Abstract- Simon Mills

framed: interviews with new media writers and artists

Between 1995 and 2004 I edited the frAme: Online Journal of Culture and Technology which was published on the website of the trAce Online Writing Centre based at Nottingham Trent University. trAce was unique in the UK as a site for creative and critical work within the intersection of writing and new media. As trAce’s journal, frAme featured digital artwork/multimedia, generative works, hypermedia, codework, interviews with artists/writers, critical essays, and writing relevant to new media during the early stage of the use of the internet for creative practise.
In 2006 I received funding from Arts Council England and Nottingham Trent University to carry out a series of interviews with the artists and writers, who had been published in frAme, with regard to their practice, and to enquire with them about the current state of new media art and writing. The interview project is called framed and thus far has 9 interviews published, although there are at least another ten underway (framejournal.net).
The interviews cover a wide area of practise from new media artists and writers who have been working on-line for some time, such as Mark Amerika, Scott Rettberg, Alan Sondheim and Christy Sheffield Sanford to theorists such as Matthew Fuller and Sean Cubitt. Forthcoming interviews include Sue Thomas, Mark Dery, and Talan Memmott amongst others. My poster discusses some of the findings of these interviews, which offer a unique oral historical record of the accounts of writers and artists who were involved in the area of creative new media during a formative period. The project is thus archival in nature and important as an archaeological document. I will also discuss the actual archiving of the trAce Online Writing Centre (including frAme) website which I helped implement and some of the issues surrounding archiving new media history.