The Furtherfield Blog: A shared space for personal reflections on Media Art practice: making it, curating it, translating it.
The Furtherfield blog is a place for Media Arts practitioners to intuitively explore their practice together as it occurs, to develop understanding and to learn, without the pressure to formulate complete arguments or to come up with answers. The blog was set up in Autumn 2006, initially as a place for informal, day to day exchange between members of the Furtherfield.org team, including editor/reviewers. We discovered that this format suits some people more than others and invited a couple more to join. The Furtherfield blog is not intended as a platform to promote particular projects. Instead bloggers explore their own perspectives on their own terms; personal thoughts, emotional responses and critical intentions that are rarely publicly discussed elsewhere in such detail.
Regular Furtherfield bloggers so far, are: – Camille Baker, Ruth Catlow, Aileen Derieg, Marc Garrett, Mark Hancock, Patrick Lichty and Lauren A Wright.
New reviews on Furtherfield.org
Review Title – Curating Ambiguity – ELO
About – The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One.
Review by Franz Thalmair.
In autumn 2006 the ELO — Electronic Literature Organization released the ELC1 — Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, including selected works in New Media forms such as Hypertext Fiction, Kinetic Poetry, generative and combinatory forms, Network Writing, Codework, 3D, and Narrative Animations. One of the main common characteristics of all Web-based literary products is that they can be read (or viewed, listened, played with, used) in multifaceted ways. Accordingly the curation of Electronic Literature is challenged by ambiguity and heterogeneity on different levels. As broadly termed by the ELO itself, Electronic Literature is a form of cultural and artistic production on the Internet with important literary aspects that takes advantage of the contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Similar to what is not yet consistently defined as Digital Art, Netart, Internet Art, New Media Art, etc.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=217
Review Title – The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success.
Review by Pau Waelder.
A work by Carlo Zanni in the form of a short, one-minute movie that plays over the web [1]. Starring Stefania Orsola Garello and Ignazio Oliva, the film has been produced with the quality of a major motion picture, yet it will be screened exclusively on the Internet. The reason for this is, the movie is meant to be transformed by its own audience. When users visit the website to watch it, they leave a trace in the form of data (date and time of access, IP address, country of origin and so on). This data is collected by Google Analytics, and then sent to the server that hosts the film. A program interprets this information and fills the body of the man in the movie with stains, their number and location depending on the number of visitors and their origin. The film is then re-edited and uploaded so that the next users can watch a newly made movie. Their presence is monitored by Google Anaylitics, and the whole process starts again.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=218
Review Title and name of work – You Are Not Here.
Review by Luis Silva.
Developed by Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Andrew Schneider, Ran Tao and Mushon Zer-Aviv and inviting people to explore Baghdad through the streets of New York, YANH presents itself as an urban tourism mash-up. Not only can you be in two places at the same time (the ubiquity concept we departed from), but also both places become interconnected in a psychological enactment of a meta-city. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: users (the so-called meta-tourists) are invited to download and print on one side of a sheet of paper a map of Baghdad and on the other side a reversed map of New
York. As soon as that task is accomplished the exotic sightseeing can begin. Scattered around New York are YANH street-signs that provide warned explorers (those who printed the map) as well as random passers-by the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, where audio-guided tours of contemporary Baghdad destinations in NYC can be listened to.