Fudge the Facts

After a lot of hard work KOLABO is over. It was a very intense but fantastic week. Some documentation of the workshop can be seen here.

To view the collaborative project made during the workshop go to My Third Life.

Last but not least, a big thanks to the following KOLABOrators ;-)

Annemarie van den Berg
Erik Kroes
Noortje van Eekelen
Vera Verberne
Nadine Roestenburg
Michelle Sipers
Michiel van Heeswijk
Bruno Setola

Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, co-founders and co-directors of Furtherfield.org and the HTTP Gallery, discuss their approach to networked production and culture. Keywords: community, collaboration, mail art, Fluxus, DIY, DIWO and networked environments.

The Skype-streamed lecture took place Feb. 17th, 2009, in the context of a three-day MA seminar entitled, “From Representation to Participation”. Examining participatory and collaborative art practices, the seminar was organized by Renée Turner at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway.

Participants in the discussion were MA students, Frøydis Linden, Anja Ulset, Elida Brenna Linge, Andrew Taggart, Nina Bang Larsen and guest, Amanda Steggell.

The stream was broadcast from the HTTP Gallery in London where the work of Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski was on view. For more information on Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and their diverse activities see: www.furtherfield.org, www.netbehaviour.org, www.furthernoise.org and www.http.uk.net

I met with a group of textile students at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Sitting around a small table, I read from a selection of finished and unfinished online pieces.

After the talk, we did a live-writing exercise. I dumped several bags of printed words on the floor and placed two sets of alphabet stamps on the table. There were two guidelines:

*write yourself (playing with Clarice Lispector’s idea of writing yourself into existence).

*write two versions, one in first person and the other in third (I was curious about what kind of shift would take place when moving from “I” to “she”.)

I AM, SHE IS, AM, PM

As could be expected the exercise didn’t go as expected; the results were actually much better. Given the brevity of time, the writing was sloganistic and Fluxus-like. There was a beauty to the way they responded to the materiality of the text, whether it be printed or roughly stamped out.

And because almost all of the students were not writing in their native language, there was very playful approach. Non-native speakers have the ability to SEE words and not just READ them. One person juxtaposed the word AM with PM, transforming a state of being into a property of time.

The Medium Is The Message

At the end of the exercise, one person read all of the texts together. It was amazing to hear how the fragments came together through the unity of one voice. Thanks to everyone’s contribution, it was a fascinating learning experience in performing writing both individually and collectively.

The full collection of images can be found here

I’m preparing a lecture for next week at the Rietveld Academie. Aside from presenting some of my more recent online works, I want to try an exercise in live-writing and hypertextual thinking with the students. What is live writing? I suppose it’s narrating on the fly. And what is hypertext? Although there are certainly a lot of circulating and well-established theories, I like to think of it as something infinitely mutable. No need for href, it’s time to get out the scissors and start shuffling paper.