alienated.net

The students currently working on the Artmob project are enrolled in either the York Communication Studies undergraduate program or the York/Ryerson Communication & Culture graduate program. With the guidance of our Project Director, Bill Kennedy, they are involved in many aspects of Artmob, including organizing and planning, conducting research, developing content for our websites in our lab space, and working closely with our arts partners on the digitization of their archives.

Click on the thumbnails below for larger views of the images. Titles for each item link directly to the web project in question itself, where appropriate.

Current projects involving Artmob students:

bpNichol.ca: An Online Archive for bpNichol

bpNichol.ca is an online public archive of the works of bpNichol and his collaborators. The site includes an extensive selection of audio, digitized print materials, photographs, links and critical articles. Video and curated exhibitions will follow shortly.

The site was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with Ellie Nichol, as an accompaniment to The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, and is designed as a not-for-profit community initiative. It is intended as a showcase of what will eventually become the the Artmob Drupal distribution: a highly usable, aesthetically pleasing version of the popular content management system that will focus specifically on the implementation of tools designed to resolve issues over the provenance of digital objects. The site itself is only the start of what will be an ongoing online archiving process, hopefully one that will take many years and many contributors to complete.

If you have material that you would like to contribute to the site, or if you have an idea for an exhibition of bp's work, we encourage you to read our submission guidelines and contact us at your convenience. (launched April 2008)

students:
Ariana Andrei
Hilary Chan
May Chew
Heather Hogan
Kayla Meisner
David Meurer
Justin Stephenson

The Scream Literary Festival Digital Archive

The Scream Literary Festival (formerly The Scream in High Park) was founded in 1993 by Matthew Remski and a team including Peter McPhee, Gayle Irwin, Michael Holmes, Bill Kennedy, damian lopes, Tom MacKay, Alana Wilcox and myself. Since then, under the direction first of Peter McPhee (1994-2000), then Bill Kennedy (2000-present), it has grown from a single night into a week-and-a-half of the most varied and aesthetically challenging literary programming anywhere.

The Scream has always run on volunteer labour, donated by people from all professions, with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm. This last year, though, Artmob students and staff stepped in to begin helping with the processing of the vast audio, video, image, publication and text archives that the Scream has amassed over its 15-year history. Thanks in part to the work of our students, this material is beginning to make its appearance on the Scream Digital Archive website, and is an important addition to Canadian literary culture. (July 3-14, 2008)

students:
Ariana Andrei
Hilary Chan
May Chew
Heather Hogan
Kayla Meisner
David Meurer

Ubuweb

Founded in November 1996 by poet, visual artist, DJ and provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry, Ubuweb is one of the largest and oldest archives of digital media versions of work produced by the historic avant-gardes.

Since 2004, Artmob has been hosting the Ubuweb archives. Students work regularly with the materials, learning the processes of digital archiving, uploading and storage firsthand. An overhaul of Ubuweb's HTML is also in the planning stages.

The Ubuweb archive an invaluable resource for educators, historians, and scholars of literature and music all over the planet. Further, the history of legal responses to Ubuweb over the past decade maps an alarming move away from the values of openness that made the Web possible in the first place. As scholars explicitly interested in studying such questions, we feel that Ubuweb will continue to function as the canary in the coalmine of fair use and fair dealing.

students:
Kevin Muise
David Meurer

Older projects involving Artmob students:

FREE as in speech and beer

The FREE as in speech and beer website was designed as an online companion for my book from Financial Times Press, FREE as in speech and beer: open source, peer-to-peer and the economics of the online revolution. Because of the book's subject matter, it seemed only appropriate to place the entire text online (a gesture that was possible because of a sympathetic editor and some clever contractual phrasing). Further, when I began teaching in Communication Studies in 2002, the book was already in regular use as a textbook, and I wanted to make it available to as many students as possible.

Under the direction of Kevin Muise, the first Artmob information architect, the website was designed and constructed in a very early version of Drupal by Derek Lee, one of my senior students at York. It remains an excellent example of what a talented, motivated student can accomplish in a fairly brief period of time, and of the robustness of even early instances of the Drupal platform.(winter 2004)

students:
Kevin Muise
Derek Lee

Artmob Information Architecture

The gains that the Artmob project made over its first few years were largely due to the talent and hard work of Kevin Muise. Kevin began working for Artmob as a senior Design student, and was officially hired as our Information Architect after we received our first CFI grant.

Over the three years that he was involved with the project before moving on to pursue graduate studies at the School of Interactive Art and Technology in Vancouver, Kevin produced endless systems diagrams, slideshows, presentations and templates for the first instance of the Artmob software, when it was still largely focused its potential as a courseware tool. A projector version (zipped, 5 mb) of one of Kevin's early Artmob presentations is here. (2002-2005)

students:
Kevin Muise