounge, a Jay Wright-designed fitness center, children’s playroom, conference room, dog washing station, valet parking for 340 cars with electric vehicle charging stations, parking for 150 bicycles, and over 10,000 square feet of retail at street level.

Located in the emerging Transbay neighborhood where SoMa meets the Embarcadero, MIRA will offer convenient access to the waterfront, the new Salesforce Park and Transbay Transit Terminal, and a wide array of retailers, nightlife, restaurants, transportation options, and sports and entertainment venues. MIRA will contribute to the dynamic neighborhood created by Tishman Speyer’s nearby Infinity and LUMINA projects. The site was previously known as Block One of the Transbay Redevelopment Plan. Interested parties can visit MIRASF.com to join the MIRA interest list and receive project updates.

About MIRA MIRA offers a new, fresh, and forward-thinking take on luxury living in San Francisco. Conveniently located steps from the Embarcadero at the corner of Spear and Folsom, MIRA comprises 392 modern residences and bold, iconic architecture by Studio Gang. Each home features fanning bay windows and striking, sweeping views of the City or the Bay, and residents have access to amenities such as a courtyard, rooftop decks, private dining and lounge, children’s playroom, business and conference room, and a Jay Wright-designed fitness center.

About Tishman Speyer Tishman Speyer is a leading owner, developer, operator and fund manager of first-class real estate around the world. Tishman Speyer’s visionary leadership team and on-the-ground experts are unparalleled in their ability to foster innovation, anticipate global and local needs, and cultivate new initiatives, such as Zo, Studio and Kin, that focus on the people in their buildings, not just the buildings themselves.

Founded in 1978, Tishman Speyer develops, builds and manages premier office, residential and retail spaces for industry-leading tenants in 29 key markets across the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Tishman Speyer’s portfolio, valued at approximately $94 billion (US) and totaling 175 million square feet across 411 properties, incorporates such iconic projects as Rockefeller Center in New York City, The Springs in Shanghai, TaunusTurm in Frankfurt, and the Mission Rock neighborhood currently being realized in San Francisco.

Photographs: Scott Hargis

MIRA Tower San Francisco Condominiums – Building Information

Address: 280 Spear Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

Sales Gallery: 163 Main Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 415/488-6972

Developer: Tishman Speyer One Bush St., Ste. 500 San Francisco, CA 94104 415/536-1850

Connect: Facebook: @livemirasf Instagram: @livemirasf Website: MIRASF.com

Delivery: Winter 2020

Project:

Located at the corner of Spear and Folsom, MIRA offers creative design, distinctive Description layouts, and expansive views. Designed by award-winning architecture firm Studio Gang, MIRA features a twisting façade and luxury condominium homes that are fresh and forward-thinking, offering potential buyers an opportunity to own a part of an architecturally iconic building in San Francisco.

Developed by Tishman Speyer, MIRA is their latest in a series of high-quality condominium properties where SoMa meets the Embarcadero. This inspired community will include a 40-floor luxury tower of residences topped by a Panorama Collection of penthouse homes offering stunning views and expansive floor plans.

Just steps from the Embarcadero, MIRA delivers convenient access to San Francisco’s wealth of extracurricular activities including waterfront recreation, the city’s buzzing nightlife and restaurants, luxury retailers, iconic landmarks, and local sports and entertainment venues. The property offers valeted and secure underground parking and is situated within walking distance of myriad transportation alternatives including the Salesforce Transit Center, SF Ferry services, BART, MUNI, and Bikeshare, with a projected Walk Score® of 91, Bike Score® of 86, and Transit Score® of 100.

Amenities • Jay Wright-designed Fitness center • Stylish, staffed lobby with lounge areas • Private dining room and amenity lounge with outdoor deck and BBQ • Children’s playroom • Conference room • Dog washing station • Valet parking for 340 cars • Electric vehicle charging stations • Parking for 150 bicycles • Rooftop lounge areas • Landscaped courtyard

Configuration

• The 40-story tower will offer a mix of 392 one-, two- and three-bedroom condominiums, townhouses, and penthouses averaging approximately 1,300 square feet. There will be over 10,000 square feet of retail at street level. The project is targeting LEED Gold certification.

