Jonah Brucker-Cohen: BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined
June 2003
Jonah Brucker-Cohen: BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined
BumpList: An Email Community for the Determined by Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a mailing list with limited membership that challenges the rules and culture of online email forums. Only six people can be members at once. When a new person subscribes, the first is “bumped,” or removed, from the list. BumpList encourages people to resubscribe repeatedly if they are bumped off, reflecting the urgency of networked communication platforms in pressuring people to participate and engage in their contents. By attaching simple rules to this communication medium, BumpList highlights the behaviors engendered by online connection, as well as the mandate of mailing lists to maintain ties within groups and forge a sense of community across borders.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen (b. 1975; Washington, District of Columbia) is a researcher, artist, writer, and associate professor of digital media and networked culture at Lehman College, City University of New York. He received his PhD in disruptive design from Trinity College, Dublin. His work focuses on deconstructing networks and includes more than one hundred creative projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His work has been exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; among others.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.
