PEER ONE IMPORTS HOSTED BY THE WALTERS

Imported and hosted by the Walters Art Museum and endowed by the 2010 Apgar Award, Peer One is a video project organized by wi-fi based artist Kari Altmann, using the museum’s online art database as a starting point. A group of artists, curators and bloggers have created or submitted video responses to objects in the museum’s permanent collection. These responses take the form of artworks, research results and audiovisual essays.

Altmann invited people in her online filesharing network to participate, and encouraged them to place the museum’s objects into a contemporary informational, commercial and cultural context. Some contextual relationships were requested, while others remained as open prompts susceptible to interpretation, as well as the nature of p2p trading which can run into the same issues as other exchange routes.

The final videos are available as a tour of clips correlating with specific museum objects or galleries. The results range in form from experimental video art to mp3s to critical audiovisual essays, and in many cases present the topics, tags or content that would appear in other tabs of the same browser window.

In an age of knowledge management, crowd-sourcing and cheap handheld devices, Peer One presents a simple and relatively non-invasive model to continually export museum collections as files to a specific network, then import, install and archive new clouds of resulting content around the artifacts.

The problems of the project are included as part of its premise. The participants here represent an expanded network of creators and researchers whose activity contends with the current availability and material nature of information.