1 Bedrooms: 33 Junior 1 Bedrooms: 5 2 Bedrooms: 153 3 Bedrooms: 17 Townhomes: 8 Panorama Collection: 20 BMR homes (BMR rate is 80-120% of AMI): 156 Total: 392

Contacts

Developer: Tishman Speyer

Architect: Studio Gang Architect

Associate Architect: Perry Arcitects

Associate Architect: Barcelon Jang Architecture

Landscape Architect: INTERSTICE Architects

General Contractor: Lendlease

Structural Engineer: Magnusson Klemencic Assoc.

Civil Engineer: Urban Design Consulting Engineers

Sales and Marketing: Polaris Pacific

Public Relations: Pike & Company Gary Pike, APR, President 132 Hamerton Ave. San Francisco, CA 94131 415/585-2100

The features, finishes and specifications are subject to change.

Studio Gang Architects

MIRA Tower San Francisco Condominiums, California images / information received 060820

Location: San Francisco, California, USA

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The Italian Swiss Colony Building Lobby Architects: jones | haydu photograph : Matthew Millman The Italian Swiss Colony Building Lobby

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Comments / photos for the MIRA Tower San Francisco Condominiums Architecture page welcome

Website: San Jose

The post MIRA Tower San Francisco Condominiums appeared first on e-architect.

[freshleadprovider]

