Furtherfield Blog

I am just back from the 32nd AAH conference which was held in Leeds (5-7th April). It was a really good conference with the usual problem of multiple concurrent sessions with really interesting themes and speakers. I enjoyed a couple of presentations in the sessionThe Artist Interview: Contents and Contentions in Oral History/Art History which included a paper called: 'Finding Homometric Equilibrium: Robert Morris and the E-Interview' by Brian Winkenweder. This paper was of particular interest to me because it was a study of the use of email as a creative contextualising medium by a non-internet-based artist (Robert Morris). Brian Winkenweder made the point that email can be used as a performative space and that the interview itself becomes like a collaborative artwork produced by interviewer and interviewee. He reiterated this point by making the presentation of his paper extremely performative, and this picked up a thread that continued in other sessions. It was useful to hear of an artist using email in this way despite not being net-based and it was also good to encounter the theorisation of such practice.

I wrote the catalogue foreword for the NODE.London Season of Media Arts: Foreword: Media arts are popularly held to be difficult, or even impossible, to exhibit. This is not due to a lack of good work, venues or audiences - quite the opposite - but art of such an interactive, ephemeral, temporal, hybrid and often radical nature inevitably defies the easy contextualisation offered by conventional curation. It also defies easy definition by the conventional art-historical lexicon, necessitating extensive lists of characteristics as above; and even these are insufficient to encapsulate the range of work included in the NODE.London March 2006 season of media arts. Perhaps the real problem with Media arts, therefore, is also its most distinctive and productive attribute: that there is such a diverse profusion of practitioners, projects and places in which to discover them.

My review for Rhizome of: New Media Art: Practice and Context in the UK 1994-2004 Edited by Lucy Kimbell, Arts Council of England and Cornerhouse Press, 2004. Having somewhat ripped up the conference circuit this year, I was relieved to discover a book, in the form of New Media Art: Practice and Context in the UK 1994-2004, which is rather like attending a conference - but without the flu (ISEA), travel expenses(ISEA again!) and inevitable weariness (take your pick!) associated with such events. New Media Art is the Arts Council of England's round-up of ten years of funding new media projects. Its opening explains: