ABSTRACT
This chapter extends the notion of the ‘situated digital.’ A number of artists associated with the London-based activist digital arts collective Furtherfield have sought to embody, emplace, and perform ideas, people, and interactions that are at a distance or distributed across space and/or time as well as revealing the social relations that are produced by infrastructures for distribution and connection, including communication and information networks. Furtherfield’s Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) ethos has always ensured that, although its primary expressions are digital and networked, that coming together at table over food and/or drink—commensality and propinquity—have been essential to ensure big steps forward in collective endeavour. It became a project to increase opportunities for this international ‘rich networking’ by seeking ways to reach into global ideas and associations by creating, through digital means, commensality without propinquity. This chapter explores the political and theoretical grounding of these efforts using case studies from projects of Furtherfield-associated artists involving networked food distribution and dining, including Pollie Barden’s ‘Telematic Dinner Parties,’ Sophie Hope’s ‘1984,’ and Kate Rich’s ‘Feral Trade Café.’
