To Whom it May Concern:
I am writing this letter to express my support of the /an’a*tom’ic/ initiative at De Waag Society Amsterdam and to confirm my intent to establish a collaborative relationship with the initiative over the coming months.
As an established artist and educator who is active across northern Europe in areas of new media, and especially in the area of networked performance and collaboration, I am well aware of the substantial work in this area done by the two principle artists who are the producers of the Anatomic initiative, Guy Van Belle and Sher Doruff. I had the opportunity to work with Guy already when I was the European Coordinator for the cafe9.net cultural networking project organized between the nine European Culture Capitals 2000.
The dimensions of our anticipated collaboration include preparatory and research work along with the execution of a variety of live/online “happenings.” I will be involving my extensive network of current and former students from across Europe and North America as well as my large personal/professional network of cultural activists and educators. As part of my visiting artist activities here at the University of Colorado, for an example, I am organizing the second major annual live/online event di-fusion which will take place in late April 2003 and will include more than 20 international groups as well as the /an’a*tom’ic/ crew.
This general area of art/technology research, while still on the cutting edge of experimentation, is rapidly becoming the focus of intense interest because of its power to occupy global network spaces in ways that return hierarchic geopolitical energies to human-scaled liveliness. Speaking personally, I believe that these kinds of trans-national projects are essential to an increase of understanding between peoples — actions which will decrease the possibilities of senseless war.
For further information about my work, please refer to:
https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/
and
https://art.colorado.edu/di-fusion
Cordially
John Hopkins
Senior Lecturer / Visiting Artist
University of Colorado – Boulder
Department of Art & Art History
Boulder, Colorado, USA
…..
/an’a*tom’ic/ in action
ANATOMIC: Related to the structure of an organism
Since February 2003 Waag Society organizes a weekly open studio at the Theatrum Anatomicum, hence the name /an’a*tom’ic/, inviting a wide range of young technological artists to collaboratively perform with various technologies online.
Within the /an’a*tom’ic/ program we plan to facilitate an exchange of knowledge, culture, and skills between artists and participating publics outside Western Europe and North America. Through discovery of scalable, communicative techniques utilizing distributed technologies, interactive broadband and multi-user collaborative environments, we are looking to build and enhance resources in a creative commons. Cultural diversity and difference stimulates the dynamic process of mediated communication and we hope to continue nourishing both online and offline intercommunity praxis by connecting on a world stage.
/an’a*tom’ic/ aims at growing the skills of the local participants through knowledge exchange and shared expertise in real-time, multi-user, multichannel environments such as Waag Society’s KeyWorx platform. Informal workshops, tutorials, presentations, performance events and explorations of applications and technologies including telekinetic devices, public and haptic interfaces and digital performative environments (Max/MSP/Jitter, pd, Isadora, PHP, Director) are supported by the hi-bandwidth Gigaport backbone.
The weekly labs are streamed to participating artists and organizations that upload their simultaneous activities. Emphasis is placed on learning the tools and language of interaction, distributed broadband media networks and performance practice that investigates these technologies. One challenge of the experiment lies in distributing this learning process to an extended community of participants and viewers in the upcoming phases of the project.
Current partner organizations:
Athens (GR) – Fournos; Manthos Santorineos
Boulder (US) – University of Colorado; John Hopkins
Brussels (BE) – f0am; Maja Kuzmanovich and Code 31; Gert Aersten
Manchester (UK) – Futuresonic; Drew Hemment
New York (US) – [Share] digital media lab; Eric Redlinger and Keiko Uenishi
Prague (CZ) – MediaArtLab Centrum Pro Soucasné Umení
Reykjavik (IS) – Haraldur Karlsson
Riga (LV) – RIXC; Rasa Smite and Voldemars
Sao Paolo (BR) – FILE – Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica; Paula Perissinotto
Sofia (BG) – Bulevart Association; Lyobov Kostova
Tblissi (GE) – maf_Media Art Farm
Tokyo (JP) – Tama Art University; Akihiro Kubota
Toronto (CA) – Interaccess, Kathleen Pierry