On nettime olia lialina wrote: Dear nettimers,

I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or remember it differently.

In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]

It was my very first media art event. Continue reading

[Sculptor Abdulrahman Katanani is one example of the fact that Arab artists are 'already among us' (Al Jazeera)] On nettime, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my head for some time, particularly with reference to architecture — the discipline I practice — but perhaps having wider implications: Ever since the early stages of the modernist movement (since the second half of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned by the idea of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm shifters. Their work consists of two facets that operate simultaneously. One is a deep critique of current paradigms of cultural production. And the other is production of artistic work that demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. Continue reading

[Deborah Hay, Solo, 1966. Documentation from performance from "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" The 69th Regiment Armory, New York, October 13–22, 1966.] [via Art Agenda]: Continue reading

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Céline Condorelli + Uriel Orlow: There is nothing left :: December 9, 2011 – January 12, 2012 :: Opening: December 8; 7:00 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) :: 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt.

In There is nothing left different works by Céline Condorelli and Uriel Orlow are in dialogue with each other in a new multi-part installation.

There is nothing left explores blind spots, unexpected epilogues and disappearances in the grand narratives of history; it starts from Alexandria and the Suez canal in twentieth century Egypt. A series of installations engage with the constitutive movements affecting time and space: movements of people and goods, the flow of capital, political movements, removal of statues (and regimes) and migrating species. Continue reading

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The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neigbourhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few. Continue reading

Electronic Cafe International, “Hole in Space Revisited,” 1980-2009. Courtesy of the artists Continue reading

Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings by Judith F. Rodenbeck, MIT Press:

“Happenings” have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture and hippies in public, joyful rebellion. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy of avant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the action painting of the 1950s. In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology. Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings “radical prototypes” of performance art. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historical reading of Kaprow’s project and related artworks. She finds that these experiential and experimental works offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality. Continue reading