June 7, 2003, 11.18pm • No comments (be first!) » • 717 Views

Watershed’s watershed

Twenty-one years. In Watershed’s “digital cafe” (a room boasting five iMacs and a cool breeze, no bar), people are merely chatting. Elsewhere, in this dockside arts complex without pretention, artists, PRs, investors, bosses, journalists, developers, lecturers and wankers are dancing, drinking, showing off, spissing and celebrating the institution’s “birthday”.

Bristol’s Watershed is a nice place if you’re into screen-based media. A couple of cinema screens; decent programmes for couses and lectures; a young, trendy audience of producers, arts consumers (who always seem to resemble dickheads or revellers - who wants to just consume when today we’re all supposed to be makers?); and, finally, an interest in digital art, principallly plugged through SquidSoup.

But, main thing that shows Watershed’s newfound enthusiasm for all things new media lacking is SquidSoup’s own foundwanting. Ghosts‘ may tout itself as digital sculpture (a tesseract term if ever there was), but by no means is “an added context and a new purpose” given to messages added sequentially to this permanent text-wrap animation form; no way does each previous entry orm the basis of my next (you can’t see the previous entry before adding your own). SquidSoup’s aim at permanence is admirable, bu0t - unfortunately - it misses the point in several respects.