creativity

it's a few days now since the 090909 UpStage Festival, & i've sort of recovered from the 20+ hours marathon of live online performances; however i've thrown myself into the eclectic tech carnival, & that coupled with a lingering cold means i still feel tired ... but i have no other cause for complaint. once again the UpStage festival went off without a (visible) technical hitch, & the variety of performances - style, content, technique - blew me away.

i began my day with artists' presentations in the bar, where floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides rendered the flat-screens more reflections than anything else. this made it difficult for the first presentation, "ribbons - a live cinema instrument" by tomas laurenzo. ribbons is an application is based on VJ tools but with the intention to combine more of the narrative possibilities of cinema with typical image-based club VJing.

Following the appalling "Kreativwirtschaft" symposium in Linz, I was all the more interested when I started seeing announcements about the "Creative Cities" symposium organized by Armin Medosch and Ina Zwerger in Vienna. Since I was able to go, this time I was not disappointed.

On WIKI as Art On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys' admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.

At some point long past the limits of a normal attention span, when the speaker took a deep breath and announced solemnly: "And then we see that we are pure love", I whispered (not very discreetly) to the photographer next to me, "Do you think she will stop now?" The photographer shook her head and whispered (equally indiscreetly), "No, she hasn't quoted The Little Prince yet. I'm sure she won't relent until she mentions that line about only seeing clearly with the heart." The photographer was both right and wrong.

This is a response to Amy Wilson's recent discussion of the collision of cultures in virtual worlds in Second Life, "The Raw and the Cooked", http://amyfreelunch.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/the-raw-and-the-cooked/ In it, Amy considers the non-academic online artist as analogous to that of the "Outsider" which I challenge to place into a broader context. I reply:

Considerable time between my posts, but here you go. I’ve been trying to find out who has been using spam emails, junk mails and bogus forum posts. Most artists seem to be interested in the content and wording of the spam and just translate it into some other format, either by painting it, by making it audible (there is a Spam radio!), writing a program that makes a picture of it or creating an algorithm of some sort that they then use for something else.

we're an hour away from the start of the 080808 UpStage Festival. i've uploaded the last-minute media, done a restart, & checked my email - seems there are no last-minute panics (yet) ... in typical cyberformance fashion we've had numerous interesting technical gremlins in the last days, but everyone has been very patient & persistent, & douglas has worked miracles. i've just about gone insane over the time zones - i'm sure there will be at least one mistake still in the schedule but i've done my best.