hi charlotte (& all),
there was certainly performance/theatre talking/making going on in MUDs
& MOOs. the first documented online performance that i'm aware of was
"Hamnet", an 80-line version of hamlet performed live in an irc channel
on 12 december 1993. http://www.hambule.co.uk/hamnet/
then in 1995 juli burk created ATHEMOO as a site for live performances
in conjunction with the ATHE (association of theatre in higher
education) conference, & this turned into an ongoing thing for several
years with a number of performances created specifically for it, notably
"metamoophosis" - ATHEMOO has pretty much disappeared but there is
documentation of "metamoophosis" here: http://www.vex.net/~rixax/Kafka.html
there were other groups & individuals such as the plaintext players who
were also working in irc & moos. (stephen schrum's book "theatre in
cyberspace" covers quite a bit of it).
i don't know how much discussion there was outside of actually making
the performances, but there must have been some; & i don't know whether
there might be archives of such discussions. i certainly had some
discussion about it all with juli burk in 1999-2000 but this was via
personal email, not on an open list.
my first experiences of online art discussions were via the rhizome list
in the late 90s, i forget exactly when, & i was very much an intimidated
lurker at that time. my background is in theatre & i come from new
zealand, so i did not have the same vocabulary & theoretical grounding
as the most vocal people on the list, who, it seemed to me, came from
predominantly north american visual arts & academic positions. i often
felt very ignorant & anxious about my lack of knowledge, & then i
started to find it quite amusing that often theatrical concepts were
being discussed using other terminology and as if those discussing them
had suddenly discovered or invented these concepts for the first time ;)
when i discovered furtherfield & faces, i'm not sure exactly but around
2000-2001, i began to contribute to discussions. also when empyre
started, for a while that was really interesting, altho i find it
impossible to keep up with the level & amount of discussion on it.
certainly lists can be prohibitive for newcomers, but isn't that also
true in rl? when you first meet and enter into an already existing
group, whether it's an informal circle of friends or something more
organised like a club or a sports team, it's normal (i think) to take
some time to find out where/how you fit in, to get accustomed to the
habits & protocols of that group (& perhaps to decide not to join it if
you don't like it). lists can of course do things to be more or less
welcoming, like introducing new members & being transparent about
protocol & forgiving about mistakes, but also new members can allow time
to get the feel of a list.
h : )
On 3/10/13 8:25 AM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
> Thanks Rob.
>
> I'm unaware of any art-talking/making MUDs or MOOs - anyone? This is a
> definite gap in my knowledge!
>
> I *think* I first posted to Rhizome and lurked on Nettime. My first F2F
> with any of these online art types was with Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow
> at Furtherfield. I wrote and asked them what Furtherfield was all about
> and whether I could get involved - it seemed the best way to learn. And I
> also started writing Net Art News for Rachel Greene around that time -
> again because I wanted to learn. I felt like there were pre-arranged codes
> of conduct for lists and that I hadn't got the memo. In a way, I suppose
> there were. Pit Shultz explained this situation in an interview in Mute in
> 1997 - that things kind of just worked themselves out:
>
> 'The phenomenon is, and I think this is not such a rare thing, that a
> group of people, in a repetitive, communicative environment, begin to
> filter a field of possible 'communication acts' in a certain way, quasi
> machinic. You don't have to be professional or especially skilled in the
> beginning. The production of 'information' along the borderline of
> noise means to constantly refine a social context, maybe an artificial
> one, what some call immanent, I mean with rules which are self-evident,
> and are interdependent in a dynamic way.'
>
> http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/mute-conversation-nettime-pit-sc
> hultz-digital-publishing-feature
>
> Before we even get into any discussion of lurking and flaming, I wonder if
> you or anyone else has any thoughts on how prohibitive online spaces can
> be to newcomers. I'm about to run the 3rd Academic Writing Month, which
> uses a lot of Twitter, and someone just said to me they were scared to
> death of taking part the first time round.
>
> And also I like your point - if I'm understanding correctly - about
> different spaces giving rise to different types of interaction/discussion.
> Today it's easy to compare the 'brands' of different social media
> platforms but it's difficult to get a sense now of how one list would have
> differed from another - except by asking people to comment. So I'd love to
> know which lists people used and why? Why the Syndicate rather than
> Rhizome? Was it just geographical allegiance or was there a different type
> of discussion or a different value in being involved?
>
> All anecdotes and examples welcome. By the end of this month I'd love to
> have collaborated on a vast archive on the history of online art
> discussion - feel free to respond on list or elsewhere and post us a link!
>
>
>
>
> On 03/10/2013 10:16, "Rob Myers" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> On 01/10/13 03:53 AM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
>>> So, first up, what was YOUR first experience of online art discussion?
>> It was 1996 and I had signed up to an art mailing list (I cannot now
>> remember its name or where the archive of my old [log in to unmask] college
>> account is).
>>
>> But I didn't have a handle on the shared academic or specific mailing
>> list culture that would have allowed me to participate constructively.
>>
>> This meant that I made a lot of elementary mistakes. For example I
>> replied to a cross-posted essay as if it was a comment by someone on the
>> list. This annoyed people and left me feeling alienated.
>>
>> So my first experience of online art discussion was of its social and
>> technological form rather than any specific art historical content.
>>
>> Perhaps I would have done better if I'd tried IRC or the MOOs instead (I
>> knew about MediaMOO), something more realtime and social. Maybe that's
>> just technological determinism.
>>
>> But surely part of the reason for this discussion is the idea that new
>> tools and new media create new possibilities for discussion. And if this
>> is the case, the technological and emergent social differences between
>> the various means of discussing art online will affect the discussions
>> that take place using them.
>>
>> - Rob.
--
helen varley jamieson
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.wehaveasituation.net
http://www.upstage.org.nz
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