The New Black Mountain Poets: Asheville meets SF. . . Again

Residents of the mission district in san francisco are a most glorious extension of the black mountain poets. With all the flickr tagging, vloggerconning, moblogging, mobilcasting, and digital logging - the internet is more than the new library or new mapping system, it is a medium by which neighborhood characteristics are once again brought to light in the shadow of real-life Wal Mart domination. Digital media embraces the subjective and turns each agent into an artist, decomposing and re-recomposing itself as a palette. The mission district and the digital media artists (documentarians, really) who are congregating within it, are leading the movement - our neighborhood is our palette, "web2.0" is our tool, and the ways we manipulate each tool is yet another form of the art.

Take, for example, the sidewalks stencils as seen in flickr group sidewalk aphorisms.

The Mission is easily reconstituted as new artforms and creating a movement in digital media by simply existing . . . now the rest of the world is quickly experiencing the sidewalks & graffiti in the mission in multi tiered formats.

Photography recreates the stencils, tools on the web enable the syndication and therefore the experience. video puts it to motion. general freak factor in sf helps make it wonderful. Perhaps one or two tourists are walking around the mission, right now, looking for the sidewalk stencils they heard about/ saw on the internet. The mission is a digital palimpsest, experienced in layers and documented with indelible ferocity, in multiple mediums - written by The New Black Mountain Poets. That's us.