project.arnolfini
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corps_checker by Wayne Clements
corps_checker by Wayne Clements http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/checker/ As a service to the artworld, in a time of considerable uncertainty, corps_checker anxiously takes the pulse of the business benefactor. corps_checker is a response to the credit crunch and the promises of the creative economy. A script running on the arnolfini server tests the state of corporate sponsorship by 'pinging' the servers of companies listed on the UK Art & Business web site. There is no way to evade a ping test. If the company folds as a result of the credit crunch, a negative result is registered. The work exists as a sort of virtual corporate monitoring organisation watching potential business donors for signs of keeling over. Ultimately the work becomes a test of what lasts longest: capitalism or the software program. corps_checker is a project.arnolfini commission. http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/ Wayne CLEMENTS is a visual artist and a writer. His artworks have been shown in many festivals and exhibitions of electronic art. un_wiki received the Award of Distinction, Net Vision, Prix Ars Electronica (2006), and was shown in Connecting Worlds, ICC Gallery Tokyo (2006), in a specially commissioned Japanese language version. His artworks have been shown recently in Madrid, Barcelona, and Athens; notably also in Valencia where logo_wiki was part of the curated presentation antisocial notworking. Wayne is a Research Fellow at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. http://www.in-vacua.com
internet archive
http://www.archive.org/index.php The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
www_hack
Rui Guerra's www_hack is now working on the project.arnolfini.org.uk site, which will explain the multiple mouse cursors you might see whilst browsing the site. It's likely this is a temporary arrangement since it could interfere with other projects, so enjoy it whilst it's around.
Notes on Archives
There seems to be a current obsession to archive. The archive stands as a means to accumulate, store and recover historical knowledge but also runs the risk of more negative tendencies in overly determining meaning (and even commodifying it). The important principle is that an archive stands not as a set of things or even a set of statements, but rather a set of relations. Foucault describes the archive in terms of the conditions of the possibility of its construction, thus changing it from a static collection of texts to a set of relations and institutions that enable statements to continue to exist. This begs the question of what social practices validate something as valuable enough to be archived? To take this even further, the archive is a repository of potential speech (Agamben). Like free speech, emergent archival activity is somewhat demonstrated in the socio-technical dynamics of mailing lists, blogs, wikis, content management systems, and so on - all that seem to have their basis in the idea of the archive (or database). Furthermore, the internet indeed archives itself (archive.org and waybackmachine.org).
Hello World
This is the first post to the Arnolfini's latest online archive project, project.arnolfini. It's mostly written for debugging purposes but it also acts as a definitive first entry to document the construction process of the project.