"MTEWW Website Unseen #100 (The Power was out
in Baton Rouge)" was an online collaboration inspired on the Rhizome
maillist by an errant micommunication by Rhizome.org president Mark Tribe
with artists Mark River and Tim Whid. The Website Unseen series, a list
of 100 concepts for web art pieces, were offered to patrons 'site unseen'
for $100 each. Tribe bought the 100th, which dealt with what net artists
did when the power was off.
In this case, Tribe desired to collaborate on this piece, but in posting a missive about collaboration online, a plethora of artists volunteered. The result was that 12 artists over the day would describe their time offline through an online installation.
In
my case, on the day that I was to do my section, a terrible storm hit
Baton Rouge, and the power went out precisely at the time I was scheduled
to be offline. So, I was lft with a digital camera and hours of time offline.
Also, I had frozen, in preparation for this event a plastic chicken in
a block of ice to perform time-lapse photography on it to represent that
I was at a loss for doing anything when I'm offline. The 'meltimg chicken'
images is one that was remembered well after the launch of the site.
