Still Water for network art and culture

Welcome to the Still Water press page. If you can't find what you need from the links at left, please contact us.

If you're looking for program and project descriptions, please visit the Still Water home.

ABOVE: Visiting artists John Klima and Liza Sabater join Jon Ippolito to watch Alex Galloway's first demo of his Prepared Playstation.

press links

Since its founding in 2002, Still Water has garnered press from over 40 blogs worldwide as well as mainstream venues such as ArtNews, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired.

Check back soon for excerpts and links; in the meantime, you can find some of the press here.

biographies for joline blais

You can find more information about Joline at her home page.

100-word bio

Joline Blais is Assistant Professor of New Media and co-founder of Still Water at UMaine. She previously helped develop New Media Programs at NY Polytechnic University and at NYU.

Her book At the Edge of Art, co-written with Jon Ippolito, looks at strategies that empower new media artists to reshape the practice of art and beyond.

Blais' projects include LongGreenHouse, a merging of the Wabanaki Longhouse, permaculture gardens, and networked collaboration; RFC (Request for Ceremony), a call to invent ceremonies to accompany moments from everyday life; and the Cross-Cultural Partnership, a legal framework for sharing connected knowledge responsibly and sustainably.

200-word bio

Joline Blais is Assistant Professor of New Media at UMaine and co-founder of Still Water for network art and culture. She previously helped develop New Media Programs at NY Polytechnic University and at NYU.

Her book At the Edge of Art (2006), co-written with Jon Ippolito, looks at the way new strategies of empowerment--execution rather than representation, arrest rather than entertainment--work in communities of new media artists, and how these artists are reshaping both the practice of art and the world in which they practice.

Blais' publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. This cross-cultural braid suggests tribal and networked alternatives to conventional socio-political and cultural structures, and produces models of deep sustainability.

One recent project, LongGreenHouse (2007), brings the Wabanaki Longhouse, permaculture gardens, and networked collaboration together in a working community, complete with alternative school (Wassookeag), and in partnership with UMaine and ESTIA Eco-Peace community.

She is currently working on RFC: Request for Ceremony (2008) and the Cross-Cultural Partnership (2006). This work takes her to indigenous and traditional communities around the world to foster ceremony, micro-treaties and glocal networks based on the Cross-Cultural Partnership model.

300-word bio

Joline Blais is Assistant Professor of New Media at UMaine and co-founder of Still Water for network art and culture. She previously helped develop New Media Programs at NY Polytechnic University and at NYU.

Her book At the Edge of Art (2006), co-written with Jon Ippolito, looks at the way new strategies of empowerment--execution rather than representation, arrest rather than entertainment--work in communities of new media artists, and how these artists are reshaping both the practice of art and the world in which they practice.

Blais' publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. This cross-cultural braid suggests tribal and networked alternatives to conventional socio-political and cultural structures, and produces models of deep sustainability.

One recent project, LongGreenHouse, brings the Wabanaki Longhouse, permaculture gardens, and networked collaboration together in a working community, complete with alternative school (Wassookeag), and in partnership with UMaine and ESTIA Eco-Peace NGO (of which she is a board member).

Her latest projects include RFC and the Cross Cultural Partnership. RFC (Request for Ceremony) is a call for individuals to re-connect to the earth around them by inventing ceremonies to accompany moments from their daily lives. In a deliberate echo of the "Requests for Comments" that generated the protocols now governing today's Internet, RFC takes the form of an online community repository. The Cross-Cultural Partnership, meanwhile, is a legal framework for sharing connected knowledge in a way that is responsible and sustainable.

Her current work takes her to indigenous and traditional communities around the world to foster micro-treaties based on the Cross-Cultural Partnership model.

biographies for jon ippolito

You can find more information about Jon at his home page.

1 sentence, 32 words, 200 characters, laconic

A footsoldier in the battle between network and hierarchic culture, Jon Ippolito is an artist, Guggenheim curator, and co-founder of Still Water for network art and culture at the University of Maine.

2 sentences, 71 words, 441 characters, naive

One of many footsoldiers in the battle between network and hierarchic culture, Jon Ippolito is an artist, Guggenheim curator, and co-founder of the Still Water program for network art and culture at the University of Maine. His current projects--including the Variable Media Network, the Open Art Network, and his 2006 book co-authored with Joline Blais, At the Edge of Art--aim to expand the art world beyond its traditional preoccupations.

3 sentences, 81 words, 512 characters, irreverent

Jon Ippolito (three.org/ippolito) has made a career out of pursuing vocations for which he is drastically underqualified. Following short-lived stints as a dancer and astrophysicist, he has co-created online artworks seen at the Walker Art Center and ZKM, curated exhibitions of video art and virtual reality at the Guggenheim, and published a regular column in ArtByte magazine. He suspects that his early adoption of new media has something to do with his recent success in pulling the wool over people's eyes.

4 sentences, 128 words, 788 characters, self-congratulatory

The recipient of Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundation awards, Jon Ippolito exhibited artwork with collaborative teammates Janet Cohen and Keith Frank at the Walker Art Center, ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and WNET's ReelNewYork Web site. As Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, he curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and, with John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Ippolito's critical writing has appeared in periodicals ranging from Flash Art and the Art Journal to the Washington Post. At the Still Water lab co-founded with Joline Blais, Ippolito is at work on three projects--the Variable Media Network, the Open Art Network, and their 2006 book At the Edge of Art--that aim to expand the art world beyond its traditional confines.

8 sentences, 268 words, 1661 characters, no holds barred

Jon Ippolito hopes building networks will help keep digital culture alive and kicking--but he has his hands full in today's climate of unfettered media monopolies, accelerated obsolescence, and looming co-optation by academia. He is the digital doyen of The Variable Media Network, an international consortium of museums and archives that devises medium-independent strategies to preserve new media art. As grand vizier of The Open Art Network, Ippolito works with a growing number of prominent digital artists to promote an open architecture for the Internet and digital media. As chief constable of the Still Water lab at the University of Maine, he works with Co-director Joline Blais to enforce an expansive definition of networked art in the academia and the art world, as argued in their 2006 book At the Edge of Art. The recipient of Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundation awards, he has exhibited artwork with collaborative teammates Janet Cohen and Keith Frank at the Walker Art Center, ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Harvard's Carpenter Center, and the Yale Art and Architecture Gallery. As Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, he has curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and, with John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Ippolito's critical writing has appeared in periodicals such as the Art Journal, Artforum, Flash Art, the Washington Post, and in his regular column for ArtByte magazine. He and his work have been cited in eleven New York Times articles and eleven Wired articles, but that doesn't stop his tenure committee from asking why he hasn't published in any academic journals in the past year.