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business (or GMB) is a business listing on Google that allows your company information to be output by Google in a variety of different results. We all know Google, and how it has its fingers in every part of the online pie, but what is Google My Business? Google My Business (commonly known as GMB, and formerly known as Google Local and Google Places) is a business listing on Google, not unlike listings on online business directories such as Yelp. It’s also a core element of local SEO. If you’ve not set yours up yet, you’ll find out how to put your business on Google here. The key difference between Google My Business profiles and other directories is that your Google business listing can be incredibly detailed, and information from it can be output by Google into a variety of very important places with high online visibility, including: Google Knowledge Graph The box containing business information that appears in the top-right hand corner of Google search results on desktop, and near the top on mobile, when someone performs a branded search for your business (i.e. when they search your business name). Google Local Pack The three Google listings that appear beneath the map when someone searches for businesses in or around a particular location (e.g. ‘plumbers San Francisco’). Google Maps The app used to get directions and discover businesses and locations, available on pretty much all devices, mobile or desktop. Google My Business listings offer everything you need for a potential customer to find and use your services, buy your products or visit your business. Once you’ve registered or claimed your Google local listing, you can respond to customer reviews, add images and much more to help your business stand out in local search. Put simply, if you don’t have a Google My Business profile, you literally cannot compete in local search, so Google My Business is one of the very first places you should start when working on local SEO for your business or a new client. What Is Google My Business Useful For? When users search for localized keywords or terms using Google, they’re presented with relevant local business results, all tailored to the search term used. These searches can happen in a variety of places, including: Google app search Google search in third-party browser or Google Chrome (mobile/desktop) Google Maps in mobile/desktop browser Google Maps app Google Home voice search Google Assistant voice search Let’s assume you have a car wash business on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NY. When someone searches for ‘car wash lower east side’ you’re going to want your business to appear in the results provided by Google, as this is someone who is looking for a business like yours in your area. This is where your Google business listing (as a completely separate entity to your website) comes in. It’s also worth noting that, if Google has access to a searcher’s location, local results will be triggered by anything that’s seen by Google as a search with a local intent, which could be as simple as ‘car wash’ or ‘barber’ (without the need to add ‘near me’ or ‘in new york’) Depending on where they’re searching, the consumer will see local pack results, Google Maps results, or even have the local pack results read out to them by a Google Assistant. While the businesses surfaced by the search should be the same, what actually shows in the Google listing depends on the search type. For example, Google will show just a few elements of GMB in your Google Maps listing, but results in the local pack are much more rich, including review stars, photos, and sometimes even a snippet of a review. When you set up your GMB listing, in addition to the wider visibility you get, you’ll have access to Google My Business Insights, which provides detailed information on how and where consumers are searching for your business, as well as how far away they are when looking for directions, and much more. Find out more on GMB in our Google My Business Insights. Combining this with your website’s Google Analytics data creates a powerful overview of how people find your website and listing and the actions they take afterward. Google My Business Profiles are Only Getting More Sophisticated Google My Business is getting much more sophisticated, and no longer simply relies on the information you provide to build your listing. If you’re a restaurant, for example, it may attempt to find a web page containing your menu (potentially even from an unverified, third-party site) and add the link to your profile. This shows that it’s important to keep an eye on unsolicited changes to your listing. Google also uses User-generated Content (UGC) to populate your Google business listing, including ‘subjective attributes’ defined by your customers and the photos they take of your business premises. Some features have a lot of interactivity built right into the profiles, too. These include: Google Posts, which allow you to promote offers and services directly through Google Maps and the Knowledge Graph (and even reach people who ‘follow’ your business). Google Q&A, which lets consumers ask each other questions about your business on your GMB profile. Google Reviews, probably the most important of these features, as generating quality reviews and responding to them has been shown to significantly impact rankings and clickthrough rates. Suggest an Edit, the ability for customers of your business to submit edits some of your business details, such as names, opening times, or addresses. And Google seems to be just getting started. More and more tools and features are being added to Google My Business all the time, so there’s plenty of good reasons to get yours set up pronto. You can find out more about where Google gets information for your Google My Business profile and what it does with it in their helpful guide here. How Can I Qualify for a Google Local Listing? To qualify for a Google business listing, you must personally interact with your customers during the business hours you include in your listing. You can work with your customers at your physical place of business or at the customer’s location. That means that even Service Area Businesses (also known as SABs), like plumbers, house painters and pest control experts, for whom physical address isn’t as important, can claim their Google My Business listings and define the area they serve without it being tied to their address. Bear in mind that while most businesses which interact face-to-face with customers can claim a Google My Business listing, there are a few exceptions. So, Does My Local Business Still Need a Website? Yes, it does. While Google My Business is now the most important touchpoint in a local search, and many local business transactions can happen without the searcher ever visiting the business’s website, a website is still crucial to getting across your brand’s personality and provide examples of excellent customer experiences, amongst other things. A local business website’s requirements will shift drastically based on the industry type, with hotels needing high-quality design and photography, and plumbers needing prominent contact info, lists of services and customer testimonials. So we’ll admit that some businesses definitely need a website more than others. However, no matter what industry you’re in, Google is likely to find a way to use information on your site to feed new features in SERPs, the Local Pack, your Google business listing and more. Just look at on-site review star ratings now appearing in SERPs. This is a taster of what Google can do with information from your site, provided you create it and keep it up to date and consistent with all your other business listings. Finally, although we haven’t touched on it here, we have to keep the power of organic traffic in mind. We know that on-page signals and organic traffic can still impact your local ranking, so try to optimize and update your website with great local content. Our advice to any local business is to create a good website that represents their business well, then shift focus to their Google My Business profile, ensuring that’s the first to be updated with new business info and the first to be checked for customer interactions via Google Reviews and Google Q&A. After all, consumers can still find your business if you have a Google listing but no website, but they sure won’t be able to if it’s the other way around.   Boost your local marketing with BrightLocal Setting up your Google My Business profile is just the start of your local marketing journey. Competition is rife, no matter how niche your business is, so it’s crucial that you have the local SEO tools on hand to help you understand your local search presence. That’s true of your website as well as your Google My Business listing (remember that the Local Pack appears above organic search results for local searches and is only made up of Google listings), so you’ll want a toolset that gives you an overview of how both are performing. BrightLocal’s Local Search Rank Checker, Local Search Audit, and Google My Business Audit are great ways to get this up-to-date and accurate performance data for you or your clients. Get started with a free 14-day trial today! The post What is Google My Business? appeared first on BrightLocal. https://probdm.com/site/ODk3OQ

[luhkevin]

