This is the end

This is the end

Dear art friends,

The year 2009 was a big one: Obama was elected, Michael Jackson died, swine flu swept the globe and we launched Strobed. Because we liked seeing art, free drinks and wandering through the city. I mean, who wouldn’t want to do that? And blogging was still a thing back then. We stopped blogging at some point—who has time to wander the city getting ‘cultured’ every Tuesday night?—and became an events calendar for art exhibition openings in Sydney. We’re now the most comprehensive art calendar in Sydney. Well, we were.

To automate the exhibition listing process we connected our website to Facebook to grab data about exhibition openings across Sydney. But in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has blocked access to events by developers. This means that our calendar no longer functions. Facebook haven’t said if or when they’ll unblock access.

We’ve looked at alternatives for grabbing Facebook data, but there are none. We thought about adding events manually, but it’d take more time than we have to give. And we thought about asking gallery owners to add their events directly to us, but people have tried that in the past with little success.

And so, for now, we’re calling it. Thanks for your support, we’ll miss you.

xoxo Strobed

25 Comments

  1. Genevieve

    Hey Strobed..your team rocks!! Forever love art always from art to love to life.
    Thank you xxxo

  2. Ben

    Thank-you so much. You guys did an incredible job. May you have excellent karma forever for bringing joy to so many of us

  3. Pony

    Thanks, sorry it didn’t work out , you’d imagine with technology it should be easier eh :)

  4. Lusa

    Thank you James and the mysterious Beth for doing the good thing by Sydney’s art scene.it was a great thing to do. Openings, free drinks and Strobed went together like… Shame on Fb for killing that.

  5. Mikey

    Thank you for providing an amazing service. Especially for those of us who are not on FB. So many good memories founded from discoveries on your site. You will be sorely missed. Thank you again & good luck.

  6. Alicja

    You’ve done an outstanding job!
    thanks so much for all you’ve done.
    best wishes for the future

  7. Carmel

    That’s terrible news. You provided such a great service. Thanks for the effort and hopefully it will work out that you can keep it automated. Carmel, Scratch Art Space

  8. Charles Glaspole

    oh poo that’s all kinds of sad face I’ve told everyone about the miracle of STROBED have you tried linking to events on this instead?

    1. James

      Thanks Charles, we agree it’s sad. We can still link to events, it’s just getting the data that’s the issue…

  9. Justine

    You’ve helped connect this community in more ways than you know, i hope this doesn’t mean goodbye forever and maybe you could find other means of sharing the event calendar love <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

  10. Sad haha

    Thank you so much for running strobed, I’m very sorry to see you go! Could it work if people manually sent in any openings that they knew about and you add them manually? Or if there was an automated way to sort events by date and people who know about them can submit them?

    1. James

      Definitely! But a few have tried that over the years and have struggled to get the galleries to commit… It’s the problem that no one wants to put the effort in until you’re huge, but you can’t get huge until everyone is putting the effort in.

  11. Em

    No! So very sad your closing up shop.
    I have definitely appreciated all of your emails over the years!

  12. Kent Johnson

    Thanks for the years of information, art, and of course the drinks! You will be missed!

Comments are closed.