Martine Neddam

MARTINE NEDDAM: ARTIST, PROFESSOR, THEORETICIAN

Martine Neddam is an artist who uses language as raw material. Since she began as an artist her favorites subjects always were ‘speech acts’, modes of address, words in the public space. Since 1988 she exposed text objects (banners, plaques, shadows on the wall) in museums and galleries. She also realized many large scale public commissions in several european countries : Netherlands, France, Great Britain.

Since 1996 she created on internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author is never disclosed.
–Mouchette, created in 1996 whose website is still active to this day is a 13 year old girl who exposes online the fantasies born from her dark imagination, contantly triggers for user’s participation and response from her web audience. She has become such a cult figure that she decided to share her identity with her online friends in Mouchette’s Network.
–David Still  who was created in 2001 offers his identity and the use of his email account to all the passing websurfers.
–XiaoQian, created in 2006 is a chinese artist who creates virtual persons.

These virtual characters have always functioned more as communication tools than as mere portraits. They engage in dialogue with the public, trigger their reactions, stimulate exchange between the visitors, archive these exchanges to recycle them into new works of art. They have been doing so, long before blogs and web 0.2 existed.
–VirtualPerson.net is the online interface she developed in 2007 with several programmers. It allows the creation of virtual characters. She has used it in different workshops she organised (a.o) in Shanghai and Montreal and Aruba.

In the last three years, Martine Neddam has given up the anonymity related to the virtual characters. Therefore she has been associating her work in the public space, her work on language and her work on internet into a seamless artistic combination. The analytic aspects linking these three fields became more apparent in her work which made it possible for her to express the theoretical aspects of her artistic activity in lectures, workshops and contextualized research as artist in residence.

In the last few years she has been restoring and maintaining the website Mouchette and its interactive functions to resist digital obsolescence. She is continuously archiving the old links and the new discussions and articles about Mouchette in a weblog: about.mouchette.org .
She has also created new works engaging in a new approach of the character. With “Turkmenbashi, mon amour” she uses the fictional character Mouchette in a playful manner for a strong political comment on the dictatorial regime of Turkmenistan. With Guerrilla FanShop (SKOR), Mouchette enters the physical space in the form of a shop selling souvenirs of the cult figure, turning a famous website into t-shirts, buttons, and bracelets, iconizing the character into sellable objects.

Martine Neddam is also also teacher at the Rietveld academy in Amsterdam (where she lives since 1994). She also regularly teaches as professor in the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in Visual and Media Arts.

Some of the courses she gives can be the opportunity to research an intellectual subject related to her own artistic practice.
In spring 2008 she gave a special course in the Masters Program about virtual characters.
In 2011 she gave a course in the Studium Generale in the Rietveld Academy, “Tout Va Bien, Self-Reflexivity and Cinema Verité” where she curated a series of lectures.
In 2013 she gave a seminars in  Ecole de Beaux-Arts d’Avignon in France, and organised an artistic project with the students around the notion of virtual characters and role-playing games: Déjà-Vu in collaboration with Emmanuel Guez and Christian Giriat.

Currently she is developing a new software “MyDesktopLife“, her own tool made to represent a flow of consciousness composed of different layers images, texts, sounds, voice melted into each other in a timeline. Here is a description of MyDesktopLife an example of a work created with the software (this.fiction), and here are the latest news of MyDesktopLife

Some links of some of the websites created and maintained by Martine Neddam
Documentation site: http://neddam.org
About public commissions (until 2003) http://neddam.info
Mouchette: http:// mouchette.org
Mouchette’s network: http://mouchette.net
Mouchette’s CV: http:// mouchette.org/cv
News about Mouchette: http://about.mouchette.org
Mouchette’s online shop: http://shop.mouchette.org
David Still: http://davidstill.org
David Still’s CV: http://davidstill.org/cv
XiaoQian: http://turbulence.org/Works/XiaoQian/
Virtual Person: http://virtualperson.net
Blog of the seminar and artistic project in Avignon: http://www.virtualperson.org/deja-vu