Communication Art

Posted on No Practice

I've borrowed D.'s laptop while I try to figure out what is wrong with my Mac. What an awful thing for a cyborg - the breakdown of a virtual body.

I found an interesting article about Communication Art. While it specifically addresses telephones with an emphasis on the mobile phone, the definition of the genre covers technology based participatory works of many kinds:

Telecommunications-based art is primarily concerned with connecting distant and contiguous spaces. According to Frank Popper [7], communication art has six main characteristics: (1) it stages physical presence at distance, (2) it telescopes the immediate and the delayed, (3) it focuses on the playfulness of interactivity, (4) it combines memory and real time, (5) it promotes planetary communication and (6) it encourages a detailed study of human social groupings. In a broader sense, it can be said that telecommunication art not only foresees new developments for existing technologies, but also changes our perception of space. It focuses on the relationships between participants, rather than on the creation of material objects, in a situation where the author is the context provider, not the content creator.

I was thinking about how vlogs are participatory in a way that video art is not. Vlogs allow for direct communication with the image creators and are often intertextual. Like a conversation on a bulletin board, the videos are posted, viewed by many who respond with written, audio and video comments. Sometimes, the videos are taken and remixed or expounded upon. The viewer is also a potential creator.

D. and I have joined a vlogging community and are finding out just how much the various vlogs are interwoven. We only wish that we had the money to attend the various real time/space meetings between this worldwide group.

On a related note, Eric Deis sent me an email pointing me to his drawing board project. This is also a form of communication art. Deis has provided a forum for others to collaborate and converse via drawing. While this is not a new concept (my youngest daughter has been participating in this activity for years on the many draw chat sites), the drawings done on Deis' site will be printed out and displayed as art. Who is the author?