ARTS WIRE

ARTS WIRE was a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts — conceived by Anne Focke, who proposed it at a 1988 artists’ gathering on Orcas Island organized by the Foundation, and backed by NYFA’s executive director, Ted Berger. It ran from 1992 to 2002 as a social platform and Internet presence provider for the nonprofit arts world: a text interface first, the web from 1996. Judy Malloy joined its staff in 1993, brought on by its first network coordinator, Anna Couey, and edited its newsletter until 2004; Joe Matuzak, a Michigan poet, became its director in 1995. Its staff never shared a building — a virtual office across New York, Ann Arbor, Norfolk, Detroit, Seattle, and Northern California.

By 2001 it hosted over 80 online conferences and more than 100 websites, with a directory linking over 400 members: conferences such as ARTISTS and AIDSwire, the National Performance Network, PROJECTARTNET bringing San Diego schoolchildren online, the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference in 1996. ComputerWorld named it in 1997 one of the 100 most effective organizations at using Internet technology; the Detroit Free Press called it “the poster child for Internet theory 101.” That is artswire.org’s historical importance, and the editor’s reason for singling it out: before the web was a place ordinary organizations had, ARTS WIRE put artists and arts organizations there — as participants in conferences, not merely as pages.

Its place in this edition’s family: the Interactive Art Conference — INTERACTIVE — was founded on ARTS WIRE in 1993 by Anna Couey and Judy Malloy as “a laboratory for focussed discussion and production of interactive art,” with Tim Collins and Reiko Goto among its virtual artists-in-residence. Its members, in Malloy’s words, “collectively created my name is scibe” — the 1994 hyperfiction the editor of this edition co-wrote, preserved at the sister site, scibe.org. Item 8, three years later, began on a different network, when the editor opened an item there to see whether the experiment would happen again. The fuller ARTS WIRE entry stands in the sister edition’s wiki: ARTS WIRE at scibe.org.

consulted sources

The sister edition’s wiki: ARTS WIRE — the full entry, with its own consulted sources

The New York Foundation for the Arts’ ARTS WIRE record — Focke, Berger, Matuzak, the conference roster, the virtual office

ComputerWorld (1997) and the Detroit Free Press — the verdicts quoted above

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