I'm saddened by the passing of Panditji Ravi Skankar. He lived a long and amazing life, touching numbers of people around the world with his music. The New York Times and LA Times have good chronicles of his life, and they're wonderful reads.

I remember listening to Ravi Shankar for the first time and buying my first CD of his, which I listened to again last week. But when I think back on my life completely honestly, my connections with Indian classical music, and by extension Ravi Shankar, have been tied closely with my experiences of racism and immigrant oppression, being a child of Indian immigrants. Over the course of my life with these oppressions, I've been left with a complicated set of feelings, not always the loving fondness towards Indian classican music and Panditji that I'd like to hold.

When I performed classical music on sitar regularly, I often felt that I was not completely being received for the music I was playing, but as a symbol of what I represented--a young adult of Indian heritage playing classical music on an instrument that was so tightly linked to the mysticism associated with South Asian culture.

As a symbol, I was often perceived by my elder South Asian audience as a great hope--that the culture my immigrant elders left behind decades earlier could actually exist, live and grow here in the States. After a performance one Aunty told me with overwhelmed eyes that she hadn't heard the sitar since she left India thirty years earlier. Thirty. Years.

As a symbol, I was often perceived by my young adult South Asian audience as a way to connect with something that had been lost. Many of us grew up trying to hide ourselves as people of color. I myself was targeted a great deal as a young person because of my heritage. Trying to be invisible was the safest thing I could come up with to survive. But it came with a great sense of loss in myself. I never felt I had a strong connection with the history of my heritage like my non-South Asian peers seemed to. That was a big part of why I decided to learn sitar, and I think it's a big part of why my young adult audiences were drawn to my shows.

As a symbol, I was often perceived by my white audiences as a '...

The following article documents how I went about creating a mobile version of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Collections website in Drupal 5 using CSS and Javascript. I presented this work at the March 2012 Chicago Drupal Meetup Group. Here are my slides from the presentation:

At the Art Institute of Chicago, our museum website is run as two separate pieces. Collections—information on ~50,000 of the 150,000 artworks in our galleries and archives—runs on Drupal 5 and was initially developed by Palantir in 2008. Everything else runs on Serena Collage, a now-out-of-business CMS, and is currently being redesigned in Drupal 7 (*phew!*). I work mostly with our Drupal 5 Collections website.

More of our users are visiting our site on mobile devices. 7.75% of our visitors in February were on mobile devices, up from 3.25% the previous year. These aren’t staggering numbers today, but are inline with global trends. As mobile trends grow, we need to make the experience of these visitors more accessible. Viewing our current site on a mobile device is a little bewildering, with teeny-tiny text and links that you have to zoom in so far to use that they’re essentially unusable.

Our regular site is being redesigned with mobile in mind. With no immediate plans to upgrade our Collections site on the horizon, we needed to think about how we can work-with-what-we-have to satisfy our mobile users today. This led to us taking our current design and laying it out for mobile users—literally hiding content that’s less essential and making the rest bigger and more streamlined. We made an effort not to over-complicate our work so we could get a mobile site launched in a short amount of time (about 3 days of work).

Mobile design...

This week President Obama announced that the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden. As a response, people flocked to the White House and Ground Zero partying to the news, chanting "USA! USA!" I wrote about my fear and confusion of the celebration of violence as a resolution to conflict on my blog, Feminist Bhai. Here's an excerpt:

I cannot accept that violence, as a means of resolving conflict, is an appropriate option. We must eliminate the oppressive conditions that cause so much anger that people are willing to organize huge missions of attack. We must seek to understand the complexities of globalized, imperialistic racism and xenophobia, and the conditions the rest of the world is in as a direct result of our oppression. Only then will we be able to think about alternatives to violence as a response to violence against us.

Read more here.

Anida Yoeu Ali's "The 1700% Project" is a fierce, passionate response against violence directed at Muslim communities since 9/11. Using text found in hate crimes that were filed, she writes of acts of violence against the Muslim community, and folks *mistaken* for being Muslim, and uses her writing as a launch-point for a multi-disciplinary work. This retelling of real reports is as compelling as it is horrifying. She uses quotes taken directly from the mouths of perpetrators in her text: "terrorist," "kill all arabs", "go back to your own country", "you Islamic mosquitoes should be killed", "America is only for white people." It's hard for me to even feel comfortable restating those words, all shockingly similar to things I've personally heard in my life and stories that were shared in my community of things that have happened to people I love. I feel re-stimulated by her work, I feel hurt and saddened all over again. But I also feel challenged by Ali, to speak up louder than I have, to stand strongly in solidarity with other oppressed people, and to turn my anger into action, because as she puts it, "we refuse to end in violence."

Unfortunately, last week the installation of her work was defaced. Some of the responses to the news spreading of what happened have been really disheartening. People have been placing the blame on Ali for being "too political," accusing her of defacing her own work just for attention, and questioning whether the act of defacement is a hate crime at all. These questions and accusation are problematic on a number of levels.

First, let's try to frame what the circumstances around the defacement were. When one walks through a gallery space, it's not typical to touch the art or to physically interact with it unless there's something in the space specifying (a sign, security guard) what is allowed by the artist. We can have lots of discussion about artist and audience here, but generally, it's the artist who is given control of a space, and gets to decide what their intention is with their work, and what is safe and appropriate for the audience to do in their space. As a rule of thumb, this usually translates to "don't touch the artwork!" These norms should have been followed with Ali's installation, as there was...