Furtherfield.org is an artist-led online community, arts organisation and online magazine. It creates and supports global participatory projects with networks of artists, theorists and activists. and offers "a chance for the public to present its own views and enter or alter various art discourses". Their lab-office and gallery currently operates out of in Finsbury Park in London, UK.
Furtherfield describes itself as:
History and background
Furtherfield was founded in
Harringay
Harringay (pronounced ) is a district of north London, England, within the London Borough of Haringey. It is centred on the section of Green Lanes running between the New River, where it crosses Green Lanes by Finsbury Park, and Duckett's ...
, London, England, in 1996 by artist-theorists
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett. Inspired by the cultural value of collaboration as opposed to the traditional myth of individual artistic genius, Furtherfield has focused on the development of "artware" – software platforms for creating art – that engages its users in collaborative creative endeavours.
In 2004, Furtherfield opened HTTP, a physical gallery space for networked media art in North London, and since that time it has received funding from the
Arts Council of England
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...
to support its activities. As well as its own projects, Furtherfield has contributed to other initiatives such as Node.London, hosting exhibitions and events, and contributing to the resulting book, ''Media Mutandis: a NODE.London Reader''; and the travelling exhibition Game/Play (2006–07), co-curated with Q Arts, Derby. In 2007, Furtherfield was ranked in
Dazed & Confused's Digital Top 50.
Projects
Furtherfield's activities include artist presentations and exhibitions, residencies, reviews, theoretical texts, the Furtherfield blog, touring exhibitions, online exhibitions and events. All of these activities address the group's interest in collaborative, networked art, open source, media art ecologies and provocative media-art projects.
Specific projects that Furtherfield has developed include:
* Artists Re-Thinking the Blockchain;
*Artists Re-thinking Games;
* Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops;
* Media Art Ecologies;
* Visitors Studio;
* Rosalind – Upstart New Media Lexicon;
* House of Technologically Termed Practice;
* Furthernoise;
* 5+5=5 NetArtFilm;
* Netbehaviour – new media art mailing list;
* Do-It-With-Others (DIWO).
People
Approximately 600 people are regular contributors and collaborators in Furtherfield activities, with an estimated global readership of 26,000. The organisation is run by a core group of six "current grafters" comprising founders Catlow and Garrett (Co-Directors), Charlotte Frost (Executive Director), Neil Jenkins (Technical Director of Projects), Giles Pender (Technical, Network and Logistics’ guru), Michael Szpakowski (Outreach and Education), Olga Panades Massanet (Co-editor and Workshop Facilitator) and Lauren Wright (Co-producer and Coordinator). A "neighbourhood crew" and "now-sleeping Furtherfielders" are also listed on the organisation's website.
Notable artists and curators that Furtherfield has worked with, in various capacities, include
Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang () (born April 13, 1954) is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker who lived and worked in New York City in the 1980s and 90s, until relocating to the EuroZone in 2000. Cheang received a BA in history from the National Taiwan Un ...
,
Thomson & Craighead
Jon Thomson (born 1969) and Alison Craighead (born 1971) are London-based visual artists, who work with video, sound and the internet.
Life and work
Jon Thomson was born in London, England and Alison Craighead in Aberdeen, Scotland.
They have ...
, Ben Vickers, They Are Here,
James Bridle
James Bridle (born 1980) is an artist, writer and publisher based in London. Bridle coined the New Aesthetic; their work "deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one." Their work has explore ...
, Katriona Beales,
Holly Herndon
Holly Herndon (born 1980) is an American composer, musician, sound artist and sound designer based in Berlin, Germany. After studying composition at Stanford University and completing her Ph.D. at Stanford University's Center for Computer Resea ...
,
Gretta Louw,
Helen Varley Jamieson
Helen Varley Jamieson is a digital media artist, playwright, performer, director and producer from New Zealand. She "is engaged in an ongoing exploration of the collision between theatre and the internet." Since 1997 she has been working on the i ...
,
Carla Gannis, and
Anna Dumitriu
Anna Dumitriu (born 1969) is a pioneering visual artist based in Brighton, England, specialising in BioArt. Her installations, interventions and performances use digital, biological and traditional media including bacteria, digital technology an ...
amongst many others.
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
External links
Furtherfield.org websiteVisitors Studio
HTTP(House of Technologically Termed Practice)
Furthernoise{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080605061753/http://www.furthernoise.org/ , date=5 June 2008
1996 establishments in England
Organizations established in 1996
Organisations based in London
Internet-based activism
Community organizations
Internet art
Harringay
Media and communications in the London Borough of Haringey