Encounter is an early net.art project inspired by the burgeoning beginnings of online relationships and dating in the 1990’s.

Year: 1998
Exhibitions: ‘encounter’ Furnace, Lancaster, England (1998); ‘Maid In Cyberspace – Encore!’ Studio XX, Montreal, Canada (1998); ‘Message Sent’ The Travelling Gallery, toured to venues throughout Scotland (2001); ‘sins and senses’ plug in, Basel, Switzerland (2002)

Link: Encounter net.art project
http://archive.bhood.co.uk/archive/encounter

The Encounter project documents the daily online communication over a period of 30 days in 1998, between two strangers. It was inspired by the beginnings of online relationships and dating in the 1990’s, which gathered a significant amount of attention from the mainstream press at the time, due to its novelty.

The project began as an anonymous call across various media art mailing lists, for an project participant who would commit to anonymously communicating at least once a day by email, and once a week over IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The only stipulation was that the artist had to be based on the UK and be willing to conclude the project with an in person, public dinner. The aim was to see if, and how well, the artist and participant would get to know each other, through purely online communication.

From the responses to the call, (some of who said hello, my name is ‘…’ so that was never going to work), one participant was selected, and from March 20th - April 18th 1998 the daily private conversations between artist and participant, were uploaded to a public website under the pseudonyms ‘anon1’ and ‘anon2’. IRC chats were held weekly, which the public was invited to join, enabling the audience to become participants in the conversation. Two CuSeeMe video conferencing sessions were held between ‘anon1’ and ‘anon2’ which enabled the artist and participant to chat, alongside having a live camera feed. At neither session did either opt to show themselves on camera, instead employing techniques of subterfuge.

The project culminated in a public dinner in Lancaster on April 18th 1998, in Cafe No 6, where the artist, anon2, and members of the online audience met in person. The dinner event was also live streamed via IRC. anon2 was digital curator Chris Bryne. It turned out Beverley and Chris had met once before, just before the project started, and they both lived in Edinburgh.

Funded by: The project was commissioned as part of the online residencies "My House & Your House" hosted by Furnace, Lancaster.