Hello everyone,
my name is Stefan Beck. I'm media artist based in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
I'm involved in collaborative practices since the beginning of the 90s, when
I got out of art school to find that I'm neither interested nor that I would
fit into the normal art market, exhibition, gallery scheme. I even dropped
doing exhibitions alltogether for the last years.
Fortunately, there was a development happening here in Frankfurt which
helped me to find my own way, the so called "off-spaces", tiny independent,
selforganized spaces and projects, sometimes "artist-run", a term more
recognized outside Germany. These projects mainly worked outside galleries
and institutions, relying on a social network of the people involved in it,
often connected with the music and club scene.
I did my own space, multi.trudi, between 1997 and 2001, which was neither an
exhibition space, nor a club, but something like a meeting place and
information exchange for the people coming there, treated not as visitors
but as collobaorators. There's a website, which, though partly in German,
may give some impression of it:
--> http://www.multitrudi.de
I'm also the local editor of The Thing Network. The Thing, based in New
York, is one of the oldest electronic exchange and collaboration networks
with branches in several cities dating back to 1991.
With The Thing Frankfurt I intend to extend my field research into webspace
to make it more visible and allow people physically nonattendand to work
with it.
The Thing Frankfurt focuses on phenomena outside galleries and institutions,
represents them, and tries to build a network among them and connect with
others interested in it.
Attached to it is a mailinglist and a Content Management System to allow
users share information among each other.
--> http://www.thing-frankfurt.de
To share my views and ideas about the free collaboration project I'd have to
say, that after more than 10 years of work, acceptance and relvance of the
above mentioned projects (not even my own) is still very low here in
Frankfurt.
As an outcome the artist-run projects have more or less served to promote
its managers into the "real" artworld, instead of sticking with their own
individual schemes. This would not be too bad if new people from the art
schools would start again with their own projects, but this doesn't seem to
happen at the moment.
Concerning web based art and intermediation you probably all know the state
of things. In the beginning no one had internet access, nowadays people are
either annoyed, tired or attracted and absorbed by the big players in the
"game", like Yahoo or AOL. I'm not shure whether the audience for a project
like The Thing has signicically increased compared with the diffusion of the
internet alltogether. (This may be a typical Germany phenomenon where
society is traditionally closer knit and "homegrown" compared to North
Amercian societies..)
Nevertheless it's a good thing to discuss it again and exchange our ideas
where we're standing now and where we might go in the future.
Yours
Stefan

--
The Thing Frankfurt http://www.thing-frankfurt.de
Thing Mailinglist: mailto:thing-frankfu-*at*yahoogroups.com
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Stefan Beck | Hohenstaufenstr. 8 | 60327 Frankfurt | +49-69-7410210
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Multi.trudi artspace and mediabase works *at* http://www.multitrudi.de