ABSTRACT
T his case study looks at the way that an artist situates her practice in relation to awider development of and interest in ideas about new media.Nina Pope and her collaborator Karen Guthrie have been working with new media since the mid-1990s. Their first new media project in 1996, ‘A Hypertext Journal’, was one of the first Internet arts projects in the UK. For this project they undertook a trip around Scotland in the path of the famous journey taken by Boswell and Johnson in the
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Figure 5.1 Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, ‘A Hypertext Journal’ (1996) Detail from the website showing a portrait of the artists during their tour of Scotland, undertaken as an ‘interactive artwork’ in which they uploaded daily diary pages of their journey. This project
seventeenth century, which led to what is arguably one of the first published travel journals. When Pope and Guthrie travelled they uploaded texts in an early version of a web diary or a blog, with embedded images and animations. The project explored how to use hypertext as a part of the narrative and as a reference to historical publishing. Later, Pope and Guthrie went on to create other projects such as ‘An Artist’s Impression’ (1999) that used aspects of Internet culture, such as the multi-user virtual environments of MUSHes, that were otherwise considered to be very technical, but used them as a space for collaborative artistic expression. ‘Broadcast (29 pilgrims, 29 tales)’ used webcasting as a contemporary approach to community folktales by reworking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was presented as the Tate Gallery Annual Event 1999, in London.
