Yes I’ve had this idea of ’structural intervalling’ on my mind lately as it seems to keep cropping up as my main motivation behind blogging. As with Thea’s work which I discussed in the article much of my own practice is based around the experience of duration and the interval of time, be it through movement, process or observed change. In previous projects with the inter collective, blogging has worked as a form of timekeeping - a structural framework overlaying a project in order to break it down and inevitably make more sense out of it for ourselves and potentially more accessible to a viewer. Throughout university and now post art school by sitting down to articulate my practice and surrounding thoughts into a post I feel myself understanding and consolidating things that otherwise would get lost in the mix.

I feel like blogging is a direct way to break down research and projects into bite size pieces, recording thoughts and opening them up for discussion as they occur and more so in a direct form than the postproduction/documented work of ephemeral art practices of the past. It gives a visibility to practices like Thea’s, that is otherwise potentially ‘quiet’ and short-lived in nature.

Blogging allows for an artist to make conscious their status and artwork as an object unfixed in space and time and has the unique capacity to represent that consciousness and communicate it. I very much agree with yourself Lucas, that it creates an open forum for dialogue and conversation that can result in unique criticism surrounding contemporary projects whist in progress. This commitment to dialogue no matter how self-reflexive signals the reliance of these projects on some common system of meaning within which the various participants can read, respond and interact. It can be seen as opposed to long established resistance in modern and postmodern avant-garde practice to a concept of shared discourse.

However as I have recently encountered on the inter collective’s trans continent blog this ‘open forum’ can go in very diverse paths. As with most blogs there was the occasional pat-on-the-back, keep-up-the-good-work comment but early on in trans continent we managed to attract the attention of a self coined ‘troll’, who repeatedly responded to posts with backlashing criticism. Although in my article I discussed the advantage of the ‘public sphere’ which the blog allows for in creating an open forum for anonymous criticism, I was shocked to confront a participant who didn’t adhere to the certain performative rules I expected. The discursive space of a blog I understand differs from other more constrained interactions in normal daily life - however here we came across someone so openly critical and destructive. They did not offer their work up for discussion nor any criticism with which we could constructively take on and feedback into the project and meanwhile laced the site with booby-trap links.

This arises some interesting self-conflict for us as authors - such as what is our right to censor. If we feel the criticism is destructive or irrelevant do we have a right to remove it and/or block the user? We decided on responding with a post that outlined the situation, our position and asked others to comment, resulting in a debate around the trolls motivation and eventually the legitimacy of such criticism and the very nature of the practice we are perusing.

With the egalitarian nature of blogging every subject with the ability to write is able to take part in the discourse and question assertions and offer opinions - however in this case rather than cultivating a sense of solidarity and communal understanding between ourselves and the viewer here there was a jarring difference. Through blogging we are attempting to present our views to others, to articulate them more systematically, as well as to internalise and react off our audience responses. Is there a way to utilise this kind of response to at least be more critical and self-aware of our art making?