Artopium's Roving Art & Music Festival - Festival News & Updates

Festival News

Artopium's Guide to Urban Camping Episode I
July 6, 2010

As the CEO and founder of Artopium.com and RovingFestival.com (known jointly as Artopium's Roving Festival) Artopium Mike is currently living a 24/7 guerrilla urban camping lifestyle as way of bring the most raw and talented art, music, fashion, video and books from the underground. Mike is documenting his ventures through the urban jungle using nothing more than the camera in his phone, and not only showcases the talent e finds along the way, but demonstrates how you too can be a guerrilla urban camper. Check out Episode I where Mike shows you how to set up camp, then goes into the city to blanket vend his creative endeavors.

See more at YouTube.com/StealthCamping

Artopium's Guide to Urban Camping Episode I (full version)

Artopium's Roving Festival | MySpace Video

Become a Premium Account holder!
March 4, 2009

This is still a very new feature and is still in the beta testing phase. I am going to give away a few Premium accounts and let artists use the features such as adding works to eBay, completely for free for one year. This will eventually be a $24.99 per year value, but if you are interested in testing out the new features, please contact me and I will take a look at your account. I'm looking for artists who have a very well formed profile page, completed with everything that can be. The higher your rating points and account activity the better too. Anyway, this is a limited offer (maybe only 5) and will be on a first come first serve basis, so don't hesitate. Just contact me ASAP. :)

Amazing new features on Artopium.com
March 4, 2009

I'm incredibly excited to bring to you the news that Artopium.com has gone through some wonderful and innovating changes, granting more freedom and flexibility for you, the artist to sell your Creative Works online. It's been a long journey, but I think you'll be impressed by all the new features. Here's an almost complete list of what I'm calling Artopium 5.0.

New Features

For everyone...

1) Artopium has a new, sleak yet simple look, helping to present your work in the best way possible.
2) Every single written article has been updated with the latest information.
3) The "Art, Music, Fashion, Video & Book" drop down menus have been fixed so that work in most versions of IE
4) You may now sign up for Artopium's Newsletter once again. Just add your name and email to the feature at the bottom of the home page. It shouldn't be too long before a new newsletter comes out.
5) Artopium now has a new and improved privacy policy, protecting your sensitive information.
6) The Artopium forums have been removed. Nobody was using it anyway. I'm looking into new forums or blogs or something to take it's place, however, I'm not putting much effort into it until I see a need for it.

For Standard Artist Members...

7) All reviews posted by Artopium onlookers are now secured by captcha (people must solve a simple code to post). Only a very few people were being harrassed by spam, but not anymore!
8) "Buy Now" pages are now a lot more appealing to buyers. By presenting more information to buyers in a nicely formatted design they will be more enticed to buy. Also, buy now pages are much easier to be indexed by google and other search engines.
9) All Artist profile pages as well as buy now pages contain a "Link to this page" box, enabling people to copy and paste HTML links from their blogs, websites, forums, myspace pages, etc. to your art work.
10) You can now add google and youtube videos to your Creative Works by simply pasting the video embed code into the appropriate box when you "add a video clip". This feature only applies to Video Creative Works.
11) Totals for the amount of money either Pending, Verifying, Cancelled, Refunded, Completed and Paid Orders are now presented at the top of the Orders page.
12) You can now change the order in which your Creative Works are presented on your profile page, as well as the number of works per page.
13) The Shipping Center has been completely renovated and upgraded into a full fledged and fully functional shipping preferences settings page which enables you to set shipping costs (and insurance for original works) for your Works.

For Premium Artist Members... (Beta)

14) Artists who choose to upgrade their accounts for a small subscription will get a host of more features including:
15) The ability to instantly add your Creative Works to eBay! Just pick a category and your Creative Work is immediately available for bidding!
16) 80 MB more disk space (a total of 100 MB) for uploading music, video and images to Artopium.
17) A higher base rating for every Creative Work listed, pushing them all higher in the Artopium search results as well as causing them to appear on the Artopium home page more often.
18) Longer ranging statistics. Your stats will be saved for two years instead of only one.
19) Premium account holders will be charged nearly half the commission for sales of their works on Artopium. In essence this is the best feature, as if you are a high volume selller you can instantly increase your earnings. In accordance to these new changes a fees chart has been created.
20) There's probably more that I'm just forgetting to mention, but do you really want to sit there and keep reading about it, or are you going to go check out the new site at Artopium.com now?

Festival In The Works
January 31, 2009

OK Folks, the next festival you've all been waiting for is now in the beginning stages. I've definitely decided that it will be in Portland (bet you didn't see that one coming). I have a few ideas about the location, but I won't say exactly where at this stage in the planning. Let's just say I'm shooting for downtown somewhere. And this one's going to be big! No joke. I've got a great theme in mind and I hope to bring in a lot of different, very cool organizations to help put on something truly grand. If space and funding are available there will be two stages, and a very large area for booths. I'm currently writing up the budget for all of this, so if you, or anyone you know, can give me good estimates for stage, sound and lighting, as well as promotional ad space, it would be appreciated. It would be nice to think that I can put together the festival I see in my mind by the end of this summer, but for the next Artopium Roving Festival to really be on the next level I'm thinking I may go ahead and set the date for 2010. I know this is really far ahead for most artists to book, so I'm going to wait a little while longer before opening the festival sign up.

