"competition" "art" "must use google technologies"

wtf is going on here?

This sounds like a huge advertisement for google under the premise that "if we put your stuff in a gallery, you will be an artist." One that the public in another country will pay (the gallery) to see.

> "Sometimes we just need some inspiration and an outlet."

Folks, your outlet for your art is the entire world around you. It is your friends and family and co-workers and meetups. Art isn't a competition requiring $company's products. It's a way of communicating, not a class that you enter by adhering to corporate rules. I'm not saying, "don't do this," but I am saying, understand the power imbalance you're entering into, how they're benefiting and how they're feeding your ego to pull it off.

It may be just some of bitterness from my grad school years, but I showed stuff around the world for a few years, and like my advisor used to say about most of the projects in the world of "fill-a-gallery with computers and LCD screens and sensors" which faddish curators have been building the last decade, "Oh look, it's geeks!"

Producing art is a lot like a startup - you won't get any traction by impressing customers with your skills. You have to deliver. In business, you have to make your customers look good to others and in the art world, you have to communicate an insight and perspective and you have to make yourself vulnerable. Even if you just write code, you will probably get dirty.

Very few of you who do this will be compensated for your work. Most of your work will be shown and used to attract people, benefit the gallery owners financially and co-produce some kind of message about "google supports the arts." The works will be selected not on the basis of improving the world, but for supporting the message of the event's organizers.

Your contribution of free labor to the established wealthy may make some visistors laugh and cry, but it won't amount to anything except a diversion. They won't remember you and the world will be just a little bit more out of your control because you relied on someone else's validation and permission to communicate your message. Look, it's not about art, because they've already filtered out works which don't meet their corporation's criteria.

If you don't want to just be a freakshow participant for the benefit of a company's and gallery's bottom line, begin with an idea, not with a code editor. All of that "make a pretty pattern stuff" and "hook up a sensor to a pattern generator" stuff was actually done waaaaay back in the 1960s. The only people you impress will be those who don't know any better and you won't be communicating anything, but mollifying them with shiny objects. And for God's sake, don't limit yourself to showing your work in this one gallery or to using google technologies.

They're using celebrity to impress you. They're presenting a group of people as celebrity artists drawing pretty patterns on the screen and with blinking LEDs and implying that people get something out of it. But those are patron artists who benefit those for whom they are employed, not folks who communicate ideas through art that benefit the species.

It's as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, "Too much art is like candy and not bread."