Insite

Insite-overview

‘Insite’ took place, in part, at Watershed in Bristol in summer 1996  and was, then, an innovative use of technology  – an international, simultaneous, online exchange of artists’ work, where a pair of artists in five locations created images on computers, launched them (via dial-up modem) into what may still have been talked of as cyberspace and the other artists responded by adapting, modifying, annotating or demolishing the image they had received. The process was repeated over seven days – a kind of Exquisite Digital Corpse. The locations were Bristol (artists, as shown in these photos, were Phil Smith and Terry Taylor), Birmingham, Brighton, Oslo and Sydney. I was invited to document this process at Watershed in Bristol over the duration of the project and in the process invented (or at least anticipated) what would become blogging. I took photos, wrote about what the Bristol artists were doing, why and how, and put the results into … a paste-up! No blogging platform at that stage though the text was circulated with their images. I seem to remember it was a very slow process but a fascinating week.

Insite-paste-up