Research - (VI) Blog art

Start This is part of a tradition of journal use in research, blogging is seen as the modern equivalent of the pen and paper diary. According to Dieu (2004), blogs in education may be used in manifold ways, the most common being: "By individual learners to post work and reflect". Finish This has a different set of precedents.

Artists have used the internet to document and promote their work and also in the creation of online artworks or as part of a live performance but more recently and with increasing frequency, blogs are being used.

There are temporary weblogs such as Globeart, maintained to coincide and work in conjunction with a physical art exhibition;

"An exhibition need not be a pre-determined thing, its great when it evolves in relation to the space, the local environment, the fellow artists involved, the internet(!), and any number of other factors. Weblogs and other social software applications could then be put to use as an instant archive. Performances, like this evening's, could be broadcast live via webcam (I'll need to do a bit more research for that one), images of the work can be uploaded, sound pieces, everything. And new ways of working would evolve specific to that environment. You may need never go to a gallery again! ....but, er, then again, maybe not...."

Blogs are also being used as discussion forums as in the case of networked_performance;

"an open forum to discuss network-enabled performance for an international conference in 2006. The idea is to use this blog to generate discussion about emergent forms, current practice, histories, interests, issues and ideas - to explore performance within, through, and across computer networks and disciplines."

Then there are sites such as Blog.art;

"Blog.art utilizes blogging as the medium for web-based artworks [net.art]. In other words, blog.art is not a blog about art, but rather a blog as art, where the blog is the conceptual foundation of the work."

The Blog.art site was created by Christina Ray, a Brooklyn-based artist and the founder of Glowlab. Ray began the Blog.art site in August, 2003 as a place to collect her own recent experiments in blog-based net.art. She has now opened the site to submissions, and aims to maintain it as a resource for blog.art.

Some works are literally blog as art as in the case of art-blog, conceived in the recognized blog as diary format; images, links with commentary, the artist describes it as;

"Art as diary: day by day, the blueprint of the thoughts, connections and leaps between ideas and images which are the essence of my work as a visual artist and videomaker. A work of art in itself, art-blog is made of texts and photos."

Playing grounds explores the notion of public interactivity with the piece's choreography;

"The audience will be able to comment on the work in progress and through the user feedback the choreography will be changed, shaped, and polished. Every other rehearsal will focus on the internet feedback and the public view of the work. The audience becomes the choreographer, making a dance piece created for the public by the public."

Another is a collaborative photoblog and exploration of avant soap.

However, the two pieces I am most interested in are Sarah and Ahmad which is,

"A collaborative story written in five sentences each post, between two people. The storyline progresses without any discussion, and characters emerge likewise."

and Metabetablog;

"a graphical representation of the TypePad beta testing experience, a compression of data generated in an evolving blogging environment. Each entry contains a dense chunk of sample content from the top ten most recently-updated blogs from the TypePad Devlog, gathered just before posting. The posts can be read as generative poetry or text-snapshots of blogging activity."

Both pieces have similarities with Finish This. Sarah and Ahmad's collaborative story is open-ended and text based. The contributors have no idea, day to day, what will be the content of the line they will be adding to, much as myself with the One Million Footnotes posts. The characters and locations are revealed as the story progresses. The blog follows a standard template and it's art is in the story. Where we differ is that S&A is linear, each post follows on from the last in a coherent narrative. Their characters are also much more rigidly defined, they are named and have descriptions of their status and personality/character traits. The characters within Finish This are shifting, multiple personas, it may not be the same 'he' or 'she' from post to post and the posts have no linear progression. Metabetablog is a much more visual piece, overlaying text over text over image over image but is still formed from lines taken from individual contributors blogs. Each post can be seen as a separate piece or as part of a longer piece of "generative poetry". Taken, as they are, from entirely random blogs the individual lines have less chance of running together neatly as I have tried to make mine or as S&A intends. It's like holding a magnifying glass to Finish This and instead of looking at the posts in light of their new contexts and meanings the viewer/reader is visually asked to make connections between the individual words.