Analog

I’m trying to get back into film photography this year but like many other things it doesn’t feel as fresh as the first time. I don’t feel as excited when I’m out and about taking photos, but maybe it’s just that I don’t feel settled yet in nyc. What remains, though, is the excitement of receiving the developed photos. Somehow the anticipation -- opening the email link, downloading a huge zip file, seeing all my pictures from weeks, months ago -- still gets me.  I’ve been trying to find a cheaper film stock to use for more frequent photography, maybe even for a larger project. Portra is pretty expensive, and more than that, I feel bad wasting it on random street photography. It’s like taking really nice drawing paper and idk scribbling on it with some crayon. If I had easy access to a lot of lomo I would definitely use that for everyday shooting. It seems to have a more saturated look than portra, but I still like the colors. Ultramax and Superia 400 look the most “vintage” to me, and they’re also midtier price and quality-wise, so I think I’ll go with one of those. Plus, I like that “vintage” look. For black and white, I’ve only tried Acros and Ilford. Acros has this super creamy look, I absolutely love it, it’s beautiful. But it’s not available anymore, I could only find it in Japan, and I hear Fuji is discontinuing it and releasing a newer version. Ilford looks so legit, the grain is large and exquisite. I should try out Tmax and Tri-x, those are the professional ones.  There’s this scene in Claire’s Camera where one of the characters talks about changing things through the power of looking at a picture, looking at a picture for a long time and really focusing on what’s in it. I think that’s what this entire process of analog photography has forced me into doing. After importing my latest pictures I’ll sit and stare at some of the other pictures in my library. I’ll reminisce on those outings or vacations where I took them, and maybe I’ll even remember exactly when I took a given picture.  Tonight I was looking through some pictures I took when I was in Japan, April 2019. The first half of 2019 I was waiting for a lot of things, and compared to 2018 I stopped living life as fully. I was planning a move from sf to nyc which I tell people is because I got tired of sf and I wanted to be around more film culture, and that is true, but the catalyst was probably getting my heart kinda broken in taiwan and just wanting to start over somewhere. For a lot of reasons, a combination of taiwan, moving, job stuff slowing down, my friends in SF becoming more settled in their lives, I felt like my life was at a standstill in the first half of 2019, so I didn’t have the same lust for life as I did in 2018. I just did things to go through the motions. 

I wasn’t super excited for Japan, I decided to go because it was the last major East Asian country that was on my mental list, and some close friends had gone the year before. Plus, I was going to Shanghai to visit relatives anyway, and I was going to leave the West Coast soon, so any future flights to East Asian countries would take much longer. I think what I’m getting at is that my reasons were more logical than emotional, which feels strange. I remember almost going to Berlin instead, which I had also almost done in 2016 as well, but that year I also went to Shanghai to visit relatives instead. Even though I got sick towards the end of my Japan trip, it still felt very relaxing. Again I think this is partly due to my purgatorial mood in early 2019. Everything felt very idle and I was in no hurry to do anything, I was just waiting for July to come, which is when I would move, and the six months until then were more or less throwaway. I didn’t make an effort to date, I was very blasé with any new people I met in San Francisco. I think all of my emotional energy went into some work stuff and into thinking about all of my friends that I would miss.  I keep thinking about mid 2017 through the end of 2018 and I keep thinking about that quote apocryphally attributed to Lenin -- “There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen” -- and along with this I think about the first couple months of 2019 where sfmoma had a Jia retrospective. This period of a year + change were incredibly spiritual for me in a lot of different ways, and maybe that’s just rare, like really rare. It kind of all happened by accident too, I don’t think I consciously did anything to kickstart it all. I’m not really interested in tracing the cause-effect chain anyway...but I will say that momentum in life is a real thing. My 2018 was only so busy because once it got rolling I felt the need to keep it rolling.  Here are some moments and periods of my life that I am comfortable sharing that have made me happy when I think about them... Protesting at SFO in early 2017 Coming home after long nights of drinking with smb Visiting my nyc friends, which I am now also a part of Christmas at home Shooting Two Apart Taiwan 2017 and 2018 The first day I arrived in Milan and saw my family and we went to the grocery store bought all this food and ate it Evenings @ Eureka, and I’d go home at approx 11 PM, then go to the bodega and get half a ham sandwich and a mac salad, then adorn the mac salad with freshly cracked black pepper and rock salt and eat it while watching TV  The Jia retrospective, where I saw Platform on 35mm, spoke to Jia w/o addressing him in the honorific, got him to sign my book of his essays, saw a bunch more movies with two of my closest friends and cried during some of them too, and we would go out for hotpot or drypot after almost each screening The first couple times I went to sf photoworks after shooting film The month or so when k was living with us at nob hill and the three of us were hanging out more in general, and we would get wine, cheese and bread on Friday or Saturday, and I would eat the leftover cheese and bread and drink the leftover wine, which was cooled @ the perfect temperature of San Francisco Room Temperature.  When I got my new camera and did some street photography at night with it and then met up with k and v at some cocktail place and we ended the night at dimple The first time we went to DNM Waking up every morning next to a huge bay window, facing south, rolling up the window and feeling the sun shine in. The 6 - 7 months when k started living with w and I would sit in the huge living in 1235 pine with just my clamp light on and I would be watching something by tsai or continuing west of the tracks, and I got really into slow cinema which colored how I perceived life in general

k’s pageant, specifically before and after it; before -- where I was watching a confucian confusion on my phone the entire time, and after -- where me and k and v went out for donuts at bob’s donuts after she had won miss social media, and she looked so happy and he looked so happy for her and I was very happy for her too   boardgames in sunnyvale, especially that one time when I started making kimchi early in the morning and finished late at night after I got home, and in general I completely forgot all sense of time and reality whenever I was at boardgames Going to All Star Cafe early in the morning, where around 8 AM the sun would shine directly into the cafe and flood it with light, like almost half of the entire restaurant. 

