Filling the artistic locker

SIMON FILDES explains the genesis and rationale behind the dedicated artist’s website www.leftluggage.co.uk

WHAT IS www.left-luggage.co.uk?

Essentially it has become a storage space for creative processes and a springboard for many ideas, be they educational, intellectual, conceptual, avant garde, or just a thought that occurred at the time.

In 1998 at the height of the dot.com frenzy I picked up on a company called freenetnames.co.uk who were setting themselves up as an Internet Service Provider and giving out free domain names with 20mb of server space. The strings attached were minimal so I set about thinking of a domain name I would like.

I was working at a multimedia company called The Media Factory at the time, and was quite aware of the possibilities of how a site could work for you commercially. What I wanted, however, was to create a site for my work as an artist. I arrived at the name ‘left-luggage’ as I thought that it would be a place where I would leave stuff temporarily.

This stuff could be any ideas, images and sounds that related to my work. It would be a kind of random archive if you like. To me, the name also conjured up images of unwanted baggage and maybe a political leaning.

I didn’t do much with the site apart from create a homepage graphic for a year when lots of things changed in my life and made me rethink the way I could use the site. I bought a house in Newtonmore in Badenoch, resigned my job, and was awarded a Year of the Artist residency making video and computer projections in a shop window in Edinburgh. The new website was then to be a shop window to the world and a way of archiving projects.

Now it’s easy to build a website but way more difficult to get people to look at it. I talked through some thoughts with my partner, video dance artist Katrina McPherson, and a few other creative friends. I figured we each had about 100 people in our email address books. If we all used the site and did an occasional mailout we could multiply our exposure to other art forms and professional fields significantly.

The left luggage lockers as you now see them were born. The content is intended to change depending on how successful an idea or an individual is at any particular time. It is also the home (sites) to the people involved so they direct their URLs to left-luggage. (e.g. www.colinmcpherson.co.uk will take you to the left luggage site).

Current locker holders are myself (New Media Artist), Katrina McPherson (Video-dance maker and writer), Colin McPherson (photographer and writer), Gavin Lockhart (Video and environmental artist), Conrad Ivitsky (Musician and animator) and Fred Parsons (Musician sound designer).

Two other project hold lockers – Hyperchoreography and dogma-dance. We are always looking for like-minded individuals and interesting projects to add to left luggage. Hopefully the ideas generated on this site will become fully fledged enough to stand on their own and have an autonomous website and organisation.

Hyperchoreography has achieved some success and will soon move off left-luggage to a space of its own. A hyperchoreographic work is currently hosted by New Media Scotland at www.mediascot.org. Other individuals have come and gone but they didn’t go with the left-luggage ethos of keeping the content developing.

Lockers are not for keeping your out-of-date CV in. They are also not meant for commercial entities. I hardly mention the bread and butter work I personally do. All those involved generally do have some other commercial work but use the lockers for art and educational activities.

An irregular mail out is sent by left-luggage and then by each of the participants thereby expanding the network of contacts for everyone. While we do not of course condone spam (or ‘tofu’ as some call artists’ mailouts) we feel that most of the people on our mailing list will be interested in our work. We always stop sending the emails to those who request it.

The feedback we have had from the site has been very positive. Many people, from funders to researchers, look on the site to keep up with our activities. It saves us from sending lots of information out by post. The fact that it has been built in ‘Flash’ does not seem to deter people.

I didn’t want to put lots of fancy animations and intro (skip this) pages. It was just an easy design tool for me and a way of controlling how the content was viewed. It has become a lot of work now every time it is updated and we’ve now run out of server space. In the near future other project ideas are waiting to be put in lockers so we’ll have to move away from freenetnames.co.uk and start spending money.

It’s worth it though. We’ve had a couple of unsolicited emails recently singing the praises of the site and only today I was offered a short teaching job in Dundee from someone who had looked at the site. If you are an artist of any flavour in the Highlands and you don’t have your own website, then why not?!
© Simon Fildes, 2003