a message from Jon which bounced by accident....
From: Jon Ippolito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: March 4, 2009 11:44:14 PM EST
To: "Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org" <NEW-MEDIA-
[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: February 09 Theme: Lab/Time-based residencies and
Environmental Response
On Mar 2, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org
wrote:
We're also ditching the hotel rooms and instead putting the artists up
with staff, friends, friends of friends, and community groups - in spare
rooms and couches where they'll naturally feel more a part of the city
and hopefully offer an exchange.
Brava! Joline Blais and I have run nearly all of Still Water's Code
and Creativity conferences this way, injecting participants into our
various living rooms (and often into our kayaks or skis).
At one of these events, after a swim off our dock, Eva and Franco
Mattes of 0100101110101101.ORG described our approach as "typical net
art practice." In the early days of Soros-funded Eastern European
meetings, the Mattes--like many net artists--would periodically
cobble together enough resources to travel to a new media
exhibition / festival in Budapest or Ljubliana or wherever. The
organizers had little in the way of a hotel budget, and often less
for installation equipment. So the artists would frequently end up
sleeping on their couches, which led to late-night conversations over
drinks, which turned out to be far more important to the culture of
net art than whatever took place in the official venues.
Fastforward a decade and net artists like the Mattes are now
celebrated enough to be sought after by the mainstream art world. Eva
and Franco described their experience of being flown to New York or
LA to find their work beautifully installed in an immaculate museum
gallery. Unfortunately, the shift from creative process to
exhibitable product has left something crucial out of the equation.
All the Mattes get from the curators today is a handshake at the
opening, leaving them free to return to their well appointed hotel
room and ponder the inverse relation between production values and
social contact.
Hotels are prosthetic hospitality, just as a mirror is a prosthetic
lover and money is prosthetic trust.
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