nonsite
July 2009: welcome to nonsite
Nonsite represents my digital arts research over the past two years.
I have been reflecting on how my memories of being an undergraduate art student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada from 1974 to 1976, relate to my experience as an MA student in Digital Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London from 2007 to 2009.
I have been writing about the formation of my identity as an artist, on how a sense of community is created by a school or college within a university, and in particular I’ve been considering the art world as an imagined community of artists, regardless of our actual geographical location.
This research has become a memory work. My goal is to create a place for the reader to locate themselves and to help them make sense of the world. I’ve been reflecting on art events, artworks, exhibitions, people and artist talks, that I remember from the mid-1970s and how they contributed to me becoming an artist and as such, part of a larger art world and contemporary art community.
One of my challenges has been to determine a design for the content that appropriately reflects and collapses the content from these two distinctly different times: 1974-76 and 2007-09. I have dated each post and time stamped the postings in order to arrange the sequence by day and month regardless of year.
June 23, 2007: Michael Somoroff’s Illumination
While walking around Chelsea I was struck by several gallery spaces showing early 20th century modernist furniture and lights. The lights were always beautiful in their elegant simplicity as was the furniture. We went into one showroom with several beautiful pieces- a beautiful sofa and an armoire that were set in a room lit by florescent tube lights behind an elegantly etched frit glass scrim.
I had a chance to see Michael Somoroff’s exhibition Illumination at the BravinLee Projects space on 26th Street in Chelsea. It was in interesting example of a good idea- create sci-fi like projections of sound and light. He had several different projection pieces- one on a large monitor as you entered the dark space and two more facing each other as you went further into the space.
I like the idea of using video projectors with slowly transforming abstract light projection. Good possibilities there.
The problem for me with this work, was that not only were the images science fiction like, but there were 2001 A Space Odyssey soundtracks composed for each piece. It was hard for me to separate the presentation from a trailer to a new sci-fi film, and perhaps that was the intention. Reading the Press Release after leaving I now understand “the artist’s interest is in sacred architecture, spirituality and politics provoked by light patterns on March 20, 2003 when the US first attacked Iraq.” That intention was absent for me in the Illumination project.
June 19, 2008: CAPTCHA and Folksonomy
Monday’s chat introduced me to folksonomy, a term I was unfamiliar with- which relates to collaborative or social tagging. Jonathan posted some notes from Charles Leadbeater from his new book We-think and his thoughts on various forms of collaboration including folksonomy. As wikipedia notes: “Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy.”
Folksonomies like del.icio.us have recently become a very popular way to store links. BibSonomy is similar to del.icio.us (which I’ve been using in a sort of ad hoc way) but it seems more academic, in that it relates to bibliographies and links to articles more that websites.
I was signing in to BibSonomy, an academic social bookmarking site out of Kassel, Germany and I had to fill in a CAPTCHA before I could register. I became intrigued by these images of distorted words, that evidently spambots can’t read. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), as a term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, for a program designed distinguish whether the user is a human or a computer.
So I began thinking about how beautiful they were and could they be generated and printed. I also enjoyed how random the words seemed to be.
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(...continua no site NONSITE)
