'I Am Not A Collaborator' - by Ruth Chandler

( work-in progress )

Being In the Cyber-Kitchen - Notes, Thoughts and Observations by the Artists...

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 10:48:24 -0700 (PDT) Michael Szpakowski "...Personally I don't think there's a recipe for collaboration -there are so many intangibles /imponderables *but* people might ( or might not) be interested to see a description of a project I was involved in a couple of years back ( actually not originally a net thing at all) -the idea was to create a set of rules for collaboration which also allowed maximum creative autonomy to each participant. The description is at http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/linkedverses.html"

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 08:02:21 -0400 Pamela G. Taylor "...Perhaps, we need to simply expand the call by taking time to find more diverse discussion groups and listservs and we may want to expand the suggestions to include an invitation to create kitchen redesigns perhaps using the original as an underlying layer.....I can see the images and links in my head .......in fact ....my view of a kitchen (through the lens of my own U.S. southern cultural heritage) is very different."

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 16:58:39 +0100 (BST) Ruth Chandler "...we've got a lot of issues boiling away already! i didn't mean to sound perjorative about the original location being 'white western'-in fact, one of the problems i have with post-colonial critique is how much it reinflects the tendency to homogenize the 'white' as an undifferentiated master narrative. each of us brings an alien sensibility to the piece, jess, by structuring the gaze from her wheelchair, pamela's southern kitchen-i'm a Nietzschean-feminist in an eclesiastical college andlive on my own so i'm not going to tell anyone what my kitchen looks like-it is fortunate, however, that the uk is generally too cold for cock roaches-my kitchen is a daily obstacle i have to negotiate if i am not going to starve and then its has to clealned so i can get it dirty again!- from this perspective- all housework is cannibalism, more or less disguised..."

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 00:29:31 +0100 Saraswati Gramich "...I enjoy walking in the Cyber-Kitchen, using the machines, utensils, opening every single drawers and doors and discovering the surprises. I see the Cyber-Kitchen as one work, (not multiple) which the richness is as a result of the divers contribution of people from different localized position. It is one work done by collective intelligence, hence it is collaborative, even though it may not had gone through the way of collaborative work as what the expert defined it.

I see the round and round cycle of the kitchen space as a framework, which you set up for this alternative kitchen to happen. As any other work/ ideas/ experiment or whatever, it is quite useful to set up a framework as a starting point so as not to let the decision becoming an arbitrary one. The round and round is definitely not a closed space, because it has already been disrupted by the different peoples contribution.

The work relies on the contribution of interesting idea AND interesting realization of idea, and uses different method & technology as some other collaborative work. I dont see it as a work, which simply is not totally open to the network and does not offer the possibility to the Web user to participate to it, because the contributors here ARE the network, the web user and the community. I also would not always stop for finding an answer to the question of what is artist. Besides, whoever contributes to the interesting realization of interesting idea nowadays like to name oneself as artist. I personally frequently encountered people in Singapore, (a city where I started and practicing as an artist), who claim themselves artists and exhibited their first ever work in a high-profiled gallery/ museum. Some of them did have interesting work and pertinent idea, and in the end it is really beyond the anxiety of answering this question.

Of course we all know that the network and web-user is definitely those who have the privilege to IT. I personally own my first ever PC last year in April and confess I am very new in the field. I actually felt that the image of the Cyber-Kitchen could be seen as teasing the economic status of the web-user. There is no perfect virtual world. (In Indonesia, the country I grew up, many the kitchens were located outdoor, so you could actually see what the persons in the kitchen were up to, but my parents did have a kitchen resembled yours).

In terms of position, whether it is white/western/coloured/tropical/subtropical/etc, personally looking at the work as a whole now, I feel that it is rather slippery/ unidentified. I wouldnt stop only at the kitchen image, which you felt very white/western , I would glide through and finding the different positions, which almost make me feel being in an unknown, foreign, indefinite, unfamiliar and therefore inventive kitchen. I enjoy the experimental quality, like my new picked-up cooking activity in my (real) kitchen in this new country I am settling now. And surprisingly the food taste absolutely delicious. :-)"

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 17:17:36 -0500 Barbara Santos "...We can find layers inside the ciberkitchen's objects like _limits, _capacity of share or not, smells, _feelings, and so on. We can trying to read inside the CK. That will help us to recognized aspects that are growing already.

____ I'm finding in the CK a place on transition, like a mobile kitchen, with one body but with different faces."