Josh Sager Media: Creative Technologies Blog

The creative Marathon is tonight. Come one come all. It’s going to be a rockn’ good time!

Start with an idea. Invite everyone you know. Then solve the problem. Take note as the solution comes together. The answer is never quite what’s expected, but usually better than anticipated. That is the “Community Difference”.

This past Sunday marked the first planning meeting for the second Creative Marathon. Walking into the meeting I thought I had everything covered. Quickly I was introduced to things I didn’t even consider. Like facebook invites, bus schedules, live blogging, and the idea of a remote marathon. In the moment, I was fairly jazzed about the ideas. Now that I’ve had time to digest them, I’m exploding with enthusiasm. A remote marathon!!! What a great idea!

My event planning batteries were completely recharged with a super duper cherry on top. I was so excited, that the rest of the holiday weekend turned into a Creative Marathon task party. As a result, I’m proud to announce the 24hourcreativemarathon.com is live.

Thank You
A true example of the “Community Difference”. A BIG thanks to everyone who spent a few hours of their holiday weekend with me ironing out the details of the event.

A Good First Step
A lot was accomplished over the weekend but there’s still a long way to go.

Come discuss, plan, and help organize the 2nd Creative Marathon.

The Creative Marathon is a 24 hour event where artists have 24 hours to create work, in any media, based on the theme of the event. All works created during the marathon will be viewed in a gallery show the very next day acompanied with live music and horderves. The first Creative Marathon featured 70 artists, and 150 guests at the show. It was a blast and I really look forward to planning and participating in the next one.

Right now the plan is have the marathon Sept28th and 29th.

Any questions can be sent directly Josh Sager, creative.marathon[at]gmail.com

Time: 12:30 PM , Sunday Sept. 2nd
Place: Creative Treehouse
517 Lincoln Ave. 2nd Floor
Bellevue, PA 15202

Over the last 4 months my website, stardotstarcomics.com has been receiving a lot of traffic. Which is totally awesome. I’m really excited to see that people are following the blog and checking out some of the comics.

Much of the traffic increase is as a result of social networking and participation in local events, like Podcamp Pittsburgh, Bootcamp Pittsbugh, Creative Marathon, Pittsburgh Flash Users Group, and The Creative Treehouse. Which has been terrific, but there’s one small problem.
Verbally saying stardotstarcomics.com is very difficult and is very confusing. It’s a very long name and the spelled out dot throws everyone for a loop. My only battle strategy is to say stardotstarcomicsPERIODcom, but a lot of people think the PERIOD is spelled out too. It makes for an uncomfortable conversation and the worst web marketing ever.

It really came to head that other night when my mom lost my web address and I had to explain to her what it was. That conversation lasted about 5 minutes longer than it really needed to. If I can’t simply tell my mom what my web address is, then I need to do something about that.

In 24-48 hours I will be the proud owner of sdscomics.com pointing to this website. Don’t worry I’m also keeping the stardotstarcomics.com name as well. sdscomics is much easier to say and to type. Hopefully this will make it easier for me to talk about and easier for you to get here.

PS I want to thank all of you reading my blog. This has been a great way to share really cool things going on in the creative and technology communities.

Last Friday Pittsburgh was named the most livable city for the 2nd time by Places Rated Almanac. We are the only city to have ever earned the title more than once. Quite an honor for our city.

Typically I would have shrugged my shoulders, made some sort of cynical comment about the recognition and then moved on with my life. But I can’t help but feel pride and excitement about the kudos from non-Pittsburgh media. Over that last 8 months I’ve been apart of a creative community heavily involved in the creative arts and technology scene responsible for podcamp, doughnuts and art, bootcamp, the 24 hour creative marathon, creative treehouse, internet web video, online novels, interactive podcasts, traditional art, etc, etc, etc…

I’m witnessing the rise and excitement of our community first hand. With every event I meet more people who then get involved and pass the energy building momentum for the next meeting, the next event, and things to come. A collective passion is forming into a contagious stimulated community that is empowered to share their skills and imagination with the rest of our region. As this continues to snowball others are taking notice. Pittsburgh was just recently featured in an Associated Press article that was picked up by CNN.com.

The national media is now taking notice of this creatively inspired activity. This is a “Very Big Deal”!

Keep the fire burning, get involved, and make some noise in your community. We did so can you.

Justin Kownacki of STBD.tv put this together and it’s awesome!

Click To Play

What can I say other than wow! The marathon was nothing short of amazing! If you’re not familiar with what it is, well it’s shakes down like this. Artists have 24 hours to create works in any media around a supporting theme for a gallery show the very next day. The work is sold and the proceeds go towards the development of the treehouse.

Friday at 8PM artists started to filter in and set up camp. It didn’t take long for the creativity to start flying either. There were paintings, sculputures, scratch boards, sketches, canvases, and you could feel the creative energy feeding off of one another. Burn energy drink was flying off the shelf and our first round of Vocellis pizza arrived just in time for the big registration rush.

Things started to settle down around 10pm which is when we fired up the big screen with all kinds of award winning music videos. Thanks Andy!! Thats when I started to sketch out my painting.

From 11pm - 4 am most of the artist got down to business. The room had a collective focus about it. Outside of a few informal critiques and bathroom trips the entire room was in the zone. It kind of reminded me of working on final projects at the end of the term, only we were all doing in on purpose… and for fun.