Halloween
November 2, 2008

Well, I'm still here in Portland. Things have slowed down a bit in the jewelry department. I attribute this to the change in the season as the plentiful North Western rain not only drives out a lot of the tourists but creates a different, and possibly macabre mindset in the locals. That isn't to say I haven't been having fun. Some of those whom I've met that have lived in Portland for a while have told me that you're not a real Portlander unless you get wet. I personally love the rain, so it isn't getting me down. For Halloween I had the distinct pleasure of partying with a group of some brilliant musicians and beautiful gypsies that form three of Portland's finer bands; NIAYH (Stands for: Now Is All You Have, check out their music video), Def Kids, and Shelter Kids. They performed at Reed College which is supposedly known for "rich hippies", whatever that means.

Hempfest in Seattle
August 27, 2008

I just spent the last week in Seattle, Washington. The first weekend of which I spent at Hempfest, an amazingly huge festival of music, art and products for the purpose of marijuana anti-prohibition, and pro-legalization. I would have to say at least 30 to 40 thousand people attended throughout the day and witnessed the 3 stages of great, live bands, and the many booth vendors along the Seattle beach a few blocks down from Pike's Market.

Urban Camping in Portland, Oregon
July 22, 2008

So far, it's been a very interesting "mixed bag" of experiences trying to urban camp in downtown Portland. First, let me say that for all of the cities I could try and do this in, Portland is setup for it like an urban camping paradise. There are numerous parks to sleep in, and certain doorways seem to be acceptable sleeping places, although the idea of sleeping directly on the sidewalk seems silly in lieu of the fact that Washington Park is just a train ride away. At Washington Park, if you go far enough in, and it is indeed a large park, you will find many others who have zipped up into their sleeping bags and taken up a nice, quiet, and mostly peaceful plot of park to sleep in. My first several days in this town have been camping out with other rainbow brothers and sisters in the park. The weather has been very nice and temperate throughout the day, but it does get a bit chilly at night and I would recommend a sleeping bag rated to at least 30. It rains a bit in the spring and a lot through the fall and winter, but in the summer it's not anything you couldn't handle with a tarp, so I haven't need to pitch a tent yet. The people in Portland are amazingly friendly and actually, quite a few of them are travelers from many other places. It is a port town, I guess. But, just about everywhere you go downtown you will see others with travelers packs, walking around, taking in the culture, being the culture. There are so many free meal programs throughout the city that no one could possibly go hungry in this town. Going to them kind of makes me feel like I'm at Rainbow again, walking from kitchen to kitchen around the meadow. The biggest differences being that at rainbow I got fed wonderful, nutritious, vegan food that gave me much energy, even if I didn't eat very much, and Portland's free meal programs make me feel like I've been poisoned. Not to mention the fact that most of the free meal programs are visited by the mentally disabled or drug (heroin) addicts. Well, OK, so are rainbow kitchens, but at rainbow there's so much more love and consciousness present, and definitely no heroin, or most other powders. And alcohol is discouraged greatly.

Artopium at the Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming
July 18, 2008

I left Austin, Texas with a purpose: to "rove". The festival had become stagnant and I knew that in order for me to achieve my purposes with it I needed to rove. So I teamed up with the one and only Freeman from the Freeman Perspective along with two close friends and headed out for this year's National Rainbow Gathering in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. On our way there we stopped in Colorado to visit the Garden of the Gods, near Colorado Springs and to stay and visit with some fantastic glass blowing brothers.

When I reached the National Forest I was promptly welcomed home, and after spending one night in the parking lot, we made the 4 to 5 mile hike into "Main Meadow". Mostly we "plugged in" to Milliway's kitchen, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" where "Tea starts wars!" There I met so many numerous, wonderfully lovely brothers and sisters and we worked hard to feed the masses with so many varieties of pizza and zoo-zoos.

On the 4th of July all 20,000 of those naked hippies in the forest remained totally silent in contemplation of world peace. This has got to be one of the most profound experiences of my life. To think of this many peace loving brothers and sisters coming together in the middle of one of the most scenic and aesthetically beautiful forests I've ever seen to remain totally silent through an entire morning, contemplating. Of course everybody still meandered, looking for breakfast or that morning bowl, but without saying a word. At noon, the children from Kiddie Village paraded down to the peace pole in the middle of Main Meadow while all 20,000 present held hands and ohm'ed at the perimeter of the meadow. Once all the children reached the pole, everyone at the gathering broke their silence in an eruption of cheers. And the party went on all through the night. I've since met a beautiful rainbow sister who has encouraged my friend and I to come visit the Great Northwest. So I'm in Portland, Oregon. I've already been whisked away to Siuslaw National Forest to see the beautiful Oregon coast line and to somewhere near Hood River to venture into a rock-built hot springs on the Washington side of the border. It's amazing to me already that I've gone from about 8,000 ft in elevation in the Wyoming mountians to be at the Oregon coastline three days later. And the light and life of the Rainbow Gathering continues as I've run into many brothers and sisters from the gathering here in Portland, and the general attitude of the town seems to be of the same spirit. I think I'm going to check this place out for a while.

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