honoria madelyn starbuck :
In the beginning I painted on paper, then I wondered into online worlds where I wrote myself into various identities and created an opera, then I joined online communities and even made a living as a moderator for a while--I still moderate www.plexus.org/chalkboard/oneworld/. Now I art blog at honoriartist.livejournal.com. All the while I've been creating works on paper including a big work on paper called a dissertation. Now I'm back to creating little works on paper, paintings and life drawings, and my research is smaller and more personal too -- art blogs.
Networked computers started a global frenzy of emailed and Web-paged public proclamations of attitudes, impressions, random thoughts, heartfelt conclusions, rash judgments, strong reactions, conjectures, speculations, and theories in the form of poetry, prose, diaries, and sexual fantasies. Slightly behind but parallel to these multitudes of self-published texts came a throng of images crowding onto the Web as charts, icons, gifs, jpgs, animations, flash, graphic novels, video clips, and just about anything you can do with a digital camera.
In addition to a growing number of digital artists and grass roots image-makers, traditional paper/canvas/sculpture artists digitize their "real world" artworks for the purpose of promotion and exhibition. Art blogs are self-organizing responses to the deluge of images and artistic projects.
Variations in art blogs
As networked artists are defining themselves one has to cast a broad net to find the many configurations of artistic actions happening around the networked world. Here are a few configurations I've found:
The Web hosts a quickly evolving art scene with galleries of artworks, critics and artists. Art communities form and disolve, attractors bring people together and new technological possibilities are packed into each software release. The art blogs may be a format that snags and holds these changes long enough to discover patterns in the art, artists, art criticism, and public attitudes toward art on the Internet. My methodology is to hang out, make art, type to people and read. Where is your art blog?
Art blog hubs:
In spring 2003 I completed a 3-year dissertation study of the Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network to earn an interdisciplinary doctoral degree in communications, art, and education at the University of Texas at Austin. My research revealed deep concerns in the Correspondence Art community about the differences between their collective accomplishments and the perceived intrusion of Net-art into the domain of Networked Art. I propose to locate and analyze internationally dispersed collections of Correspondence Art and collaborative Net-art projects in order to determine the different systems evolving in each of these collectives of artists the for preservation of their cultural identity and their objects of art.
The international Correspondence Art Network has thrived over 40 years of dramatic progress in communication technologies including postal systems, offset printing, photocopy, fax, phone, tourism, computers, and ever-expanding networked electronic systems. Networking artists, also known as mail artists, correspondence artists, visual poets, and the New York Correspondance [sic] School among other monikers, experience international networking both as an aesthetic life style and as an extended community. One unique aspect about this constant flow of networked art is that many networking artists donŐt consider their individual art works to be the true art products of the network at all; the Network itself is the shared artistic product. For decades thousands of pieces of Networked Art have traveled directly from artist to artist, from country to country. Spinning off from this intense global interpersonal exchange, 100s of networked art exhibitions are organized each year in Europe, South America, Japan, Canada, and in the USA. This dynamic shared art movement leaves a trail of history in the form of private collections called Mail Art Archives. With few exceptions Mail Art archives are not housed in research institutions. In contrast, the archives are scattered around the world with the largest and most important collections in the studios, closets, and garages of aging artists. My doctoral research indicated that there is deep concern among Mail Art's artist-archivists about the fate of their archives. In the meanwhile, digitalization of art collections is an ongoing project across art museums and research institutions to make the collections more public and to preserve a detailed record of the objects. Finally, Net-artists are forming collectives of individuals who collaborate in virtual and interactive technologies. These evolving Net-art communities are creating their own culture with traditions and art objects.
There is an intense need to know more about the internationally-dispersed archives of the Correspondence Art Network, including the contents of the collections, the historical contexts, and organizational systems of each archiveŐs collector, as well as the possible fates of individual collections. Systematic research on these important archives has not been done. Now that the Correspondence Art movement is over 40 years old, many of the archives are in danger of being lost forever when the artists who maintain the collections die. Some archives, such as the David Cole archive, are in the hands of spouses of deceased mail artists with no plan for the future of the collection. The difference between the archives housed in institutional collections and the at-risk Mail Art archives is extreme. I propose to examine the opportunities for preservation that the Net-art and digitalization holds for Mail Art collections.
I propose to conduct research in three areas: Correspondence Art archives, Net-art preservation, and current professional archival theory. The research will be based on techniques of grounded theory, a qualitative research method used to analyze social processes, human interactions, and social structures. One of the two founders of the grounded theory method, Barney Glaser states, "Grounded theory deals with what is going on in the action system studied" (Glaser 1992) p. 49. In a study of living art movements and evolving technologies the "action system" is the artists and archivists as groups; and "what is going on" is the response of artists and archivists to forces inside and outside the systems in which they work. In grounded theory methods, meaningful building blocks of theory emerge from the raw data as the researcher constantly compares literature, art works, interviews, and observations for common or unique categories and for underlying theoretical structures. Because grounded theory is a flexible system for processing qualitative data, it has been adapted to study performing arts and the fine arts.
For the first stage of the research, I propose to conduct interviews of several mail artists who have expressed concern for their archives, such as Geert de Decker, Anna Banana, John Held Jr. From these initial interviews I will create a questionnaire that targets Mail Art archivistsŐ specific concerns. I will send the questionnaire to the archive holders I contacted during my doctoral research and locate as many others around the world as possible. The questionnaire will form the basis for more open-ended interviews with each collector. The resulting interviews will be analyzed for common and distinct trends. The results will document the collections' contents, as well as the organizational methods and motivating values of the collectors in relation to their history in the Correspondence Art Network.
The second and concurrent thread of this research will be to determine how experimental Net-art is being distributed and stored. Parallel to the research with correspondence artists, I will conduct interviews with Net artists about their concerns and perceptions of long-term preservation of their virtual and interactive art works.
In addition to the research on the Mail Art archives and Net-art I propose to conduct a third area of research into the current theory and practices of professional archivists in the realm of art preservation.
Finally, grounded theory analysis of the different and common needs of traditional and net-artists combined with input from current theory in digital archiving practices will reveal directions for preservation of the cultural history and the artworks of these separately evolving artistsŐ networks.
The goal of this project is to assemble the resulting information into a document that is useful for both research institutions and for the growing number of amateur Mail Art and Net-art archivists. The document will serve as a resource of best practices and common concerns to facilitate communication between different networks of creative individuals with common archival needs. This important research will support preservation and study of Net-art and Correspondence Art Network archives.
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