It takes time for a new home to feel like home because those feelings only come after distance and reflection. When I was living at AVA I felt really nostalgic for pine street, but I had the sense that I would feel nostalgic for AVA when I eventually moved out, and now I do. And when I move out of 12F I’ll probably be nostalgic for it too. And all of the routines that I’m currently constructing will fall into the above list too...  

[kdulgar-blog]

An Open Letter to Elisa Steele EVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Yahoo Inc. on the New “The Internet is You,” Yahoo Marketing Campaign

Dear Elisa:

Last month when you announced Yahoo! Inc’s new multi-million dollar ad campaign including the tagline, "the internet’s under new management yours," I wrote you an open letter. While admittedly the letter was critical and even a bit sarcastic at times regarding censorship on Yahoo’s photo sharing site Flickr, I nonetheless was hopeful that perhaps Yahoo was sincere in your latest marketing message. I thought the statement was much better than the last big Yahoo marketing campaign about everybody needing to wear purple clothes or whatever, and as someone who values customer service oriented companies, I thought it was a positive statement for Yahoo to make.

Unfortunately, at this point, however, I am going to have to call bullshit on your new campaign. I assume it’s ok with you that I’m using such strong language to describe your campaign. Your boss Carol Bartz has built a big reputation as a tough talker with salty language so I’m hoping you’ll understand.

You see Elisa, despite the fact that seemingly everywhere I turn in San Francisco I see another one of your new ads on a bus shelter somewhere, the message rings hollow. It’s doublespeak. It’s inauthentic.

Yesterday, your Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ destroyed a community on Flickr that was home to over 3,000 hard-core Yahoo users. It was a community of photographers, many of whom have spent years on Yahoo in a group that was rich and vibrant. The group had over 5,000 ongoing conversations in it. It’s where many of us lived on Yahoo. The group was in part dedicated to free speech, but it was so much more than that. The group was a place where we talked about music. Where we shared tips on photography. Where we debated about film vs. digital. Where we went to ask each other for advice on what lens we ought to purchase next. It was a place where many of us went to meet each day. It was a place where offline photography meetups were organized. We actually published a magazine together. Many of us became good friends in real life.

But yesterday, while we were conversing there, and without any warning or opportunity to take any sort of self-corrective action, your Community Manager went nuclear and destroyed all of that user data. All of it. Every last thread. With a push of a button. Threads that were meaningful and important to us.

This was data that did not belong to Yahoo! Elisa. You destroyed something that did not belong to you. You destroyed hours and hours of peoples hard work maliciously and callously. You destroyed a group dedicated to free speech, but more significantly you destroyed a group that thousands of people had put significant emotional energy into.

And do you know what your Community Manager was tweeting mere seconds before she nuked this very popular group Elisa? She was tweeting "I hate your freedom."

That’s right Elisa I, hate, your, freedom. That’s the image that I chose to go with this letter to you. A screenshot of her freedom hating tweet.

While I’m sure your representative got a good laugh out of that tweet, personally I found it as offensive as the fact that so much user data was destroyed so callously in the first place. You see Elisa, Yahoo already has a problem with people thinking that you hate freedom. Remember when Jerry Yang got called before the U.S. Congress and was brow beaten after you all released private emails to the Chinese Govt which resulted in a Chinese journalist’s imprisonment to this day? Remember just last week when rumors (very unfounded rumors I might add) were flying that Yahoo! had released private information on thousands of freedom seeking dissidents to the Iranian Govt?

"I hate your freedom?" Really Elisa? This is the marketing message that you as Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer want to send out to the world as you rip apart an online community dedicated to free speech. It’s distasteful and it’s offensive.

You see Elisa, all the money spent in the world on bus stop billboards cannot make your marketing message ring true when the real voices, real human authentic voices online, ring out that the internet (at least at Yahoo!) is in fact very much not under our management at all. In fact our feelings are not taken into consideration one iota. We, thousands of us, are tossed aside, thrown out like garbage. Our hard work destroyed by you. Not only do actions like this invalidate your message, they create enormous ill will against Yahoo that will stand for many years going forward.

