Re: [-empyre-] the 'colourless' nature of the net

[Mendi Obadike <mendi@blacknetart.com>]

--- Linda Wallace <linda@machinehunger.com.au> wrote:

" . . . the internet is often seen as a place where 'colour is
irrelevant ' or race doesn't matter, we are all equal here etc but you
are presenting tools/services to highlight difference within this space
of supposed nondifference. with the opera, I managed to download some
of the mpgs a while ago but can't get any lately, but what I heard was
haunting. again, my question is, why do you both chose to work with the
internet?  linda"

Hi all,

We first came to online art in 1996. We were originally interested in
the net as a medium and not as subject matter for our work. We saw the
net as a place mostly where we would be able to connect with artists
doing related projects. We were living in a relatively rural part of
the US at the time.

At that time, Keith thought of the web as a great place for me to
connect with sound artists internationally. Mendi mostly used it to
keep in contact with friends in the academy or seek out new essays by
emerging writers. As we began to look at many different kinds of sites
(emerging online services, net.art, research sites) we did not feel
that the net was a colorless space, but rather, that whiteness was
being set up as the default. This meant that, yes, the images
populating the web were of white peoples, but so were the mythologies
invoked, the languages used, the terminology/tools, and the historical
relations.

>From our perspective major corporations and designers of the web were
quickly shaping the web to tell a specific western colonialist story.
The fact that one could use a browser called ?navigator? or ?explorer?
to get to the ?amazon? or ?ebay?, for example, is bound up with this
legacy. As such, we felt compelled to confront this notion of ourselves
as raced subjects within this paradigm.

Our earliest projects were about notions of community. We then moved on
to projects that dealt more specifically with race. For example, E2A
was a project in which we sent out a call for sounds and hoped that by
sending this call we could learn something and say something about the
limits of our community. With The Sour Thunder we were thinking about
the ways in which relationships to communities translated across
borders. Race is a factor in the construction of some of those
communities. The Sour Thunder is built for the net in many ways and we
obviously think it has implications for the net, but hopefully it
speaks to concerns about identity and borders offline as well. While
many of our projects are created online, we hope that the ideas extend
far beyond. 


Mendi+Keith


=====
Mendi Lewis Obadike
http://blacknetart.com
http://Obadike.tripod.com/sweat.html