Rob Myers writes:

ŒAll of this raises one of the big problems with art history online,
however conceived, outside of mailing lists. Resources are not archived
in a distributed way, as they are with copies of books and journals in
print libraries. Historically key FTP and MUD sites have disappeared
without trace, and the Internet Archive is a single point of failure for
web history that does not reach back further than the late 1990s.
Making conservation a problem for art history rather than of it...¹

And as we've seen MEZ can provide links to iconic 7-11 posts because she
knows where to look (and further to the discussion of whether we can
crowd-source/group-develop a list archive project, I've asked Heath
Bunting to serve up some examples of 7-11 posts from his extensive
archives - more on that soon). For many - myself included - even if I know
the names of some of the contributors, I have no idea A) what a 7-11 post
might look like (I¹m aware some of it didn¹t resemble discussion at all)
and B) what the lived value of it was. What I mean by that - and it
relates to Josephine Bosma¹s point about further researching the dynamic
of online discourse - is that what we value and what informs our thinking
and practice is often not traceable in the archive because it¹s within the
taking part, it¹s in the moment. It¹s in the lived experience of
interacting with certain people, on certain platforms in certain ways.
This is something that needs to come out. We need to find a way to
describe not just what happened and when, but also give some kind of
flavour of the particular experience involved - but how do we describe
that? Do theories of performance offer an excellent model to tease out
these types of experience/engagement?

And or, as Simon Biggs writes, ethnographic approaches are likely to prove
valuable:

Simon Biggs:

ŒThe work of Penny Travlou (part of the ELMCIP project I also worked on)
is directly relevant here. She's undertaken an extensive long term (3
years plus) ethnography of a number of net based communities, mainly
focused around specific listserv's and their associated communities (like
Netbehaviour) but also things like Art is Open Source, the P2P Foundation
and the embedded hybrid online/offline work of people like Eugenio
Tisselli. She's working on a book on this (probably published in the next
year or so) and there will be a long chapter (60 pages plus) in another
book, with other texts from the ELMCIP project, coming out the end of this
year. If you want to read something sooner there is a chapter by Penny in
the Remediating the Social book (which I edited) which you can download
here:
http://elmcip.net/story/remediating-social-e-book-released

This isn't so much history as stories of the current era - but hopefully
it will lead to more inclusive histories being written in the future on
this topic.¹




I confess I didn't know about Penny Travlou's work so I'm excited to get
in touch with her and find out more. In a couple of weeks' time I really
want to press on this point about how we can describe and theorise these
communities and contextual practices. But for now I'm going to go back to
some posts that fill in the blanks and of this history and begin to look
forwards to what happened after lists and the places where art history as
a discipline and online conceptual art/context making convergence (or
don't, as the case may beŠ)

Charlotte



On 04/10/2013 00:52, "Rob Myers" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>On 03/10/13 02:18 AM, Christiane Paul, Curatorial wrote:
>> There definitely was art-talking in LambdaMOO, but I don't have
>> concrete leads (Judy Malloy has written about Narratives and
>> Narrative Structures in the environment -
>> http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/moopap.html). Robert Nideffer's
>> PROXY was a very involved art project that used a MUD structure (it
>> was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial).
>
>Malloy's work in LambdaMOO when she was artist in residence there at
>Xerox Parc was lost as part of the normal maintenance of the virtual
>world's database. This is a common problem for MUD history. The book
>that essay was published in does have more text from the project, but
>that's all that remains outside of her archive at Duke University as far
>as I know.
>
>MediaMOO (which seems to have shut down only a couple of months ago) was
>for media researchers (this included people involved in new media art)
>but was also used for art making. See here for details, papers and
>transcripts:
>
>http://web.archive.org/web/20070222051802/http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/
>~asb/MediaMOO/
>
>There was also PMC MOO (which also seems to have shut down only a couple
>of months ago), the MOO of the journal Postmodern Culture, which
>certainly felt like art and was steeped in theory:
>
>http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/pmc-moo.html
>
>All of this raises one of the big problems with art history online,
>however conceived, outside of mailing lists. Resources are not archived
>in a distributed way, as they are with copies of books and journals in
>print libraries. Historically key FTP and MUD sites have disappeared
>without trace, and the Internet Archive is a single point of failure for
>web history that does not reach back further than the late 1990s.
>
>Making conservation a problem for art history rather than of it...