A number of help forum threads (now all conveniently locked down by your staff) were created over the destruction of this group. I will quote you the official Yahoo! statement, again from Ms. Champ stated in one of those locked threads:

"Flickr is a community with fences. If you want the open range, then unfortunately, what you want to do is beyond what we allow."

You see how that reads Elisa? It does not read that Yahoo is all about "you" at all. It’s a patronizing statement that says Yahoo is not about what "you" want. It’s about what "we" want. I hope you can see how this statement directly contradicts your current marketing slogan that the internet is under new management, you.

I’m sure you are familiar with John Gilmore, Elisa, a well respected thinker who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a quite respected organization that fights for freedom online. John Gilmore once said, "the Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." And that’s what many of us have now done. Many of us in the community that was destroyed have now decided that we will no longer use Yahoo for our community experience. Yahoo simply cannot be trusted to not destroy thousands of hours of our work in the future. Instead we will be using community space hosted by one of your competitors, FriendFeed, a site owned by Facebook.

You see, despite not having a large glitzy "the internet’s about you," campaign, to my knowledge FriendFeed has never censored anyone. They have this really cool feature allowing users to block somebody if you don’t like what they have to say instead. It’s great. When you do that they just disappear entirely on the site for you. Poof. Magic. Rather than pay for salaries and benefits for a team of censors, they just let their users block content that they don’t like and let me tell you, it works *alot* better that way.

Interestingly enough Elisa, FriendFeed was founded in part by the very guy who came up with the Google (another one of your competitors) slogan, "don’t be evil," — as a marketing exec I’m sure you realize how powerful of a corporate message that has turned out to be, much more powerful than everybody needs to wear purple.

I’d hope that you could see how nuking an entire group over what was a skirmish between maybe two members in the group might not make sense. You used a shotgun to kill a gnat.

Many things could have been done to more responsibly address the Yahoo concern in question. Admins of the group could have been warned and given an opportunity to take corrective action on their own, the single offending post could have been deleted rather than destroying thousands of posts 99.9% of which were entirely unoffensive, you could have simply removed what you found offensive and locked the group down, leaving a rich collection of user data to at least exist in an archive format for future reference for those who had created it.

It did not need to be nuked.

I do hope you take a moment out of your busy day to address this situation personally Elisa because it is damaging to both Yahoo’s brand and your own campaign that you are spending significant shareholder money on.

And as long as these are the types of actions that you and your management stand behind then your current campaign is very much meaningless indeed. I do also hope that you do not allow your staff to personally retaliate against me by nuking my own flickr photostream for writing to you what is in fact a very respectful letter.

Thomas Hawk

Posted by Thomas Hawk on 2009-10-13 17:46:23

Tagged: , censorship , flickr , Yahoo , Elisa Steele , Heather Champ , DMU , Freedom , fav10 , 10 , screenshot , Twitter , superfave , fav25 , FriendFeed , citizen photography , fake , false , censorshit , freedomofspeech , tesetingnipsa44 , fav20 , fav30 , fav40 , fav50 , fav60 , fav70

The post An Open Letter to Elisa Steele EVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Yahoo Inc. on the New “The Internet is You,” Yahoo Marketing Campaign appeared first on Good Info.

[abujaihs-blog]

American Institute Of Architects Announces The Best Housing Designs Of 2019

The American Institute of Architects recently bestowed a series of awards to the winners of 12 exceptional residential designs. AIA's Housing Awards program, now in its 19th year, was established to celebrate the best in housing design for new construction, renovations and restorations. Awards were given in the following categories: one- and two-family custom residences, one- and two-family production homes, multifamily housing and specialized housing. This year’s recipients were selected by a five-member jury that evaluated projects for demonstrating design excellence. The jury evaluates whether designs are sustainable, affordable, durable, innovative, socially impactful, meeting client needs and addressing the natural and built environment. Here are the 2019 Housing Awards recipients and jury comments: Category 1: One- and Two-Family Custom Residences 

BATES MASI + ARCHITECTS Georgica Cove, East Hampton, New York | Bates Masi + Architects: Each structure of Georgica Cove has an independent mechanical system allowing it to be shut down when unoccupied.

