VISIONS OF MOUCHETTE

VISIONS OF MOUCHETTE

For a website like mouchette.org with much interaction and participative experience, screen recordings are a frequent practice. They are used for archival, due to the fast changing online environment, and they are used in art exhibition since museums and galleries rely mostly on frontal viewing and wall hanging. Screen recordings as I know them are simply functional.
But what if a trove of screen recordings of Mouchette.org, full of creativity and imagination is found on Youtube channels, videos made by young people browsing and recording this website to express their personality and feelings, hoping to gather interest, sensation, and a spectatorship of their own? When the public extends the narratives to their own fancy, rather than archival, we are reaching towards collaborative creation or fan-fiction. This is what happened when Nikos Voyatzis found all these videos recordings of young russian kids visiting mouchette.org commenting and telling stories about it. For me, the author of Mouchette.org, the participative aspect of the website is the core of my creation since the very early net.art period when interactive narratives were created with users’ participations kept inside huge databases, kept and maintained to this day, and reworked into new creations. So what a wonderful gift it is to fall upon a new generation of internet users who have invented their own practices to represent and share their own reactions to my website.
You can meet:
-Victoria in the ‘Victory Show’ channel on Youtube who plays the cute teenager girl, a Mouchette personality, pretending to discover the website with surprise and bewilderment.
-Nikitos and Romanos, the young brothers presenting ‘Fears Show’, episodes of the scary and supernatural stories that stage and enact physically in their own room and where they digitally insert as screams, animations, gifs and other disturbing elements of their own making inside the website of Mouchette.org.
-You can also meet some very young kids who have difficulty in typing the URL of mouchette.org on the russian keyboard of their phone and still manage to record their screen and post it to a Youtube channel, with their own comments and mumblings and a tiny thumbnail of their face in the top of their video. Within mouchette.org, these are all valid collaborative creations, worthy of finding a place inside my website. In the same way that viewers reactions were and still are, kept and reworked into new pieces, a space inside mouchette.org has been devoted to these visions of mouchette.org, to host these films and give full acces to viewers through english subtitles from the comments in russian. I created a subdomain on the website mouchette.org, https://visions.of.mouchette.org/ where I host all the videos
First, together with Nikos Yoyiatzis who originally found them, I archived these videos on my archiving website, with all the comments and original technical data.
http://about.mouchette.org/category/archiving/by-nikos/
And then I started proposing them as online exhibitions in their full right.
Here is an online exhibition created within the context of The Wrong Biennale.
https://artsubstitute.net/index_en.html
https://artsubstitute.net/neddam.html
I wish now to show these works of https://visions.of.mouchette.org/ in the physical space in exhibitions as a part of the creation of mouchette.org.