Aleksandra Prints!
25 Years ago, making my way between day-jobs in the Manhattan jungle, I picked up my first computer on credit along with the book ‘Teach yourself html in 14 days.’ Two weeks later I was coding first generation websites for downtown arts organisations and registered my own first domain – www.aleksandramir.info – by now one of the oldest artist’s websites in continuous operation.
As a young and emerging performance artist who had already racked up a lot of travel miles working with non-profit and artist-run spaces in Copenhagen, Utrecht, Warsaw, NYC, London, LA, Pescara and Glasgow, I had long sensed a disconnect between the many scenes I was part of.
My original aim with establishing a website was therefore to archive my ephemeral art practice, communicate with colleagues across borders, distribute related publications to the wider art world and educate a global audience about my work and its historical precedents in one coherent narrative form. When international curators also discovered the site, it effectively launched my professional career which by now counts my participation in 370+ exhibitions and inclusion in some 30 museum collections worldwide.
Over the 25 years, the website itself grew to include 250 project pages, 4200 media elements (images/pdfs/videos/audio) and over 600 third party critical texts. When I lecture on my work, the website is always the starting point as students are invited to explore it freely, raise questions that are relevant to them in the present and build on my work. When academics and writers produce new material, they use the site as a reference library. When general audience members explore it, they often email me to learn more. Over 1,250.000 people have visited it to date.
This year, I registered my second domain – www.aleksandraprints.com – and things could not be more different. We now live in a hyper-connected world where distant realities are streamed to us in real time, and where creating a web presence is a matter of intuition coupled with in my case hundreds of hours on tech support. Because while things have seemingly become much more accessible, they are also infinitely more complex, and for this analogue native, it is a lot more to catch up on. The possibility to run an independent web-shop online allows for an unprecedented opportunity for an artist to make a living outside of representative systems, to fully narrate their own story and to serve the public directly. It is a great deal of work but also an amazing freedom.
So with this first post I wish to thank everyone who helped bring the website to life, including all my BETA testers who thoroughly explored it, ordered test prints and gave invaluable feedback. You know who you are.
And we are LIVE!