LAST DAY to submit for Brooklyn Museum's "Click!" exhibition

i previously posted about this "crowd-curated" exhibition here, and as the deadline is March 31, i thought it was about time that i submit my entry.

it seemed like it would be pretty straight-forward. i thought the most difficult task would be deciding which one of the thousands of my brooklyn photos to submit.

[ this is the curse of digital photography for me. it's soooo easy and relatively inexpensive to snap and save hundreds of pics at a whack that i can be lazy about editing and deleting the 95% i have no business keeping. i just have to keep buying more storage. i have accumulated close to 2 terabytes (2000+ GB) of photos in the past 4 years that i've been shooting digitally, and unless i do some serious thinning of my digital photo herd, i'll need to bring more storage online this spring if i keep up my current pace. ]

anyway, turns out that selecting the image was the easy part. [ i can't/won't tell which image i selected, as i believe it's against the rules. ]

the next most difficult task for me was the "100-word or less" artist statement. i can get a bit wordy on the "printed" page, and crafting a concise, precise and elegant statement about my own work is daunting. after about 45 minutes of revisions and reworking and modifying and rejiggering, i crafted something of which i was proud. unfortunately, i did this revising and reworking and modyfing and rejiggering on the museum's web form, which would not have been a problem had everything gone smoothly when i hit the "submit" button.

i thought i had followed all of the instructions about photo file size and format and resolution and dpi to the letter. my artist statement was 93 words, which until recently, is less than 100 words. i pride myself on being able to follow directions ("Do Not Use Toaster In Shower"). so, after hitting the "submit" button and heeding the warning not to close my browser window while the file was uploading, i thought all i had left to do was to wait for the award ceremony.

silly me.

after several minutes, i'm imformed via my browser that my photo was not accepted as it was not within the prescribed specifications. huh? i check, double check, triple check. unless they're using some alternate counting system, i think their web 2.0 code is broken. to add insult to injury, my well-crafted less-than-100-word artist statement vanished into the internet ether, too. sh*t!

so, i check their FAQ. their FAQ suggests i try Firefox if i have problems uploading. OK. fine. i accept that Apple's Safari browser doesn't always follow all of the internet P's & Q's, so i fire up Firefox, rewrite and revise and reword my artist statement again (might as well polish it again, given this "opportunity"), check, double check and triple check my jpeg's dimensions, size and format, and hit "submit", heed the "don't close the browser window" warning during the upload, and wait for the little spinning icon to stop spinning...

BZZZT! Sorry! strike two!

okay, i'm a smart, savvy, former silicon valley engineering nerd. i can figure this out. i google "brooklyn museum click! upload problem" to see if anyone else is having trouble, but find nothing relevant. i send them email, as suggested in their FAQ if having trouble uploading, but have yet to get a response. i search the Community section of their web site for leads but find nothing that helps.

what to do now? i suppose that all i can do is wait for them to answer my email and help me sort out why i cannot upload my photo. or someone else can come to my rescue.

hopefully, this will all be straightened out before March 31. i'll keep you posted.

UPDATE (3/25/08):

seems like the situation has gone from bad to worse. first, when i attempted to upload a photo this morning, the process ended with an error page with a message with words like "bad", "xhoePkmc.c", "memory". yup, we're talking software bug and application crash.

now, this afternoon, when i logged in to try again, i got routed to a page on their website that has nothing to do with the Click exhibit.

has anyone been able to upload? anyone? Brooklyn Museum folk, are you out there?

UPDATE (3/31/08):

i was finally successful in uploading an image a couple of days ago. it seems that all of the technical issues have been fixed so far. if you haven't submitted, you still have a few hours left. why not?

i can't wait to see the submissions. i have no idea what sorts of interpretations of the "changing face of brooklyn" we'll see, but i'm guessing it'll be interesting at least.

more on this once the audience evaluation starts.