An Old Web Presence
In order to go forward, it was important to first highlight all previous attempts at producing my website, and to talk through what elements were successful and what features didn’t work.
1) Gordondouglas.wordpress.com, 2008-12, was my first blog. It contains public documentation of thought-processes and activity that I produced whilst studying at Edinburgh’s Telford College, and in my first year at Glasgow School of Art. This blog has gained a new purpose with the blog post ‘Co-existing with the Formative’ that aims to distil the information gathered here and make sense of some of these formative thoughts.
2) The second was a cargo collective grdndgls, which was a more professionalised portfolio that documents work from 2012-13 in my final years at GSA.
3) The third was a Vimeo account ‘user13095003‘, that presents my moving image work from 2013-present.
4) gordondouglas.org, 2013-present, is the website I most frequently use when applying to opportunities, or directing people to my work. I bought the domain before graduating art school to have something to put on business cards that I handed out during my degree show. It’s changed a lot since 2013, but still has the basic principle of being my portfolio. It’s slightly confused right now, and is trying to do too much at the same time as being esoteric. I think it fails doing this.
5) After graduating, universal-studios-info, 2014, was set up to promote events and exhibitions that happened at Universal Studios, a tiny, communal studio space that ten graduates shared in an office building. There also seems to be an image of an artwork by Gerry Bibby at the top which I think I accidentally uploaded.
6) with-the-rookery, 2015, aimed to host research from the collaborative project The Rookery, that resulted in an off-season pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk in a much larger self-initiated studio. This blog never took off.
7) Another wordpress gordandouglass, 2016, borrowed its name from the frequent mis-spelling of my name on tickets when working with the theatre shortlisting agency, Total Theatre Awards, during Edinburgh Fringe. This aimed to be a place for performance criticism, but I never found time to write.
8) The issuu profile gordon-douglas, provided a directory for publications, A Social Report, 2016; and Habits of the Co-existent Project-Books (1)-(3), 2017.
9) Introduction-to-performance, 2016, aimed to be a private blog for co-ordinating a course elective on performance art history that I devised with students of the HND Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College. We gave up on it very early on, instead using facebook to organise.
10) introduction-to-performance.xyz, 2017, (designed by Ben Callaghan) as an interactive archive and performance score for the above course elective.
11) and finally, An Opposites Programme, the blog I am writing during my embedded research at CCA Glasgow, 2018-19.
A New Web Presence
We then wanted to gather other examples of performance artists and curatorial projects using websites in innovative ways that were appropriate to the research/intention.
1) Johannes Paul Raether’s Identitektur – the genealogical model of Johannes Paul Raether’s spawning research sisters Transformellae, Protektoramae, and Scharmwesen. http://johannespaulraether.net
2) Don’t Follow the Wind – just sound so don’t adjust your settings (unless you’re on mute) http://dontfollowthewind.info/sp
3) Ryan McNamara used to have one that was just a video of him describing all of his works whilst he made collages out of images of them. The website is no longer like this, but a similar attempt is Chris Burden’s documentation of previous works. http://www.ubu.com/film/burden_selected.html
4) The–family – had to find this on wayback machine, so it won’t function like a website, but was essentially just the simplest html website with posters etc. the later editions (2014 onwards) had a list of performers on a separate page. https://web.archive.org/web/20131204011635/http://the–family.com
5) If I Can’t Dance – a solid example of good design hosting an archive of research and activity. http://www.ificantdance.org/Editions/EditionV
6) Alexandra Bachzetsis – ‘Upcoming Events’ page as front page works well. https://www.alexandrabachzetsis.com/index.php/home.html
7) John Latham Archive – inventive use of organising data from three independent subjectivities. http://www.ligatus.org.uk/aae/#
8) Grant Watson’s Vimeo account – just so engrossed in the research it doesn’t have time to design a website. https://vimeo.com/user39361491
