Thank you Rebecca for kicking off the discussion.
What I find interesting about the method of broadcasting employed by Field Broadcast is that it adopts a form of communication that plays with the 'flowing of data' of the internet, the fact that it operates as in interruption, like a sort of instructional piece in a pop-up window, a performance that instead of breaking the flow within every-day actions in the public space of the city for example, it does so with the private space of the computer user – e.g. when someone is writing an email, compiling info in an excel doc.
What are the challenges of contextualizing an artwork within such an 'uncontrolled' space, like that of a computer desktop, in comparison to, for instance, the more controlled context of a gallery space? What are the pros, what are the risks? How do you frame the theme of the overall exhibition itself in such context? I assume there is no press release for example?
I recently hosted a reading group in Bangalore, looking at some of the concepts that Vito Campanelli raises in his book Web Aesthetics. In the chapter Fictions, Campanelli discusses the web interface and how one might conceive form and content on the web, and he states:
“Communication media has always been characterized by the circumscription of experience within a physically delimited form: the surface of papyrus, the page of a book, the frame of a picture, the width of a cinema screen, the length of a monitor. All these interfaces are based on the same convention: the experience goes beyond the 'onscreen space'. When we face the 'internal space' of a small portion of the Web, the mind automatically implies the 'external space' – the vertiginous infinity of the connections of the Net. No wonder, then. That artists and designers prefer partial representations of the Web to those that seek to represent the complexity of the whole”
Field Broadcast operates with giving space to the flown almost in a literary sense, it seems it reverses the above by bringing the external space in the internal space, which is what happens very often with social media, and blogs, more socially-oriented platforms.
Is it important to make this distinction between internal and external space, or experience?
I also wonder if we can unravel more this idea of the interface, how curators who work with adopting web interfaces use and conceive it, and how this might affect their modes of operation. But also try to connect this point to what Marc Garrett suggested in our previous discussion, the November's one:
"[…] A natural shift has evolved, redefining how we experience art now, and it has pushed the traditional concept of exhibiting 'art' off its axis. When viewing an exhibition (especially when involving media art), the experience of it and its meaning is different now. It's no longer an exhibition that we are asked to view or be part of, but an 'interface'."
What is this interface that spans between modes of offline and online presentation? Is it even possible to define it, is it what Maria Lind suggests with her definition of a museum that would function simultaneously as a production site, a distribution channel and as a venue for conversations? How?
Marialaura
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