Around 5:30 to 6:00 am I hit a wall and I went home for a quick nap, shower, and change of clothes. I got back to the treehoue at 10:00 am to find some artists still working while others found the nearest couch and crashed.

I spent most of the morning filling out a spreadsheet and configuring the numbers for the event. As I entered each name I grew happier and happier. I knew we had a good turnout, but I wasn’t prepared for what I discovered.

Check out some of these stats!!! We had 30 out 34 RSVPS show up. Which is fantastic! But that’s not all. We also had 40 Walk-ins!!! Which is a grand total of 70 participating artists. I polled as many of them as I could and the number one way they found out about the event was word of mouth. Followed by the website, craigslist, then myspace.

I was so happy that I had a delicious muffin and coffee from another one of our gracious sponsors, affagoto.

When I looked even closer I found out we had a wide variety in age. Our youngest artist was 3 and our eldest was 70. I honestly didn’t expect such a wide diversity and I’m totally pumped about it.

Around 3:00ish most of us started to slowly finish up our works and began the transformation of workspace to gallery space. It started with a LOT of cleaning and moving things around. So after a few hours we had a PA, horderves, nicely displayed artwork (Thanks Rich and Ali!), a clean gallery, and a few last minute things to get ready.

The doors were set to open and some curious people started to filter in about an hour before the show started. Which was when the first piece was sold. My “No Girls Allowd” piece. From that point on I was totally encouraged about what was to transpire that evening.

Then BOOM!!!! All of these people started to come through the door, and most of them I’d never seen before. The bands started to set up and then it was speech time. You can check it out at stbd.tv. Thanks Justin! You’re totally awesome!!!

Some other band went of first and then the show was off and running. People everywhere!!! I sold some more art, met lots of great people, and I had an amazing time. John Miller went on next followed by Sean Atkins, and the room was buzzing. The next thing I know its around 11:30 and most everyone had taken off for the evening and we sold 7 pieces.

Honestly, I’m still in shock at the turnout. Around 150 + turned out to see the artwork. This is the closest count I could get from the guest book and the artist registration. I know there were more people that didn’t sign in but I can with confidence say that 150 were at the Creative Marathon Gallery show. Which means TOTALLY AWESOME!!! Thank you so much to everyone for coming out to support the art scene in Bellevue!!

And thank you to our sponsors Burn, Affagoto, Pat Catans, and Vocelli’s Pizza. Another special shoutout goes to Rachel, Jesse, Justin, Andy, Victoria, Sam, Gondeck, Mosley, Gary, Bodnar, Shank, Deef, Erik, Kookie, SOB, John Miller, Sean Atkins, Rich, Ali, and everyone who came to the treehouse!!!

This event went over a million times better than I could have ever hoped. Thank you all for making this happen.

For more information go to www.creativetreehousepgh.com

There about 12 hours left to go until the gallery show this evening and I couldn’t be happy with how the marathon is unfolding. Close to 40 artists RSVPed for the event but the last count was 54 people who made their way to the treehouse when I checked out for a quick nap. And we still have more people showing up this morning!!!! The number could potentially grow to 60 or possibly 70 local artists participating in the event.

There is still time to come down and submit some work. We are taking submissions all the way up to 8:00 PM today. So come on out make some art, see some art, and buy some art. Help support the coolest thing in Pittsburgh… The Creative Treehouse.

So here I sit at the registration table at the creative marathon and I am totally PUMPED!!!!!!!!!! The event is going over really well and we are only in the 1st hour. 30 artist are currently in the treehouse making art. How freakn’ cool is that!!

We just got our first submission of work. Pen and ink.

Yeah for the artistic community!!

This morning I started my normal routine of checking blogs and reading web news when I got a little curious about what would happen if I googled “creative treehouse”. To my surprise there were a lot of people talking about the Creative Marathon Event going on TONIGHT!!!

Here are some of the links to their blogs and websites. I was pretty excited about today anyway but after this I’m bursting at the seams!!!! Especially about the Pittsburgh Post Gazette write up!

I wish I could describe how good it feels to be doing something where the community takes notice. The marathon started as a goofy idea in a coffee shop and about 6 weeks later it’s grown so much. We now have sponsors, live music, appetizers, almost 40 contributing artists, and a very happy me.

So if you haven’t heard already there’s an awesome event going on tonight.

People talking about the treehouse
http://radar.planetizen.com/node/30746
http://www.postgazette.com/events/default.asp?mode=3&id=1123
http://pittsburghdish.typepad.com/pittsburgh_dish/arts/index.html
http://diggingpitt.blogspot.com/
http://tastyblogsnack.com/
http://www.artfaceoff.com/artist_about.php?ID=7253
http://pittsburgh.metblogs.com/archives/2007/02/sitting_in_a_tree.phtml
http://mrbaconpants.com/thearchives/165

I just found a few more
http://wwworanje.blogspot.com/
http://wwworanje.blogspot.com/
http://one.revver.com/watch/179531
http://sumofdavid.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-7-wishing-well-were-almost-done.html
http://5starsky.com/2007/02/late-night.html
http://weblog.onlinewithbillalexander.com/2007/02/18/saturdays-edition-of-the-bill-e-and-tt-show-on-talkshoecom.aspx

This is totally exciting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!