This allows the livability of the house to expand and contract whether the owners are alone, hosting dinner guests or have a full house of overnight guests.

JAMES BRITTAIN Mirror Point, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia | MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Mirror Point is expressed as an elevated, 80-foot long extruded fish shed, supported by a steel aedicule and a board formed concrete entry core. The building is precisely sited using existing topography to maximize Southern passive solar energy and views to the lake. Tropical Cyclone Fani Hits The Indian Coast

ERIN FEINBLATT Off-the-Grid Guesthouse, Central Coast, California | Anacapa Architecture and Willson Design: The rooftop is planted with native grasses, and the house is made of sustainable building materials such as steel, concrete and glass. The home is completely self-sufficient and includes its own sewage treatment as well as an on-site water supply and a rooftop photovoltaic system to meet all energy needs. Category 2: One- and Two-Family Production Homes

JOHNSEN SCHMALING ARCHITECTS Oak Park Housing, Sacramento, California | Johnsen Schmaling Architects: Oak Park Housing is a compact infill development on a long-vacant lot in Sacramento’s Oak Park district. Designed as prototypical single-family homes around an ambitiously stringent construction budget to position the homes at the lower end of the market spectrum, the interior had to be organized in compact volumes with uncompromising spatial efficiency, avoiding any gratuitous square footage that would balloon the unit size without tangible functional or experiential benefits.

SAM OBERTER Tiny Tower, Philadelphia | Interface Studio Architects: Tiny Tower places a 1,250-square-foot home on a 12-by-29-foot lot, whose similarly scaled neighbors are currently used as single-car parking and rear yards for the adjacent houses. Although it measures only 38 feet in height, Tiny Tower is organized like a full-scale skyscraper. Category 3: Multifamily Housing

Bigwin Island Club Cabins, Baysville, Canada | MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Although formally dramatic, the cabins employ standard construction techniques, including typical gang nail trusses for the roof. This strategy, one of drawing upon local knowledge and expertise to reinterpret the vernacular, results in unique buildings that can capitalize on the economy of their construction. This is locavore architecture that is made of local materials and construction methods.

Bill Sorro Community, San Francisco | Kennerly Architecture & Planning: Bill Sorro Community provides an ambitious combination of energy efficiency, air-quality, storm-water management and grey-water re-use. The sustainable aspects reduce ongoing costs, which makes funds available for other uses.

DAMIANOS PHOTOGRAPHY Jefferson Park Apartments, Cambridge, Massachusetts | Abacus Architects + Planners: Residents are supported by a physical environment that provides privacy, a sense of community, connections to nature, places to play and gather, and a sense of joy.

The central drive connects directly into the surrounding neighborhood street grid, while the four courtyards provide a child- and community-friendly environment safely sheltered from traffic.

COREY GAFFER Lofts at Mayo Park, Rochester, Minnesota | Snow Kreilich Architects: The Lofts at Mayo Park has helped to improve the experience of a population critical to Rochester’s economy: medical patients traveling to the city for treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Beyond providing unique housing options, such as large bathrooms, full kitchens and flexible leases, tenants describe the interiors and connection to nature as calming.

DAVID SUNBERG/ESTO Pierhouse, Brooklyn, New York | Marvel Architects: Pierhouse condominium building performs as an extension of Brooklyn Bridge Park, a verdant backdrop recalling the high, sandy bank of pre-colonial Brooklyn Heights, screening urban noise while facilitating waterfront access. Category 4: Specialized Housing

BRUCE DAMONTE San Joaquin Villages, University of California, Santa Barbara | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, and Kevin Daly Architects: The overall site and individual residential unit designs needed to complement the predominantly Spanish-style architecture of the university and surrounding communities. The team satisfied this requirement by offering a modern interpretation of local architectural motifs such as tower elements, loggias and exterior stairs.

BRUCE T. MARTIN Skyline Residence Hall, Waltham, Massachusetts | William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc.: The Skyline Residence Hall “C” shape opens to views of Boston. Because of this arrangement, views are democratized. All students have access to the view over the Quad, which would not have happened had the building been placed at the hillcrest instead of the open space. Source: Forbes Read the full article

[johnaculbreath]

What is the FCC going to do about millions of bot comments during the net neutrality repeal debate?

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What is the FCC going to do about millions of bot comments during the net neutrality repeal debate?

