Charlotte:
Don't know whether you remember the dust-up on Netbehaviour a few years back around their second DIWO project which was built to some extent around a ( short description, probably not adequate) "deep green" manifesto called the Dark Mountain by a guy called Dougald Hine ( and some others)

There was a vigorous discussion around certain aspects of it ( which I kicked off by taking exception to some exceptionally ambiguous language around "cosmoplitanism" - dangerous, historically loaded word)

There was a lovely Gordian knot cutting coup by FF where they staged a public reading of the discussion but with the participants reading the parts of their "opponents". I can't claim it resulted in life long friendships being established but it was *fascinating* and *humanising* to be inside. I think there's a video record somewhere...
michael




________________________________
 From: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 8, 2013 4:47 AM
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] performance as a way to access - re enact mailing lists
 

Annie I am so excited to hear about this. I return again and again to the
book After Criticism edited by Gavin Butt to try to make sense of lists
through performed or enacted modes of art criticism/reflection. I'm
fascinated by the idea of trying to work through email-based exchange by
performing it. I can imagine also that performance could add the nuance and
context a list text is missing after it's 'moment', after the time in which
it was part of a dynamic exchange. I'm thinking here again of Alexei's
net.art email and whether performing sets of discussions from different
lists around this time would place it in a different light. Would it be
easier to see it's playfulness I wonder. And would it be easier in a
performance to put such an email in context, show how it was part of a set
of activities designed to problematise the concept of art history….Certainly
it must have been cathartic for you, but I'm enjoying musing on list as
script…


From:  Annie Abrahams <[log in to unmask]>
Date:  Sunday, 6 October 2013 19:23
To:  Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
Cc:  CRUMB List <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:  performance as a way to access - re enact mailing lists


Hi All 

This might be a bit of a side way, but I am reacting to Charlotte's remark
on using performance to give an impression of the lived experience ...
From 1997 to 1999 we worked with a  group of artists on collectively managed
website called lieudit. (it was in French) It was an exciting and very
interesting experience, but we split up and took all the work offline after
an official art institution got interested in our work and we couldn't agree
on how to react to this (I have the habit of throwing away old mails every
now and then, so I can't give exact info, but as I remember it, we didn't
even really discuss anything, it was plain war)
In 2005 after I discovered that the wayback machine had kept quit some
files, and so I wrote to all members to tell  them that in a certain way we
still existed and I also proposed to put online our own archives again.
A few months of even more traumatising email exchange followed and the only
way I could cope with that afterwards was to imagine I had participated in
the writing of a theater piece. To heal myself I decided to arrange the
email exchange as such and to plan a reading. Some participants refused to
give me the right to do so and finally I had to organize the reading behind
closed doors with about 30 invited guests. I still have the theater piece,
but the only thing public is a photo you can find here
http://www.bram.org/special/provitesti/indexang.htm
<http://www.bram.org/special/provitesti/indexang.htm>

I do think staging interesting sections of mailinglist exchanges will
produce interesting insights in mailinglist dynamics, but as you all know,
it won't be what happened then ...

I am almost sure there are other examples of mailinglist enactments ...

Best
Annie Abrahams


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? <http://www.bram.org>

http://aabrahams.wordpress.com <http://aabrahams.wordpress.com>
http://metalogues.tumblr.com/
<http://metalogues.tumblr.com/> http://readingclub.fr
<http://readingclub.fr>