Good to hear from all of the early curators of net art et al ... Amanda,
Paul, Armin, Jon -----

Also, for what it's worth:

*Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace* (1997)
Curated by Mark Amerika and Alex Galloway
Alt-X
http://www.altx.com/ds

with "keynote essays" and/or "net.art" by the likes of Ascott, Cosic,
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Manovich, Intima, Rackham, and Alex and I, etc.

Talk about link-rot : we keep it archived "as is" to further prove the
point (that much of early net art is part of a disappeared / disappearing
history) -- kind of the opposite of Bunting's "Own, Be Owned or Remain
Invisible" in that instead of the word-links gradually linking to web sites
as commodity destinations, the links to actual net art works go dead in
record time.

BTW, Alt-X is 20 years old this month and we are producing an e-book of
contributions from those who were aware of it and possibly influenced by it
from 1993 through today. If there's a story or statement you would like to
submit to the editors (Giselle Beiguelman and myself), please send it our
way. It need not be very long. We are thinking of publishing it
simultaneously in English and Portuguese.

Cheers, MA



On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Paul Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> For the record - and sorry to interrupt!
>
> The fineArt forum archive (which will contain lots of interesting material
> for followers of this discussion and list) from 1987-2004 is now
> permanently archived at the National Library of Australia in their Pandora
> Archive:
>
>   http://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/11009
>
> Best
> Paul
>
> On 15 Mar 2013, at 08:06, Amanda McDonald Crowley <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 14, 2013, at 10:17 AM, Saul Albert wrote:
> >
> >> Nostalgia rush! It's hard enough to recall all that work and treasure it
> >> wistfully in my mind, let alone find any coherent trace of it online.
> >> Mailing list archives link-rotted, and the Uo Wiki got spammed offline
> several years ago.
> >
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Thanks so much for fun examples. Nostalgia indeed.
> >
> > I've been trying to dig around a bit for early examples of sharing a
> curatorial research practice, and like Saul, keep coming up with an awful
> lot of link-rot. I finally just got around to putting up my own personal
> web presence, in part because sites that were the repository of previous
> work have often disappeared. Some I am working to recover, and some I have
> relied on the way back machine to recover at least screenshots, but that
> simply isn't a reliable source for archives.
> >
> > So, here are some ideas, and a lot of black spots:
> >
> > resistant.media was an exhibition I curated for the city wide festival
> in Sydney Perspecta99 - Living Here Now. The resistant.media exhibition
> only ever existed online and each of the artists included in the project
> was invited to host a listserv discussion as part of the project. The web
> site is still online, but only three of the artworks/ websites are still
> active, and the listserv that was the discussion space is also lost. But it
> was intended as our way to open up the process of how we developed the show.
> >
> > conVerge: where art and science meet  was the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of
> Contemporary Art exhibition I co-curated for the Adelaide Festival 2002.
> For the website, we included not only the work of the 14 artists whose work
> was exhibited as part of the exhibition, but the works of the artists who
> were shortlisted or whose research practice was especially relevant to the
> show. All of the work in the show was collaboratively developed with
> scientists and/or science knowledge so the web site also included
> information on all the collaborators, the scientific engagement. A key to
> the project was a symposium so the transcripts and documentation of all of
> the discussion at the symposium became a core element of the web site. We
> tried to also include live synchronous and asynchronous discussion into the
> web site. That was less successful. Apart from one page, the site is
> unfortunately down for now, but I am working with Jesse Reynolds from
> Virtual Artists (who developed the site originally) to resurrect it. The
> catalogue also included writing by Victoria Lynne on the role of the
> archive for the artists and for the show, and by Lynette Wallworth on cross
> disciplinary collaboration, in addition to the curatorial introduction (by
> me and Linda Cooper). Now that I think of it, I might try to get that work
> added to the site when we get it back up ;)
> >
> > I also don't see just my exhibition work as my curatorial practice. The
> residency programs, labs, masterclasses etc. I have worked on are to me
> just as integral a part of my "curatorial practice". So I'm adding a link
> here to an interview Melinda Sipos and Angela Plohman did with me last
> year. The interview, “Out of the Lab: An interview with Amanda McDonald
> Crowley” appeared in Beyond Data, a joint publication of Kitchen Budapest &
> Baltan Labs. Melinda and Angela drew some interesting thoughts together
> with me on the idea of curating process and how one might think about
> sharing process with an audience without making it feel like the curators
> and artists are being asked to air all of their underwear in public, but
> rather show those parts of the process that are useful for generating
> interesting dialogue. That was in fact, something we really especially
> experimented with for the Eyebeam "exhibition" X-Lab, where we really aimed
> to work with all of the Eyebeam residents and fellows to open up the space
> of our "exhibition practice" to a range of interventions, works in process,
> and events.
> >
> > In fact, in developing my web site, I decided to add a category
> "Creative Research". Sometimes that research is curatorial. Sometimes it is
> a framework for a range of curatorial initiatives, as was the case with the
> Eyebeam Sustainability Research group. Of course this kind of work doesn't
> happen in a vaccuum. It is highly collaborative, so there are various blogs
> and wikis scattered about the web that relate to that process. It would
> take too long to dig up now, but I know that Rebecca Bray, Marina Zurkow,
> Andrea Polli, all had blogs or web pages devoted to part of the research in
> addition to the various Eyebeam wikis that were developed to house the
> research that sometimes led to public programs.
> > Finally, of the ways I am sharing some of my current curatorial research
> is using scoop.it. The developers of the site describe the pages of
> collections of links "curating". I don't agree, but am not going to get
> into the hot discussion of whether a collection of links is a curatorial
> process or not. I don't believe it is. But what is it useful for, for me,
> is a way to share the research I am doing on a particular topic that will
> lead to curatorial projects. So at the moment, I'm doing a lot of thinking
> around art, food and technology. The resources for this "thinking" I am
> gathering here: at ArtTechFood on my web site, which links to the scoop it
> site. Like delicous, or other aggregator sites, its likely that this too
> will disappear into confusion and broken links at some point.
> >
> >
> > I hope they are some useful examples. I'd love to get feedback.
> >
> > Amanda
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >> The best I could do without engaging in serious network art conservation
> >> was google up an email exchange on the old delicious-discuss list
> >> someone I didn't know forwarded to an MIT digital librarianship email
> >> list: http://simile.mit.edu/mail/general/0142.html
> >>
> >> A few things strike me about the curatorial bogging issue and Michael's
> >> goatskin archiving strategy looking back at the last decade of networked
> >> practices engaging with what we used to call 'social software'.
> >>
> >> It was exciting to use wikis and early link-sharing sites to shape
> >> everyday artistic communication-as-readymade, without self-consciously
> >> composing an artistic product for established markets.  There was also a
> >> critical awareness that these practices were prototyping forms of
> >> knowledge production whose value could be easily alienated and harvested
> >> as big data.
> >
> > --
> > Amanda McDonald Crowley
> > Cultural Worker, Curator
> > http://www.publicartaction.net
> > current research: Art/Tech/Food
>
> ====
> Paul Brown - based in OZ Nov 2012 to April 2013
> http://www.paul-brown.com == http://www.brown-and-son.com
> OZ Landline +61 (0)7 3391 0094 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
> OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
> ====
> Synapse Artist-in-Residence - Deakin University
> http://www.deakin.edu.au/itri/cisr/projects/hear.php
> Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
> http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
> ====
>