Unit 2 Report
Report of Progress on my Project and Plan of Study:
Over the past eight months my project has evolved a great deal based on my research and further reflection and refinement of my ideas and interests.
Project Prototype: http://nonsite.com
Over the next seven months my website will evolve as follows:
Aims
The aim of my project is to make a website that creates a virtual sense of place.
Objectives
My objective is to make an experimental website that creates a sense of location and community through writing and images. I will use my current situation as an online ‘distance education’ student at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London as part of the subject of this website. I have never visited or been to Camberwell College of the Arts, I only know through the online technologies of distance learning: weekly chats, emails, Blackboard, Pronto, Wimba, Wikispaces, along with low-resolution photographs published on a student wiki, yet I have a very clear sense of it as a place and a college within a larger university.
Through a series of entries I plan to detail and document my experience and sense of Camberwell over the past 18 months juxtaposed with my memories and recollections of events and experiences as an undergraduate art student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada in the mid 1970s. I’m curious whether I can create an artwork that collapses time as I move seamlessly between these two distinct moments, reflecting on how my identity as an artist in relation to the international artworld developed. I can clearly remember as a young art student, the point that I saw myself as an artist and no longer a student. I now see how that moment relates to an imagined community of artists as a part of the contemporary artworld.
This project work will work well for me, both in terms of what I understand are the core values of “Digital Arts” as well as my own creative process as an artist. This is a project that I can work on from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. It fits with my desire to develop a project that I can continue to work on with mobility while traveling.
Rationale
Living and working as an artist in Vancouver, Canada, while enrolled as a student at Camberwell College of Arts, London, has been an interesting experience. I have a very abstract sense of the actual architecture, of the rooms and spaces at the College. My plan in to work back from my first interview up to the graduation exhibition in the summer of 2009 and carefully build a portrait of Camberwell College as a place within its location in London SE5.
I have been researching various websites for formats for my final presentation. I like the idea of being invisible- a virtual student- attending, but not really there. That is the reality of my experience and the invention. My sense of place starts through mapping. Looking at maps, both actual and online I have been recuperating my sense of London as a city- both through the few times I have visited the city, but also how I know it through popular culture: songs, films, magazines and novels.
We live in an increasingly networked society. With the recent developments in wireless technologies we are able to stay connected to each other as we move though the urban environment. Mobile phones and laptop computers have changed how we communicate and connect with each other. I believe our sense of community has also changed. We can now be both emotionally closer and intimate with one another, with the speed of real-time voice, text and video communications while still remaining physically and geographically distant from each other. This contradiction has complex social implications.
The ability of groups of people to construct communities has also changed radically with the internet. Social networking sites, chat rooms and blogs make it easy for people within specialized subcultures and communities to connect with each other. Benedict Anderson’s theory of ‘Imagined Communities’ focuses on the creation of national identities from within scattered ethnic and religious communities. This theory has also been applied in relation to the internet and the growth of social networking sites and micro-communities of friends with common specialized interests.
I’ve been thinking about how Anderson’s research relates directly to how our identity as artists and our sense of the artworld develops from our time as art students. I can clearly remember as a young art student, the point that I saw myself as an artist and no longer a student and now I see how that relates to an imagined community of artists as I developed my ideas of being a part of a community of artists and the artworld.
Websites are used for a variety of purposes including information about organizations, people and products. Our identities are increasingly being marketed along with products. I am curious if it is possible to create a website that in based on a fiction that constructs a sense of place- like a novel, but more like a diary. A university is a microcosm of the world: a community with defined relationships, personal and professional, power structures that are political and hierarchical. It is based on a set of personal contractual agreements- I am a student, I agree to fulfill the course requirements, and my professors agree to assess my contribution.
Outcomes
Over the past fourteen months, I have been posting reflections based on my research to a weblog: http://dmacwilliam.wordpress.com. My plan it to use these reflections to form the background for this http://nonsite.com website project.
This website will be available and promoted over the internet.
How to present this information visually for the graduation exhibition will be an interesting challenge.
Methodologies
I will be using a reflective process of research to write the content for this website. My plan is to make this website based on events and reflections over the next ten months. I will now go back and edit events and recorded data. I plan to compare and edit my earlier writing to arrive at a final website. This website will continue to build and evolve over the next seven months.
Media
I plan to use WordPress weblog content management software to develop my project. My main recording media will be mobile, locative GPS enabled mobile technologies,
The final project will be data posted on the internet as a website.
Risk assessment
My personal and voluntary reflections and activities are the primary source of the data and imagery. I do not associate any attendant risks associated with this project.
Timetable
My time so far has been spent clarifying the nature of this project. I have openly followed leads and explored my interests. I will continue to post regularly to my blog. Until the end of Unit 2 in November, I will continue to research, refine and revise my project proposal, with the plan to focus, clarify and complete my final project in spring 2009.
Bibliography
Anderson, B. 1983, Imagined Communities, London: Verso
Calvino, I. 1988, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York, Random House
Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers
Glotz, P., Bertschi, S., Locke, C. (eds.) 2005. Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag
Harmon, Katherine. 2004. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. New York: Princeton University Press
Manovich, L. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press
Mitchell, W. 2003. Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Cambridge: MIT Press
Rheingold, H. 1993. The Virtual Community. Cambridge: MIT Press
Sinclair, I. (ed) 2006. London: City of Disappearances. London, Penguin
Sinclair, I. 2005 The Edge of Orision. London, Penguin
Tribe, M., Jana, R. 2007. New Media Art Koln: Taschen
Weibel, Peter, Druckrey, Timothy, (eds) 2001. Net_Condition: Art and Global Media. Cambridge: MIT Press
