Thank you all for the ongoing discussion!
First, a disclaimer/apology: I am writing this email in an airport without reasonably priced internet access, so if I seem out of order/ to be missing anything, it's because by the time I send it, there may have been responses I have not yet seen.
Sarah, thanks so much for taking my somewhat tongue-in-cheek rules and turning them into something productive. I agree that the Transmediale limitations of space and resources need to be taken into account - and thanks for chiming in for clarity there, Stephen. With regards to the counting of votes, I was trying to address Andreas' idea of "dictatorial idiosyncracies and pseudo-objective criteria" at Wikipedia, but as I think about it, and given the nature of our project being a direct intervention into that system rather than parodying it, I wonder if it'd be better to flip it, where you (plural, as in CRUMB) and Transmediale decide how to exhibit the work, and it is Scott and I who are excluded from the decision-making....?
To your questions, I'm going to go a bit broader, and talk about the many forms Wikipedia Art has taken to date - exhibition or otherwise. I should add that, like the work as it was originally conceived, the lines between what the piece is, what it does, and whether or not some of this is documentation+discussion (as opposed to part of the work itself) are up for debate - and we kind of like it that way.
The original Wikipedia Art took the form of a Wikipedia page, which, given the citation mechanisms behind the site, also meant that all discussions both inside and outside of Wikipedia were implicated. We orchestrated a small number of interviews and articles and a bit of participation, then let the work unfold as more folks got involved. We believe that the discussions on, for example, Rhizome and ArtFagCity and iDC, were as integral to the project as the mainstream press and Wikipedia-based debates that allowed its very temporary existence on the site.
The Wikipedia Art Remixed project took quite a few forms, mostly video, some sound, and a few images. There were reenactments and mash-ups of the deletion debate and water-cooler discussions (Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert, and Michael Szpakowski), baseball cars (Qi Peng), rock music videos (Kent Watson), the addition of WIkipedia Art to many other Wikis (Gregory Kohs), and so much more.
For the New York gallery show, we worked with Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reicher, whose video we absolutely loved, and got local actors to perform the script from the aforementioned video.
And Scott and I have ourselves been working on an academic chapter about Wikipedia Art, which will appear in a book that critically analyzes Wikipedia put out by the Institute of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam next year. We've got a somewhat performed 20-minute paper version of this, which we've given together in India, and which I gave in Milwaukee and Scott gave in Amsterdam. We'd be happy to send along the short or long versions of these, if you (again, plural, for CRUMB) are interested.
Given the piece's ongoing transformations around language and dialogue, I love your idea of more re-mixes/mash-ups, and agree that those that are either text- and/or net-based (given the piece's origins) or performed live (given the performative nature of the piece) make the most sense - both formally and conceptually.
I'm keen to start on that list you mention - or perhaps two lists: one for what to mix with, and one for the form it will take in exhibition? - to see where it can lead. Your suggestions are top notch. Perhaps we can add relational/dialogical art from other trajectories as well: like Liam GIllick's spaces for discussion or Gonzales-Torres' papers to walk away with (ah, no internet, can't look up the names of those pieces!). With the latter, I'm enamored with the ppossibility that people can take something physical away with them, since that's not how we normally think of conceptual work or internet-art (or Wikipedia). Perhaps a pamphlet or sticker, or a file they can download via bluetooth or USB....
This is all very exciting. Looking forward to more. Best,
nathaniel
http://nathanielstern.com
On Nov 16, 2010, at 11:13 AM, Scott Kildall wrote:
> Hi Sarah and everyone else,
>
> We have been torn between various ideas, and this is why we wanted to source it out to CRUMB, which is also in the spirit of the original Wikipedia Art project. One thought Nathaniel and I had would be to capture the essence of the work in a text-based presentation -- showing fragments from the discussions and another was a video munge of the different media involved.
>
> Sarah's suggestion of mining hired actors compels since it doesn't try to replicate a version of the original with all of its display problems, i.e. reading lots of text in a gallery or watching a long video (possibly without seating).
>
> The Wikipieda Art Re-mixed with the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf/deletion debate performance was in context of an evening of performance. Our original proposal was to intervene in the exhibition itself, but forces at work put the kibosh on that, so the audience was unsurprised when a pair of actors began arguing at escalating volumes.
