Hi People, I've just subscribed to the thingist list (again) to which I was subscribed a long time ago until it went more or less silent.
Looking through recent posts, I see that there is some sort of a resurrection attempt going on. I'm wondering, who are you people? It appears to me that there's a very small group subscribed and that you are somehow linked together through other connections (besides the list).
I'll introduce myself:
My name is Pall Thayer. I'm an Icelandic artist that has been involved in the new media scene for some time. If I had to pin my beginning to an exact year it would have to be 1997. The work I do has evolved quite a bit over the years from focusing on interactive audio-visual web-based systems in a sort of abstract painting sense, to more visual aggregation systems that follow the same abstract ideology and finally to where I am now which is presenting the code for small conceptual works that may or may not be visual or audible or networked or whatever (you can see these at http://pallit.lhi.is/ microcodes and previous work can be seen at http://www.this.is/ pallit). Although I've been more active in festivals and exhibitions in Europe, I've also exhibited my work in the US and Canada and did my MFA in Montreal. But since the computer-based new media scene here in Iceland is rather small (very small), I have relied on online networks over the years to keep in touch with new media communities. This has become increasingly difficult in more recent years as the way in which people use the internet has changed so much. In my opinion, mailing lists have proven themselves to be the best way to share work and ideas but they've been losing to the social websites like Facebook and Twitter. It's a bit difficult to share deep conceptual philosophies in 140 characters or less. There are still a couple of mailing lists like Netbehaviour which I find tends to lean a bit too far towards activism for my tastes, and Rhizome which... well... has really been going downhill for the past 4 or 5 years and finally hit rock-bottom over the last couple of months (especially since it's been non-functional for over a month now).
So I'm going to try hanging out here for a while and see how I like it.
Best regards, Pall Thayer