Dear all at ambit, Here is one of the ambit lurkers who dares to e-speak up for the first time after a couple of gentle reminders from the admin team. This disclaimer will be followed by a wee introduction and some topical reflections on the nature of networks and the art of lurking.
Thought that I could preface all of the above with a very pertinent re-posting about the rise and fall of a hybrid network for media arts and culture in Europe and beyond. This is the story of a network of individuals and institutions interested in networked art activities, known as the Syndicate. The re-posting comes from SPECTRE which is the post-Syndicate 'list for media culture in Deep Europe'. This is a polemical new article by a couple of friends - a tandem of Berlin-based culural theoreticians and media activists Andreas Broeckmann and Inke Arns. Having been one of the founding members of the Syndicate and one of the most ardent believers in the Syndicate ethos of face-to-face and screen-to-screen cooperation since the early days in 1996, I can subscribe to most of the arguments brought forward in the article. You can find the article enclosed in my next ambit posting. Here I would like to pick up on just a few sidelines about the art of filtering and lurking. From a personal-confessional perspective, one starts as a very conscientious and loyal contributor to a mailing list and then gradually degrades into a 'professional lurker'. There is also every chance for any newly subscribed mail client to submerge into a state of lurking from the start. One of the reasons for the proliferation of lurkers, as prompted by Andreas and Inke, may be due to the temptation to filter the lists we subscribe to - an opportunity which wasn't available to us in the 'good old days' when the e-environment was less jammed and we were hardly troubled by any spam, mailing lists and chat communities. The art of filtering, as we know it today, proves to be a double-edged activity. It does provide this sense of personal timing and control of one's personal e-space underpinned by a sense of privacy and a refuge from the daily downpour of e-mails. But it also allows for mailboxes to be shelved away and barely opened for months, if at all. It must be noted that ambit's netiquette rule of self-introductions and topical discussions have discouraged lurking (or careless self-advertisement as its darker side) and I was quite pleased to see such a genuine interest and enthusisiasm across the list. However, drawing on one's experience of years of e-networking, posting and occasional lurking on SPECTRE-once-known-as-the Syndicate, I wondered whether there is anything else keeping us away from active ambit-eering. Perhaps it's possible to draw another thin red line of 'before' and 'after'. Before - in the early days of e-networking across mailing lists - we were driven by an illusion of being, dreaming or buiding up an 'online community' (See the story of the Syndicate as a proof). Without a tinge of nostalgia, I think that we now live in the 'post-mailist' days and enjoy a host of sensible yet restrictive list-protection measures and subscription regulations. Another reason for the allure of lurking probably lies in one of the irresistibly sexy functions of e-networking - connecting the less connected. I would like to believe that as much as Syndicate, ambit will turn out to be launching pad for the less connected into the heavily-networked communities. With the risk of being fixated on the 'before', I can argue that the up and coming generation.com of Bulgaria (including myself) has been shaken up, identified, shaped up, supported and facilitated by an e-network such as the Syndicate-now-SPECTRE. I can only hope that in few years' time an emerging community of Scottish-based ambit networkers can proudly attribute some of their formative experience to ambit... I will leave you to that high note and include a wee introduction in the P.S. below. Cheers, -illie P.S. Presently working with New Media Scotland, Edinburgh as a Curator-in-residence, I am a producer and researcher of old and new media art events. Since 1995 I have been an Associate Curator with the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool (www.fact.co.uk) and more recently a PhD candidate exploring Curatorial Theory and Practice of Digital Art at the Liverpool John Moores University. Recent curatorial projects and publications include Desktop Icons - Crossing Over (www.crossingover.org) - a Micro-festival of Digital Film Culture co-produced with N. Czegledy; Virtual Revolutions (www.virtualrevolutions.net) - a finissage performance, a series of residencies and talks, a CD-ROM, a webspace and a book of essays by over 70 international media artists and writers; The Right One - an exhibition, a CD-ROM by N. Solakov and a booklet of essays by Dr. A. Bleakley, N. Brown and C. Esche; Blind Dating Technology (www.blinddata.net)- a web-based exhibition of six women artists from Bulgaria who have been romanced, requited or rejected by creative technology; Spacecraft - an exhibition of 12 artists exploring traditional and digital craftsmanship and Video Archaeology Biennial at various venues in Sofia and Paris. I do talks at various contemporary art fora and publish both in my native Bulgaria and abroad. Iliyana Nedkova Associate Curator, Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) Curator-in-residence, New Media Scotland http://www.fact.co.uk http://www.mediascot.org New Media Scotland, P.O.Box 23434 Edinburgh EH7 5SZ, Scotland, UK T: +44 (0) 131 477 3774 F: +44 (0) 131 477 3775 M: +44 (0) 772 006 1349 E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
