Weng will discuss his position so far and some of the content involved and how its evolving.
7:30 Cloudland opened yesterday at Substation, despite the frenzy in the street. Glad you all could show up.
Thank you's to ISEA and the Modrian Foundation. Weng will introduce everyone and then Renee will speak about the project.
Each of the contributers will speak, then Weng will speak about why the project exists. Finally, we'll take questions from the audience.
7:46 Weng is introducing the contributors now.
7:48: Weng discusses the tech aspects about tonight's event. Comparing last evening's and tonight's lo-tech/hi-tech setup.
7:50 Renee thanks ISEA and the Mondrian Foundation. Thanks the web designers, without their help this site would not exist. 1.5 years of research we are finally able to present news. Development of the platform, the process, the technology.
Gate Foundation. Publication. Different artists in the Netherlands working in video over the past 25-30 years (hold up book).
Explains early work in Netherlands. exhibitions and conferences, such as Flight or Fight. 2006, became a Board Member of Gate Foundation. Priority to find new home for the artists archive, library of over 3,000 books donated by artists over the years.
The changes within the Gate Foundation. Gate Foundation was given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum. Creation of a space different from Western hegemonic notions of discourse. Focus on cultural diversity.
Sebastian Lopez coined the name "n.e.w.s". Advisory board then traveled and met with curators and arts critics. Asking questions. How to make a significant contribution to discourse.
Technical
Web 2.0: Research into the types of technologies to help facilitate the new discourse. A folksonomy via a tag cloud. A CMS (content management system), focus on community oriented systems and open source options. 6.1 Drupal, a content management framework. Basic site functionality can be managed with little or no programming.
Renee is guiding the audience through the interface of the site.
Drupal (English "Drop", or "Dorp" in Dutch which means village)
Definition of curator is very broad. 10 contributors and one moderator. Thanks all contributors both present and abroad.
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Contemporary art discourses are still very fragile in Asia, the distribution is not so strong.
New publications
How we are engaging with each other. How we are interacting to develop discourse. ways of mediating that significance. An oportunity to work with a different network.
Questions about teh meaning of news. We've been playiing with a range of ideas. We need to loosen up and are still inding ways of speaking to each other.
I suggested every time we get people together, there are expected to collaborate but teh possibility of news is that things can happen in parrallel. We have specific geographic.
The possibility of using news as a platform for discussions. There are oportunities there.
How we write about art
Visiting Documenta and writing about it is like travel writing, are you really expecting to see and review everything in a few days without bracketing your limitations. What are the limitations of Bienalles. We are demanding things of bienalles. What do pictures want, we never think that pictures have agency of us, a returned gaze.
If you went to Documenta 11, there was so much video work, some work went on for 8 hours. There are works like the video work of Stan Douglas, looped work, it takes a long time to see and understand.
Singapore Bienalle
I have to apologize for not giving the singapore bienalle enough time. We are too quick to judge bienalles as a single thing. We should be more patient with our judgement and take more time.
Finding a way to steal time, and thinking of ways of curating. If bienalles were done by the US military or Hollywood, they would be done every 3 months, they have the resources to do it. Cities don't have the money to do it that fast.
We are dealing with a vast geographic expanse. You can see a huge inequality about how recources are distributed.
