art + blog = blogart?

Rhizome posted a call for submissions of art projects that use blogging technologies last summer and I finally found a list of their resulting selections. The call was initiated by Java Museum. I find their website and various blog-like pages incredibly confusing and frankly, very poorly designed, at least from a user's perspective. It took some serious digging to actually get to a list - with links (what a concept for a website?!) - of the blogs that were selected. I even left a comment on this page as to how nice it'd be to have their list of artists' names link to their projects, but it looks like my comment either disappeared into the digital ether or was deleted.

At any rate, lucky for you, I managed to find a list of all the projects, with descriptions and links, and I've picked out a dozen or so I find interesting.

Urban Squares
A collection of photos, panoramas, and text that "explores visual and artistic aspects of public urban squares (plazas) as a nucleus of any neighborhood. We are interpreting/translating their language about the urban morphology and fundamental values in the overall social integration and sustainability of the urban life."

Whose Body
This blog is a site where narratives about identity are played out. You are invited to join in.

Lapsus Linguae/Slip of the Tongue
Lapsus Linguae is Latin, meaning a 'slip of the tongue'. I have a lot of those. Some of my favourite works starts with that spark that happens when saying the wrong thing comes out just the right way. Lapsus Linguae began as writing exercise of sorts, an attempt to note these slips of the tongue. Then, as I began thinking of the bolg as place to publish, I would force myself to act on these seemingly small ideas while they were still fresh in my mind. Generally I work very slowly. Lapsus Linguae has helped me generate a massive amount of new writing on a wide variety of topics, and to get it into a state finished enough to post in a short amount of time. I have become more alert to the stories lurking in the every day. I used to use Lapsus Linguae to post information about my publications and events, but increasingly I find other people so much more interesting to write about. On occasion I also post responses to things happening in the news. The blog is turning me into a social archivist. See, it looks like I mean to say social activist, but really I mean social archivist. A slip of the tongue indeed.

Little Blue Book
Little Blue Book is a collection of short writings I made whilst traveling in London from 1994-1999. It is both a diary, a fictional account and a place for fantastical tales. The project is ongoing and has another 30 pages or so to go. As the cover says "These are my stories may they fall on deaf ears and be percolated in the coffee bars on nowhere."

Camera Toss
A showcase photo-blog for the "best of" camera tossing and general musings on this form of kinetic photography.

Tea Blog
Tea Blog is an ongoing project by British artist Ellie Harrison, which launched on 1 January 2006. Every time Ellie has a cup of tea (or a different type of hot drink) she notes down the thought which is most on her mind during the first few sips. These thoughts are then uploaded to the Tea Blog at regular intervals. Tea Blog aims to expand indefinitely over the next few years, developing over-time into a vast database of thoughts – a diary of day-to-day life via the ritual of tea-drinking.

Error (Image)
The project is a blog that is composed of broken links, error messages, broken and open guts html code and images made with error messages in new media art. It is a commentary on the danger of new media being lost in archiving as it and its technology ages, the folly of the fetish of the new in new media and a look at errors and error messages as text and image art and commentary.

Complexity
This is an ongoing open call for net based art regarding the topic of complexity. This blog will showcase the ongoing submissions continually on first come first serve basis. Three entries already posted are given as examples. Participants are asked to submit writing through email and visuals as either jpeg, gif, wmv, or mov files. The subject is complexity. In November 2006 I gave a keynote lecture "Managing Complexity" at an annual meeting of financial controllers in Vienna. While I was asked to speak about the topic from a historical, philosophical, and scientific background, I promised to showcase some of my art work in so far as it relates to the theme. The blog site comprises of three examples which portray some of my thoughts on it. The participants are invited to offer their views to continue and enrich the dialogue.

The Social Web Burn Out Blog
The social web burn out blog is a documentary installation and a parody of a blog. Its subject is the social web and networked experience.

Clockwork Protest Films
his is a series of films in which a small clockwork protest is made in a variety of locations around the world. A kit containing a clockwork protester and placards is despatched to various locations and then passed from person to person. No limits are set on how or where the protesters are used or what they are protesting against. The resulting films are sent back to me for editing and screening, on their own blog. People making the films include artists and non-artists mainly (but not exclusively) from the video blogging community. There are currently ten kits in the field but I am not sure exactly where they are.

Peculiaris.net
Peculiaris.net is a collaborative moblog that questions identity and self-representation. It is based on concepts of an identity that is mutant, fluid, liquid, and open… And this mutant identity is here characterized by self-portrait. The project intention is to collect a huge number of these ephemeras photos taken by mobile camera.

Scenes of Provincial Life
A couple of years ago, I started making tiny QuickTime movies, as a kind of moving image dream diary. They quickly became a major focus of my work & I have made at least two or three every month since. I guess I was a vlogger avant la lettre so it seems appropriate to present them now as a vlog…I suppose, to be explicit, I should add, that I consider & have always done, even before blogging it, the movie *sequence* to be the artwork - rather like a thematically linked collection of poems where one can read an individual poem with pleasure & profit but the greater insight is to found in the collection as a whole.