By Jason Tashea

August 2018

Jeff Kao: "I would not guess one in 15 people submitted an FCC comment. The amount doesn't pass the smell test." Photo by Claudine Gossett Photography; 13Imagery/Shutterstock.com

Data scientist Jeff Kao was skeptical of the nearly 23 million public comments the Federal Communications Commission received during the net neutrality repeal debate last year.

“I would not guess one in 15 people submitted an FCC comment,” says Kao, a machine learning engineer at Atrium Legal Technology Services in San Francisco. “The amount doesn’t pass the smell test.”

He challenged his suspicion by analyzing the publicly available comments and found at least 1.3 million were submitted under a stolen or misused identity. While there were fake comments submitted on behalf of both sides of the debate, the vast majority, Kao says, were anti-net neutrality. However, the problem was bigger than he initially knew.

The New York attorney general’s office, which is suing the commission over net neutrality along with 22 other attorneys general, said as many as 2 million Americans had their identities stolen. A 2017 report by data analytics consulting firm Emprata for industry group Broadband for America found that nearly 445,000 were from Russian email addresses, and that a similar number came from Germany.

While the FCC has taken issue with the characterization of the New York attorney general’s claims, Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner and a Democrat, released a statement saying the agency’s net neutrality repeal process “turned a blind eye to all kinds of corruption in our public record—from Russian intervention to fake comments to stolen identities in our files.”

Even with these allegations, the FCC has not changed its comments process, which Kao says is “concerning because we all start to lose a little bit of faith in our democracy.”

While heralded for improving government access, moving government online has created new vulnerabilities to America’s democratic processes. With known vulnerabilities, governments, advocates and software companies are sounding alarms and promoting solutions. This is a problem not only for the FCC.

Platform to speak

Jessica Rosenworcel: “There are eerie parallels between what we saw in the net neutrality public record and the reported interference in the 2016 election. We should pay attention…We should figure out what’s going on.” Photo courtesy of Jessica Rosenworcel; by 13Imagery/Shutterstock.com.

Rosenworcel, who is in the minority on the Republican-controlled commission, tells the ABA Journal that organizations receiving fake comments or comments submitted under stolen identities include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Labor, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission.

Renee DiResta, head of policy at Data for Democracy, an organization that uses data for social good, says Russia’s misinformation campaign during the 2016 election and the spam FCC comments are examples of “manufactured consensus.”

While this approach to disinformation is most common on social media networks, she says it can be used to sway public policy as well. Rosenworcel adds: “There are eerie parallels between what we saw in the net neutrality public record and the reported interference in the 2016 election. We should pay attention to them. We should figure out what’s going on.”

In the case of the FCC, the public comment portal is “woefully deficient,” Rosenworcel says. To limit the impact of bots and spam, she recommends using Captchas or requiring two-factor authentication before submitting a comment. However, she says the current FCC budget does not include resources to make these changes. The FCC did not respond to a request for comment. (In July, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said the public comment portal may get an upgrade, including CAPTCHAs, in a letter to U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon.)

To fight against identity theft, DiResta says the names illegally used to submit comments often come from hacked user lists, which can be found online. Submitted comments could be checked against these lists, helping an agency flag and investigate misconduct.

One company working to improve the online comment system is SmartComment, headquartered in Los Angeles. Keith Guille, a public information officer at the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality in Cheyenne, says his department uses SmartComment so the public can read about a rule change and make a comment.

Previously, Guille says, the department would take out a legal ad in newspapers or post on an email discussion list or website. Now, SmartComment creates a centralized database of comments received online, through phone calls or letters, for example. “It really helps the staff to organize things much easier,” Guille says. Since adopting the platform, he has seen an increase of comments, but that has not come with an onslaught of spam, he says.

Acknowledging bots play a role in every form of electronic communication, Tim Mullen, co-founder of SmartComment, says agencies have to adopt technology that cuts through the manufactured noise. He says his product uses various features to fight against bots and spam, but he would not be more specific for security reasons.

Rosenworcel at the FCC thinks that “our openness is being exploited,” and that there are concrete steps to be made to protect democratic institutions. “Nobody said that digital age democracy was going to be easy,” she says.

This article was published in the August 2018 ABA Journal magazine with the title "No Comment: The FCC received millions of comments during the net neutrality repeal debate from bots exploiting stolen or misused identities—what is the agency going to do about it?."

What is the FCC going to do about millions of bot comments during the net neutrality repeal debate? republished via ABA Journal Daily News - Business of Law