Art Dova

Art Dova

Art Dova technically is a piece that remains continually in process.

There has been a number of pieces written here and elsewhere about Art Dova.

Art Dova, essentially, was supposed to be an ongoing Panopticonic Happening on Facebook.  The Idea was to create a profile, get people to join the profile, get the same people to interact with the profile, become the profile, and change the profile.  It was supposed to be a community within a community within a community, eternally looking upon itself in a Foucault like way.

It’s having some severe narrative structure problems because it needs, limits.  Or perhaps friends.  People who have been involved with Art either

A) Love it

B) Hate it

C) Think its pointless

D) Fear it

Unfortunately, recording reactions have been difficult.  It’s mostly been students going up to me in person at the most random of occasions telling me something.  Not very helpful when you want to curate a piece.

Art Dova in some senses is an illegal community.  It definitely breaks some of the rules of Facebook’s TOS: However, I can’t really say I am much more than a curator-artist in this project (which is part of the problem).  Every person in some way who touches it ends up  creating another section to the piece.  The goal was to let it grow in such a way that I could eventually let go.

Although we do not recognize it easily and Facebook puts severe restrictions on its site, it breaks rules about the presentation of self on the Internet, since anyone who interacts with Art Dova as either Art Dova or as Art Dova’s friend is never fully sure who they are.  The identify of Art ideally is always in flux, which is why I am having a hard time keeping it alive and developing a narrative structure around it.  It is a completely shared identity, somewhat schizophrenic, and also one where it is impossible for multiple users to use at the same time.  There may be many Art Dovas, but only one can inhabit the space that Facebook creates for it at any given time, otherwise one will become ReCaptached.  I cannot say for certain who is Art Dova.  A lot of the critique questions that come with it (such as the differences between it and a messageboard) ended up with an I don’t know.  It felt very broad.  It also had elements of spam- since at its essence, spam is the non-identify on the web.  We place the human in it, and get irritated it.  This could be seen as benign, human created spam.  There could be no point, since there is no one facing person.  That is up to the user.

What that space one is encountering is is also unclear.  Is it the profile, the streaming home page?  Where Art exists, I am not so sure.  It would be a lot easier to know the limits of all of this if I could clarify where a person exists on the Internet.  No one seems to know, although people do talk of presentation of self (aka what the profile says about you.)

All I know is I wish I could figure out how to contain Art as well as how to expand Art.  It’s one of those pieces that need to be carefully reconsidered time and time again.  How do you make a piece that is massive, involved, socially networked, community driven, and at its core, destroys the concept of the artist and the gallery?

It’s also a heartbreaker, because it allows so much freedom of self.  Since it is identity-less, and it is clearly not your usual identity on the web, then it could be the anyperson.  I have one friend who took it over and made it into a private place to speak Esperanto.  He identified with its universalism. At one point this was found to be constraining.  Someone admitted that they logged in and changed the native language supports from pirate back to English, and put a request up ban pirate.  There are also numerous incidents of drunk Facebooking.  People felt they had a comfort zone to act out…Which is what made the experience even weirder.  You weren’t yourself…

If you want to do something involving the project:

To Log In: dovafacebook at gmail dot com The password is psswrd

To become friends with it- you are going to need to search for Art Dova.  it’s icon is currently a teddy bear.

There is a secret group run through my Facebook account (that’s Shana Carp) for coordination reasons as well.  It’s been hijacked once before, I prefer not to have that happen again: which is another complication of the project.  If there is no ownership of collective identity, anyone can take it over.

I have yet to decide what to do with it.  As I said, this is a piece that needs careful thinking in order to develop a narrative structure and a presentation that makes some sort of sense in the artistic sphere.  Any help is appreciated.

Some Links about the project:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

I still remain highly interested in the Architecture of Space, People as individuals, and Social networks as a realm of artistic practice.  I’m unhappy with what I see being produced on the Rhizome ArtBase.  And while there are some very cool rehashings out there, I would like to push the boundaries a little more by creating some sort of highly refined, large scale piece that gets to the core of the matter by mid-June.  Yes, this is difficult.