ISEA - Connecting net art and recycling

ISEA is known for its very full program. Such a full program is necessary and nice, but it forces you to make choices. It is impossible to see all the lectures at ISEA. During this afternoon however I am not able to choose. There are two lectures where I would like to go, but I am giving a lecture myself at the same time.

The lecture can only be fifteen minutes long, including questions and answers. So I have prepared a presentation which contains just the essential information and still gets to the point where I want to get.

I am not sure though if the outcome of my research really makes sense to the people in the audience. I was talking about the relation between my work as a recycling artist and my work as a net artist, but when my presentation is finished, all the questions that are asked are about the art center which I started in a small village in Austria some years ago.

Well, maybe this small art initiative is the outcome of my work combining net art and recycling.

I didn't prepare a presentation about the art initiative, I just mentioned it briefly in the talk. But no matter all the theoritical research that I tried to put together in my talk, the old farm was what fascinated the audience the most. Maybe my lecture made as little sense to them as many of the other talks of the previous days made to me....

How to write an article in which you present yourself as an artist in less than 250 words?

No matter in which field of art you are working, sooner or later you will be asked to send in your biography. Whenever you write an application for a project, grant, exhibition, festival, etc., organizers want your biography. And preferably, your biography should not contain more than 250 words, because people usually don't have time to read other people's biographies.

When you are just starting as an artist, your biography might not yet be so long. You could of course include any job that you have done, including any babysitter or dishwasher job, but that might not look so good on an artistic biography. You could invent some projects, making the list of exhibitions look bigger than it really was, including even the art presentation you did in your parents' livingroom. But that might not look so convincing.

The trick behind writing a short biography is to understand that people are not really interested in knowing all the dates of every presentation or performance you have done. In general, it is a much better idea to write an artist's statement, rather than a biography. In an artist's statement you describe the artist who you are, you explain your backgrounds, your thoughts, your way of work, without a long list of data of all your projects.

In the following articles I will try to explain how to write an artist's statement with less than 250 words. To give you an idea how much that is: this article has exactly 250 words.