>
> From what I've heard, the audience understood it was about Wikipedia, but there was not about Wikipedia Art. They were left with a little bit of head-scratching, which perhaps was a good way to leave a Wikipedia-based performance.
>
> More thoughts are welcome,
> Scott
>
> On Nov 15, 2010, at 1:52 AM, Sarah Cook wrote:
>
>> Hi Nathaniel and all
>>
>> Thanks for hijacking this month's ongoing discussion about jury systems online with a project we can all sink our teeth into - using the CRUMB list as a kind of crowdsourcing sample for your Wikipedia Art project is a fun idea.
>>
>> In reply to your newly posted rules:
>>
>> rule number 3: I have been a member from the beginning of CRUMB, ten years now.
>>
>> rule number 1 and rule number 4: I think that the idea of citing precedent for ideas is good, but whether or not it has been seen in Berlin will be a very hard criteria for most CRUMB list users to meet as not all of them live in Berlin ;-) Therefore we may have to ask Andreas or Axel or other Berliners on the list to weigh in.
>>
>> rule number 2: I think it would be good to add to the list of rules what role the Transmediale curators are taking (like you, can they only count the ideas they like?)
>>
>> I think it would also be good, in terms of curatorial research, to have more of a list of precedents for previous exhibitions of WikipediaArt. You mentioned
>> that you have had:
>> "re-mixes of Wikipedia Art exhibited online as part of the Venice Biennale <http://wikipediaart.org/remixes/>, and hired actors to perform a scripted re-mix/mash-up of the Wikipedia Art deletion debate with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, at a gallery in New York."
>> Are these the only two presentations to date? Were they successful or lacking? (I can't imagine a curator exhibiting anything without knowing something about how it has been exhibited before, if indeed it has, hence my request for more info here)
>>
>> My inclination is to continue to mine the thread of hiring actors to reenact the deletion debate, whether remixed with another text or not (rule number 1: exhibition precedent: the one you mention).
>> Perhaps the other text with which it is remixed could be a text-based work of art from the pre-Internet age (such as a Bruce Nauman Instruction piece... though we could draw up a list which we could vote on) or a text-based work from the Internet age (Douglas Davis's World's Longest Sentence springs to mind, with the same possibility of having a list of suggestions we could vote on).
>>
>> Then we could have a debate about how to document and exhibit the reenactment of the debate.
>>
>> That's all from me for now; CRUMB list lurkers - do chime in!
>> Sarah
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12 Nov 2010, at 13:10, Nathaniel Stern wrote:
>>
>>> Hahaha. What a way to start the conversation, Andreas - thanks!
>>>
>>> Perhaps we should start a list of rules then? For example:
>>>
>>> 1. All ideas must cite precedented use in a museum or public gallery, but can't have been in Berlin.
>>> 2. Only votes that I like will be counted.
>>> 3. The above are null and void if you hang about for long enough. While curatorial experience is not a requirement, it's recommended you start all emails by stating how long you have been a member of CRUMB.
>>> 4. You may add to, or delete from, this list if I say so.
>>>
>>> Onward and upward!
>>>
>>> nathaniel
>>> http://nathanielstern.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Nov 12, 2010, at 3:16 AM, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
>>>
>>>> At 19:15 Uhr -0600 11.11.2010, Nathaniel Stern wrote:
>>>>> For Transmediale, we've proposed another community-based collaboration. Specifically, we said we'd ask the members of the CRUMB list-serv for recommendations on how to "exhibit" our work. We are asking for your expertise and ideas. The installation and exhibition will be decided as a collaboration between you, us, and the Transmediale folks: Syelle Hase <[log in to unmask]> and Stephen Kovats <[log in to unmask]>. We'll be keeping records of this discussion as well, in case it is to become part of the work. There are some space and other resource limitations, as always, but we're very open to anything feasible within that scope. Consensus on the best way forward is not necessary, and any and all ideas and viewpoints are welcome. We hope you want to be involved, and to come up with some fantastic ways of presenting our work.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> dear nathaniel,
>>>>
>>>> great proposal. but if it is really and genuinely *Wikipedia* Art, shouldn't there be some dictatorial idiosyncracies and pseudo-objective criteria factored into the selection process? otherwise it may qualify, eventually, for being registered on "Wikipedia", without being truly "in the spirit of"?
>>>>
>>>> best regards,
>>>> -a
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