Re: [-empyre-] geography...

[Sylvie Parent <sylvie_parent@sympatico.ca>]

>
>
> although i must confess to generally being really english centerd..i rarely
> get emails and urls except from maybe central europe about works in other
> languages.. and i am sure there are some fabulous japanese language sites,
> and spanish and portugese ..especially from south american countries. im
> sure there is some wild stuff happening in russia  and india and china as
> well.. i don't look at any french canadian  web sites either ..(sylvie could
> you give us the urls of some from quebec?)

In the last issue of CIAC's magazine (http://www.ciac.ca/magazine), there was a
special
on Quebec and I selected 15 websites I thought deserved attention thoughout the
history of web art made in Quebec... This  text was planned in the context of
Saison du Quebec in New York and was supposed to reach a broad audience. So it
is quite didactic. In the 2000 edition of Montreal Biennale, there were 4
projects by Quebec artsts (see
http://www.ciac.ca/biennale2000/fr/electro-artistes.html). In the
Location/Dislocation exhibition (http://www.deplacement.qc.ca) I co-curated with
Valerie we chose 7 projects created by Quebec artists including 6 websites that
I believe are excellent. So that's a good start if you want to know more about
Quebec web art.

You will notice that many projects are English or bilingual. There is an
important English community.
In Montreal, specially, many people are bilingual. So it makes sense to publish
in both languages.
In a way, we already deal with the language barrier in our everyday life.

As you will expect, many early projects are based on text (for instance Dreamed)
whereas
most of recent works are multimedia oriented (see works in the Biennale 2000 or
the Location/Dislocation show). We can ask ourselves if this is simply due to
the evolution of the technology (from mainly a communication tool  to a
multimedia production/distribution means) or is there also a will to reach
people beyond the language barrier?


Sylvie