what were you thinking? Feb.

I have recently been chatting to two very different artists Claude Jones who is a print-maker with a twist and Kate Richards a new media artist.
Claude has an exhibition on at Artery Gallery on Darling Street in Rozelle that explores our relationship to the anthrpomorphising of animals and the extent we will go to fulfill our own carniverous concerns.
The works are very beautiful. This attraction allows us to suspend our disbelief and enter a work where the messages of violence are clear in the work. The twist is the choices that Claude has made to include animal parts, and her discussion of this in the seeking of sculptural form. Claude has just started a blog (claudejones.blogspot.com) where she diarises her ideas and methods. We spoke of her residencies in Spain and Canada and the influences these have on artists work. Her notes book are full of textures and tests.
This Monday Kate Richards and I talked of some of her recent projects including Wayfare which had been located in Melbourne. The work is about locative social media and the interventions that teams of artists make in their environments. Thus it is a game strategy where people form teams and plan and document their interventions. The website is a haven for what wre you thinking type questions as there are places for people to comment, and mediators that explore the ideas even further. The works incorporate games of association, political context, social media and mapping both literal and intellectual.
Kate and I pondered the art that were once ‘happenings’ or performative collaborations preformed real time are now able to interface to a broader audience through internet and online worlds. We looked briefly at the work of Writing the City, and early work I had done that had people in different cities exploring their city, interacting and doing stuff that was documented; and the locative social aspects of gaming worlds.
The role of the avatar as self is interesting in this.

Kate has also developed a number of different events online, including a mash of shakespeare in second world. This allowed people to visit in some many ways and interact with a story they know in a world that they create. Foul Whispering and Strange Matters plays between the romantic nature of classic story telling (even the title suggests this) and the playful genre of horror fiction in a new media world.
Both artist spoke of their attempts to understand the ideas in their works through drawing up and exploring them in their own media and in their own minds and it seems the context of our actions always plays into the way these artists work and think.
Today I logged into the first free avatar site I found……to create a playful avatar in seconds. Probably not really an avatar but a childs game…fun none the less.

doclisa