Summary of this Section

This section describes in detail the contents of this web site, and the specific areas of research. The web research project discusses my work reviewing the many web sites covered in the resources page of the upstate Video History Project web site. The interviews section covers the discussions I had with 5 artists around the time of the Making Connections conference in Syracuse. The conference section covers in some depth the happenings at the conference and my overall impressions of the conference and what it had to offer.

Web Research project

As part of my research I project, I investigated over 150 sites on the world wide web related to the Upstate Video History Project. Sherry Miller Hocking sent me a list of over 200 (some of these Ižm still researching...) sites, with just names. It was my job to look at all these sites and ascertain what was at the other end of the link. I developed a short list of questions to ask as I visited each site:
1. What is the organization/group/individual represented?
2. What is their mission (or provide a short description)
3. What resources are available here?
4. Are there any specific resources of note?

With that list, I looked at and reviewed the sites. Some of them came up with errors, the page no longer existed, or it had moved, or it was under construction. So the list of sites was whittled down ever so slightly. The final product is the resources page of the Upstate Video History web site. The resources page contains a long list of the linked sites, with a summary of technical requirements (Java, RealAudio/Video, etc.), and a short paragraph summarizing my findings of the 4 questions asked above. Since the resource page is also a links page to other sites, the descriptions are short and succinct, not as eloquently written you might say. They do represent an excellent summary of each site, however, which many researchers in the filed of media arts may find quite useful. As is the nature with projects on the web, the data on the resources page will periodically updated, and eventually transferred to the Upstate Video History project. Keep checking back for new resource information.

Interviews

The interview section contains interviews with Walter Wright, Carol Goss, Nancy Meli Walker, Benton Bainbridge, and Eric Rosenzweig. The interviews begin with a brief biography of each artist, compiled from previous biography material and from the interviews. Then the main section of the interview is presented.

My background as an interviewer comes from producing television. Ižve been producing interviews of artists with my colleague, Scott Noegel, since 1993 for the cable television program OffLine, a show featuring short artistic works by independent producers. The interviews are interspersed with these independent works to form one hour programs which are distributed via cable television as well as on the internet, festivals and other alternative exhibition venues. We take the footage from the interview and edit it together to create a more fluid train of conversation than the interview itself might seem to offer, adding in visual or audio documentation of the artistsž work and background music to make the interview itself more artistic than the average "talking heads" interview format of mainstream television programs. Since I am drawn to that format, I have taken the same approach with these interviews, extrapolating some of the information offered by the artists I interviewed, and in other places providing direct quotations from the interview. The intent is to provide a combination of informational and conversational structure within the document.