Slipstream / Saving Face / 2000
Slipstream
https://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/slipstream
Artists include George Barber, Adam Chodzko, Erika Tan, Thomson & Craighead, Janice Kerbel, Sonia Boyce, Lucy Kimbell, Rory Hamilton.
Slipstream was a short-lived internet project whose impetus was to follow traffic on the world wide web, and to use this steady hum of online activity as a cover for a series of artists’ pieces that were either secreted amongst the content of a chosen site, or that otherwise shadowed or subverted its day-to-day operations. Conceived as interventions within this virtual but social space, the artists’ contributions took many different forms.
Saving Face, is Erika Tan's work within the group project. It uses the metaphor of the unconscious to explore the possible individualisation and racialisation of computer interfaces. Tan creates custom made screen savers for her on-line participants and collates the data provided by them for a spurious set of statistics on racial makeup. Saving Face is a participatory work that forms a continuum with Tans other investigations into colour coding and early Victorian racial classifications.
Saving Face was sited on Feral Interactives website as an intervention and exhibited as part of Slipstream, a Film & Video Umbrella web project.
