About honoriaTWO BIOGRAPHIEShonoria's biography by Mark Bloch: Honoria personifies every positive attribute of art networking. She reaches daringly across boundaries to gently and lovingly coax her correspondents out of the isolation that comes with the pre-determined roles and patterns she accepts but also abhors, She explodes herself and everyone she touches out of these calcifying cliches with her fresh, buoyant and upbeat approach to her work. Most importantly, she effortlessly scrambles the differences between art and life with her matter-of-fact engagement with new technologies, new ideas and new mores that are very much a part of what is happening right now and now and now. She is a woman of the moment, a force we all should be happily reckoned with in the new century. Hail hail queen of the art bathtub!
honoria, as Austin's own online community conceptualista, has been moving in the cyber circles of Silicon Hills since the early 90's. Under honoria's alternate name, Madelyn Starbuck, she is a doctoral student with a dissertation in progress called "Clashing and Converging: Effects of Internet on the Mail Art Network." Honoria redesigned and hosted Chuck Welch's Electronic Museum of Mail Art (EMMA) (http://www.actalb.utexas.edu/emma) and is known to circulate the Austin community and in virtual spaces wearing many hats: as an artist, virtual community consultant, elearning designer, and creative theorist. She can be found swimming in Austin's spring-fed pools, Ruby Red grapefruit juice and watercolors in hand. Honoria worked as director of WholeFoods.com online community with the Well's jonl.
CYBEROPERA GROWS OUT OF MAIL ART AND MULTI-USER DIMENSIONSIn 1994 when I first discovered online communities, built of words and interactive objects (in multi-user dimensions), I noted that the collectively-built spaces were similar to mail art because they were freely open to new users, all work was shown, and there was a @who list of all participants with links to their creations (called rooms and objects). From my first impressions I asked people who had roles in the multi-user dimensions and on listservs to send their stories about their lives online in poetry to be used to create an opera about societies of online personae. The resulting text was a blending of mail art ideas and Internet that is still becoming the first Internet opera. You can see the current state of the project at www.cyberopera.org. It is not a mail art project, although it has some qualities of mail art. The cyberopera is a transnetwork project. The opera is called "honoria in ciberspazio." I named it after myself as a reflection of mail art self-historification such as practiced by the great G.A. Cavellini (http://www.cavellini.org/). The documentation is the website where all the writers are listed. The text has been edited because the idea - at first a simple "show" of the work, attracted a new level of collaborators who have begun to shape the project into a real performable opera. The cyberopera has taken on a life of its own and new people are coming in from other networks such as the world of opera and the world of technology.
Articles about the cyberopera:
MAIL ART AND THE INTERNET - RESEARCH FOCUSFinally, after years of coursework and writing preliminary papers, I have the official academic approval to begin dissertation research into the effects of the Internet on the Mail Art Network. My project differs from Michael Lumb's historic thesis (http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palace/62/) because my research is not on the history of Mail Art. In my research report mail artists' histories will contextualize activities that include Internet components. My research focus is on the present, the future, and on the effects of the Internet on the Mail Art Network. It is important to study the ways mail artists use both the postal systems and the electronic systems during this transitional era. What are the responses to converging media by creative networkers at the intersection of these networks? MAIL ARTISTS ON THE INTERNET CAN CONTRIBUTE RESEARCH DATAIf you have five years experience with traditional mail art and you have two years experience online please look at the research questionnaire and provide your data to the study of the effects of the Internet on the Mail Art Network. Welcome to the One World Mail Art message board, honoria |