"Project: disembodiment and dislocation
The world's first collaborative Sentence, an early (and ongoing) work of net art, by Douglas Davis, is often held up as exemplifying the ability of networked media to, as they say "bring people together". For all the promise of networked media in aiding people to communicate instantly over large distances, there are many critical points concerning electronic communication that often get deleted from conversation.
First, who has access to the technology that makes electronic communication possible? Who owns and controls the platform on which communication is held? Who is being left out of the conversation? And for those who are participating - at which point do the use of communication technologies move away from simply providing access to already physically dislocated individuals to actually facilitating disembodiment and dislocation? At what point do people become more comfortable speaking electronically than speaking face-to-face (a great example of a project taking advantage of this phenomenon is Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff (among other projects.) What is lost through the mediation of electronic communications? What can it mean when the term "communications" itself more readily describes electronically mediated conversation than embodied presence and sharing of context. When we do not share locality we can communicate through technology, but how is our communication mediated? What is lost?
Various artists have produced works that comment and meditate on (dis)embodiment, (dis)location, alienation, simultaneous absence and presence achievable through electronically mediated communications.
Assignment: Communicate with a person who you are close to (preferably a person that you see (in the flesh) at least fairly commonly) solely by means of electronic media for at least five days. Document what is lost in this process in a web page or site."
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