debate

i began my day with artists' presentations in the bar, where floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides rendered the flat-screens more reflections than anything else. this made it difficult for the first presentation, "ribbons - a live cinema instrument" by tomas laurenzo. ribbons is an application is based on VJ tools but with the intention to combine more of the narrative possibilities of cinema with typical image-based club VJing.

Anyone interest in joining us for all or part of an overland trip this September, London->Linz->Istanbul, for art, tech and ecology? "The Eclectic Tech Carnival is a gathering of women with a critical interested in Free Information and Open Standards technology. The event creates an opportunity for women to network, exchange skills and have fun!"

A hundred comments extracted from a discussion on the Netbehaviour.org list about the We Wont Fly For Art project. 1) This is too challenging. Artists will always choose their careers over the planet's safety.

• Helen Varley Jamieson's blog
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On WIKI as Art On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys' admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.

This is a response to Amy Wilson's recent discussion of the collision of cultures in virtual worlds in Second Life, "The Raw and the Cooked", http://amyfreelunch.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/the-raw-and-the-cooked/ In it, Amy considers the non-academic online artist as analogous to that of the "Outsider" which I challenge to place into a broader context. I reply:

I have spent the last year working as a 'partner journalist' on the Media Mates scheme, a project designed in order to engineer coverage of new media art in the North. One of my articles, a self-reflexive look at my role as critic and the scheme itself is in this months a-n, but you can also read it here: Media Mates On the 5th of April I spent an hour interviewing an artist who has had a profound impact on the field of new media art (in advance of his UK retrospective ‘Silicon Remembers Carbon’, at FACT in Liverpool). The artist, David Rokeby, has produced works such as Very Nervous System (1986 - ), the Giver of Names (1991 - ) and n-Cha(n)t (2001), which have set a precedent in audience interactivity – not to mention code writing as artistic practice – which many new media artists, curators and critics across the globe are still digesting, yet I was unable to get the interview published in print.

Reblogged from the Enter Unknown Territories

• Charlotte Frost's blog
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I don't know what the netiquette is surrounding reblogging from email lists but Ryan Griffis just posted this to the CRUMB list...I'm posting it here partly because the points he makes resonate with me and also as an enriched bookmark to some very interesting links. Subject: Re: Books about participation One other point regarding reflexivity and "media art"/"contemporary art"... i haven't read Bishop's edited book yet, but if the general position is anything like her article on collaboration and "relational aesthetics" in Artforum a while back, it should seem problematic, to say the least, for people involved in the discussions here. Not because of it's lack of attention to people working in "media" or "networks" per se, but because it so obviously stakes out a conservative politics through conflicting notions of ethics and aesthetics. How does one write a text on "collaboration" that seeks to be a critical analysis, and manage to move from Oda Projesi and R. Tiravanija to Thomas Hirschorn as exemplary of a challenging aesthetic and political practice?