Dear List,
Thanks Dafna for this, and apologies for not posting sooner, but we've just been attending the excellent event and exhibition around collecting new media art at the Harris Museum www.current-experiment.org.uk
Thanks Rosanne also for such a fantastic post, your examples are great, in particular concerning where community resides. There is indeed a certain distrust of non-physical location, which Ele Carpenter explored well in her research about the differences between politicised activist art and networked art. AS Matt Fuller says, is this a 'White Flight into Cyberspace?'
This makes me very curious to hear from those involved in the physical exhibition to hear about how they, or the audience, are relating to the works. Raivo said that "people are more conscious about controlling their digital environment", so how might this relate to the response to the show?
And, Anna, as your work concerns domestics linkups, how are you relating to the exhibition from your own home?
Yours,
Beryl
On 23 May 2011, at 09:12, dafna ganani wrote:
> Hi. I've never posted anything to media curating, not sure i'm doing it
> right, just wanted to say that i was touched by Rosanne's take on cyber
> networks, conscious presence and art/media community. I should like to
> develop these thoughts later, and i hope that others too, will respond to
> this thread.
>
> thanks,
> Dafna Ganani
> On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Rosanne Altstatt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hello All,
>>
>> Thank you for the invitation to put in my two cents this month. Many
>> of you will know me from my time directing the Videonale Bonn and the
>> Edith Russ Site for Media Art until I left Germany in 2004. I’ve been
>> in Indiana ever since, mentoring students and conducting research at
>> Purdue University, curating and writing about a host of different
>> projects – some more and some less New Media.
>>
>> CRUMB asks this month how located are we with our bags full of located
>> media, and I have to answer that the more locative media I’ve got, the
>> less located I feel. Let me offer two examples:
>>
>> 1) While driving to Walter de Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” my
>> car-mate couldn’t help checking her smart phone every few minutes to
>> see if we were on track to this remote location, swerving slightly off
>> the road each time she looked down. The gist of the driving
>> instructions were: “Follow the road straight ahead for two hours, then
>> turn right.” I kept saying: “Well, the sun is over there, so this road
>> is still going south.” On a desert road in New Mexico, I felt
>> comfortably located while she was somehow lost as an advancing blip on
>> a screen.
>>
>> 2) In an 8-person meeting I attended last week, those checking their
>> devices for facts were intermittently lost to the conversation, ceding
>> leadership of the discussion to those making eye contact at the table
>> and staying on topic. This says much about the location of
>> consciousness and where people get their work done.
>>
>> My work is accomplished where I am able to locate conscious thought. I
>> draw information out of the Internet and locative systems in order to
>> serve what is going on at that center, but if I lose myself out in
>> digital networks another type of connection is lost.
>>
>> Of course, work today is located both inside and outside digital networks:
>>
>> Example 3) A compendium of graphic novels about true stories of cancer
>> in my geographic community of Lafayette, Indiana will be located in
>> cyberspace as an ebook. It was also a work-on-paper gallery exhibition
>> and will be printed as a paperback. For this, local stories were
>> gathered online, advertised at small-town cancer fundraisers and
>> support groups. Simultaneously, I created a local network of artists
>> and script writers by seeking them out at comic conventions and
>> symposia, street fairs, through recommendations and studio visits. We
>> met regularly as a work group in coffee shops and at people’s houses;
>> sometimes individually at my university office. The meetings were
>> expanded in online groups and docs as well as a steady stream of
>> emails. Both parts of this project – process and product – continually
>> pass back and forth through digital gateways and wooden doors.
>>
>> Does it matter that we were bound by a geographic location? Yes,
>> because that is where this group’s sense of itself as a community
>> resides – sharing schools, health centers, music venues, comic book
>> stores and Main Street. We also share social networking sites, which
>> connect us to each other and the rest of our “friends” in the world.
>>
>> Digitally networked technologies are invaluable as gateways for
>> locating, gathering and disseminating information, but they can also
>> be over-valued. I need to re-value my actions at home – that centered
>> space where consciousness resides – because we connect to others from
>> here to create something meaningful. In my case, this makes me FEEL
>> located and comfortable as more than a dot on a network.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Rosanne
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Dafna Ganani-Tomares, Ph.D
> http://minimalcomfort.org
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Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art
Research Student Manager, Art and Design
MA Curating Course Leader
Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media, University of Sunderland
Ashburne House, Ryhope Road
Sunderland
SR2 7EE
Tel: +44 191 515 2896 Fax: +44 191 515 2132
Email: [log in to unmask]
CRUMB web resource for new media art curators
http://www.crumbweb.org
CRUMB's new books:
Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media from MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12071
A Brief History of Curating New Media Art, and A Brief History of Working with New Media Art from The Green Box
http://www.thegreenbox.net
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