Email Art

The Centre of Attention presents Email Art, a contemporary art electronic exhibition running from August 12 to September 16 2002.

Every Monday for 6 weeks, subscribers received an e-mail from a different artist, including Jenny Holzer, Ken Friedman, Sylvie Fleury, Simon Poulter and Simon Faithfull. The 6th artist was selected from our preferred e-mail contributions received within the first 5 weeks from amongst the exhibition subscribers.

Subscription to the exhibition was free.

The exhibition is looking at issues such as the links between Mail Art and E-mail Art, the Internet as a medium for communicating art, the e-mail as an art product. Some of the artists, like Jenny Holzer, are interested by how the Medium through which the text is communicated shapes the work's meaning and the audience's experience, how the electronic medium affects the dialogue. The exhibition also probes further the concept of the Centre of Attention as a non space specific gallery, and continues against all odds the Centre's low-tech exploration of art. Equally the exhibition may be seen by addicts as a quick art fix, available at their internet cafe in Ibiza, Mexico, Thailand or Tottenham Court Road.

Jenny Holzer has shown worldwide in prominent institutions and major spaces such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York, Bilbao), the American Pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, the ICA in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The main focus of her work has been the investigation of means to disseminate her ideas within public spaces. In 1977, she created her first all-text works, the Truismsseries, printing them on paper, which she pasted up anonymously around New York city. Since then, she has worked in the street and in public buildings using media that would enable her work to blend into the landscape. She has also worked in various media from T-shirts and electronic signs to xenon projections.

Ken Friedman is a well-known artist and art theorist. Since the l960s, he has been associated with Fluxus, the international forum of experimental art, architecture, design, and music. His work can be seen in many collections. The opening exhibition of the Tate Modern in London included his work. Ken was director of Fluxus West for a decade from 1966 to 1976. He edited The Fluxus Reader published by Academy Press in 1998. Ken has written extensively about issues such as intermedia and mail art, as well as conducting research on the sociology and economics of art. He is today associate professor of leadership and strategic design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, and visiting professor at the Advanced Research Institute of the Staffordshire University School of Art and Design.

Sylvie Fleury lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. Hers is one of the defining voices which have emerged from Europe in the past decade. Since 1990, her work draws direct inspiration from pop culture, like fashion or music, but her choice of materials jumps with the frequency of passing fads between modes as varied as painting, video, sculpture, and performance. "I am interested in what's in the air at the moment when I am working ... what you can capture and what can come out of it and how much you can control it."

Simon Poulter has established a national profile working across digital media, installation and live art. Poulter's work is often iconoclastic, irreverent and probing in nature; working simultaneously on and off-line. Poulter's work includes 'UK Ltd' (1995) - a fake privatisation campaign, Counter Marketing (1996) - uncovering the world's earliest known scratchcard and'Afterworld/The Digital Guillotine (2000) recipient of the Clark/DA2 Digital Bursary - examining death and human behaviour. He had a solo show Performance related Pay in June at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth.

Simon Faithfull has recently had a solo show at Artsway, Hampshire. Past exhibitions include Temporary Accommodation, Whitechapel Gallery as well as spaces including Parkers Box in New York and the Chisenhale Gallery in London. Simon is the co-founder of e-2, a web-based project funded by the Arts Council to commission ne art works for the Internet.

Taking part: Email art contributions are welcome from anyone who has subscribed to the exhibition. We will not open any attachment of more than 100k, or anything which cannot be read by a basic computer, for reasons of accessibility.

Deadline for participation is approx 12 September. The best EMail, as selected by the Centre of Attention curators will be the 6th artist featured. You can find a selection of some of interesting contributions by clicking on this sentence.

Andrew Childs was selected as the 6th artist: Andrew Childs is an artist that lives and works in Philadelphia. In 2000 he graduated with a BFA in painting from RISD. Since then he has done work in video art, net.art, web design, programming, and typography. He has published a body of flash-based, post-hypnotic work online at www.megatight.com, he also does commercial flash work online which is shown at www.acacdesign.com.

Pressetext

Email Art - a Contemporary Electronic Art Exhibition
the centre of attention 

mit Simon Faithfull, Sylvie Fleury, Ken Friedman, Jenny Holzer, Simon Poulter, Andrew Childs