Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro-Flude (eds.): Connected: LiveArt (2005)

The Connected! Programme spanned a two year period from January 2003 to January 2005. It officially concluded with a celebratory Birthday party for Art in the Theatrum Anatomicum of Waag Society, the local ‘home’-base of many Connected! projects. Although most of the people present at that event agreed with Federico Bonelli’s assessment “that art could have committed suicide in 1984” – the research and the show goes on.

The Connected! Programme had four nested components: Projects, Artists-in-Residence, Sentient Creatures Lecture Series and Anatomic. This book documents many of the activities in these domains; the lectures, the events, the workshops, the performances, the installations, the discourse. Yet, it’s interesting to note that pulling together material for this publication was a bit like trying to capture the wind. Much of the work produced in this two-year period emphasized the real-time process of the making. Documentation of that often fragile, unstable and always already ephemeral process is sketchy at best and marginal to the actualization of the event itself. For many of these artists, documentation is a secondary concern, an afterthought. For others, documenting is an integral process indistinguishable from the event itself.

There are myriad photos in this catalogue of artists behind their laptops. Myriad photos that say little about the levels and layers of codified communication emitted from those unseen screens. These casual, unpretentious shots are images of social networks in progress – the translocal – a feedback loop of the local effecting the global affecting the local affecting the global. Not only does the artwork produced, or better transduced, scramble representational meaning but so too does the process of making. Performance practice that addresses the indeterminate dance-on-the-edge-of-chaos in compositional processes is a felt thing, an experience that doesn’t always translate well in laptop snapshots.

Co-writers: Federico Bonelli, Beth Coleman, Josephine Dorado, Lucas Evers, Wander Eikelboom, Howard Goldkrand, Jan-Kees van Kampen, Arjen Keesmaat, Jeff Mann, Mark Meadows, Hellen Sky, Michelle Teran, Ananya Vajpeyi

Publisher Waag Society, Amsterdam, 2005
Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 Netherlands License
160 pages

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