Renee Turner was, like Christine Wilks, one of those students who, secretly, you feel should be teaching you instead of the other way around. With a long history in the digital arts in Holland, her adopted country, she’d worked on many pieces that were notable for their engagement with politics and the networked environment before she joined the degree. At atime when I was only beginning to think about the potential for writing across the network, Renee embarked on ‘She…’, a work that collects, curates, and subverts online news media in order to fashion/re-fashion stories. It’s a piece that I find exhilarating; like ‘Fitting the Pattern’ it exploits Renee’s vast array of technical skills in the pursuit of a good story.

She…
a collage of fact and fiction



In late 2007 I started collecting online news stories about women and writing short scenes in response. Narrated from the third person, the fictional scenes are not an elaboration of the news, but rather an imagined story projected into the gaps of what is untold. While CNN, the BBC and Reuters provide a mediatized context for each protagonist in the work, the fiction casts them in a moment of private self-reflection. In many respects the stories play with certain female archetypes, such as the careerist, the aging femme fatale and the princess. They also capitalize on our tendency to read between the lines, embellishing assumed facts with our own projections, prejudices and desires.

While making She…, it was fascinating to work with pre-existing online material and re-narrate through them. Of course, this also makes the work vulnerable, as webpages can be removed and urls changed. While I regularly update missing links, I cannot predict when the news items will become completely obsolete, and the piece will collapse irretrievably into a collection of 404 messages. Nonetheless, there is something compelling about making works which directly engage with the web’s fluctuating nature.

Building on this ethos, as a part of a series of streamed performances curated by Annie Abrahams at Panoplie.org, I worked with several RSS news feeds, re-transcribing them before an online audience. Eliminating all specificities such as names, places and time, I attempted to write a universal stream of events. The performance, broadcast via two webcams, was accompanied by the sound of a human heartbeat. Entitled, Postcards from my desktop, the project played with the literal meaning of really simple syndication and simultaneously pointed to the impossibilities of remote communication.

Currently I'm exploring the verbal economy of status updates and lookingfor ways of collaging them together through RSS. Parallel to my other work, I'm in the process of starting a domestic foundation where lectures and presentations on net culture will be streamed live from my living room.

URLs:
www.fudgethefacts.com
www.geuzen.org

Renée Turner is an American artist and writer living in the Netherlands. In 2006 she was awarded a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology, and received her MA in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University in 2008. She collaborates with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the collective name, De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. Their projects have showcased in Manifesta, Rhizome and Mute. Whether writing digital narratives or working collaboratively, Turner’s work often engages with feminist issues and online media ecologies. Next to these activities, she has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy, the Piet Zwart Institute and Bergen National Academy of the Arts.