Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Martine Neddam is an artist who uses language as raw material. Since she began as an artist, her favourite subjects always were "speech acts," modes of address, words in the public space. Since 1988 she exposed text objects (banners, plaques, shadows on the wall) in museums and galleries. She also realized many large public commissions in several european countries: the Netherlands, France, Great Britain. Martine Neddam is also a professor in visual arts at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam where she lives since 1994. In Montreal at the UQAM she is regularly invited as guest professor. In 2008 she gave a special course in the Master's program about virtual characters. Since 1996 she created on internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author is never disclosed.
- Mouchette created in 1996, whose website is still active to this day, is a 13 year old girl who exposes online the fantasies born from her dark imagination, and sonstantly triggers for user's participation and response from her web audience. She has become such a cult figure that she decided to share her identity with her online friends in Mouchette's Network.
- David Still who was created in 2001 offers his identity and the use of his email account to all the passing websurfers.
- XiaoQian, created in 2006 is a chinese artist who create virtual characters [http://turbulence.org/Works/XiaoQian/]
Recently she has been developing a new online software allowing the creation of virtual characters [http://virtualperson.net]. She has given workshops and presentations with it in many parts of the world: Montreal, Canada, Shanghai, China, Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles, etc...
Artificial_Artists
Workshops - 19, 23.10. 2011 / GeoAIR residency
In her project, Martine Neddam wanted to react to the situation in Georgia. In the time when all the young artists want to live abroad, why not "create" some new artists virtually, making use of available information from the GeoAIR archive?
At the GeoAIR residency, Martines first step was to connect with the local art scene, artists, students, art lovers, and also to the internet community, bloggers, and social media. She made workshops for the group of Georgian people using her interface http://virtualperson.net. It is a website she created 4 years ago, an online tool made to assemble texts and pictures in order to create a virtual character. The interface is very easy to use and accessible to anybody familiar with a computer. Workshops like these are a good way to make real life contact with the art community and brainstorm together or individually and trigger the imagination on the idea of "another person", while gathering and publishing digital material which can be viewed online. Together with some people in Tbilisi, New_Artists, or Different_Artists, Forgotten_Artists, Future_Artists, Future_Artists, Neglected_Artists, etc was created. They also have their biography, the documentation of their works, their success, their failures, and whatever one can imagine about artists. The results of this project is an online interface presenting the Artificial_Artists (of Georgia).
Residency stay of Martine Neddam was supported by Fonds BKVB
