Help Us Start a SciArt Tweet Storm

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

In addition to being artists ourselves, the Symbiartic team hopes to help advance the presence of images in science communication and culture. To that end, we would like to invite people making science-related art of all kinds to participate in an event from March 1-7 : the 1st SciArt Tweet Storm.

Starting today, right now, let's tweet a ton of science-inspired art, art created with the tools of science or art for science-literate audiences. #SciArt.

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Our Symbiartic Twitter list has over 400 artists and blogs engaged in SciArt listed, and more people are out there. Imagine if, for 1 week, half the people on that list tweeted 3 pieces of art, and retweeted others at least 5 times, all in one day. That's 1,600 tweets containing #SciArt per day; 11,200 in a week.

That will cause people to notice. Editors, journalists, researchers, educators, and maybe beyond.

The goal of this is to share the variety and importance of art as it relates to science. The sciart movement has been growing increasingly the past several years, aided by the internet and the easy connection of images and information. By posting a huge flurry of tweets all in one week, by tweeting and retweeting as a community, we hope to reach an even broader audience.

Perhaps you haven't yet joined Twitter. Now is the perfect time.

Some general guidelines about what we are trying to do:

• Post using the #SciArt hashtag.

• Let's aim to post a minimum of 3 of your works per day, so 21 for the week. Cool? Cool.

• Feel free to post more, a lot more than 3. Get noticed. Go to Twitter-jail.

• Variety is the spice. Post anything sciart-related: sketches, finished pieces, cartoons, fine art, bioart, paleoart, medical illustration, nature painting, you name it.

• Works do not have to be new. Get out that back catalogue. If there's one thing I've learned about Twitter, it's that your old artwork is always new to someone.

• Post the same piece more than once. If you've got an image or 2 you really want to promote, the audience at 2pm Tuesday is not the same as the audience at 2am Friday.

• Promote your blog, your online store, your Patreon or Kickstarter. A tweet consisting of ", #SciArt" + the image itself looks perfect to me.

• Share. Try to retweet at least 5 other #sciart tweets by other people per day.We are not policing this effort, so more or less is fine. Whatever you are comfortable with.

• Tagging: On desktop or mobile (strangely not iPad) you can tag photos on Twitter with the name of the person in them, and it doesn't use up any of the 140 characters.

• Hashtags: Good secondary hashtags you may want to include on occasion are #scicomm (for science communication, usually journalism) or #scied (science education). Use if appropriate to your art. Make sure you include #sciart!

• Posting: Depending on how the tweet storm is going, we may embed some tweets in posts here on Symbiartic throughout the week. Due to volume, we cannot include all of the tweets. Hopefully other blogs will post about artists and images they've newly discovered.

We are stronger as a community than as lone artists. Let's storm Twitter.

Remember to follow the Symbiartic team: