metareflector, my new art project

FROM February 28, 2005

I suppose we can't be mad that Jon no longer breaks language; he's switched his game to slang-checking his friends' blogs in the Village Voice. (And he gets paid for that.) This comes after my triumphant MIA review in SPIN (the triumph being that my kind, loving editor didn't chop the adjective "binoculars" from the piece). Does this mean we're gonna get shouted-out in Matos' roundtable about the ever-nebulous boundaries between print crits and the net pool? Separatism begone; I'm gonna start scanning my print work and posting it on my blog.

COWBOYZ'N'POODLES
an installation

by Julianne Shepherd: feminist writer, performance artist, choreographer, blogger, smack talker and slang inventor

The installation is a series of 245 Mac iBooks, displayed side-by-side atop an Apple-white, plastic mobius strip (built with the assistance of Vito Acconci). On each screen is a piece of the artist's writing, scanned from its original published format--primarily magazines and newsprint, though in one case the original medium is a silkscreened pair of men's Hanes briefs. If desired, the viewer may read each published work in its entirety on the individual computers. At the innermost point (heart) of the mobius strip, there is kinesis: a constantly refreshing, live internet stream of the artist's blog affected by the activity in the room. The writer-artist, Julianne Shepherd, hangs from a plastic swing hung directly above the blog-computer and blogs in real-time. Because she is writing online, the installation is free and accessible to anyone in the world during the duration of the piece. However, only those present in the room can read the artists' published magazine-works at once, while the blog computer is inaccessible; the only evidence of its truth is the presence of the writer, constantly typing. What happens here, is blogged here.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
I'm interested in traversing the ever-nebulous boundaries between print criticism and the internet blog-pool from a Marxist, feminist standpoint. As writers in late-stage capitalism, we create within the structures alotted to us, tethered to word count and content restrictions which sometimes prioritize the hunger of commerce before the desires of humans (be they writers, editors, or readers). As a result, we are increasingly attracted to the free-space and unbound, un-word-counted, illusorily infinite medium of the blog. I wanted to comment on the blog as nucleus of a writer's creative space, and the more traditional format print media as satellite--the outlying islands to the inner thought-community and largely untamed colony of the blogosphere. My blog is the place where I riff freely, a fuck-all battle-cry to punctuation as equally as format. In shedding the conventions of formal journalistic writing, I am able to indulge the heart and raw, unharvested ideas within the craftsperson. And by offering these up to the imperfect populism of the internet, the blog becomes a cell in an organism--it joins a continuum that is alive and breathing, right now.

Blog as safe space, print media as proscenium. Both mediums are flawed and both will someday die, but in this piece, they support each other, and they are one.