Right before ratsdeville came to life, I was reading this book: The Age of Access by Jeremy Rifkin. What I retain from it is that we were now living in a world submerged by information; information is not what we lack of – access is the key.
How do we access information?
One-stop-shop
With the blog, I wanted to create a space where the lowdown would be organized in a simple way, answering the most basic questions:
- Who
- Where
- When
- What
The idea was to provide what the audience was looking for in a convenient way, where one may find a diversity of information that relates to a niche like contemporary visual arts’ events.
Over time, the mission revealed itself two-fold: on one hand, ratsdeville offers a web presence to artists and their exhibitions, as well as the venue that produce them, and in this way contributes to position the less know artistic approaches, as well as more established ones.
On the other hand, the selection of events serves as a guide for anyone who desires to go towards the art that is being made here and now, in a spirit of democratization of information.
Acting as a gatekeeper, the webzine became a media on its on, like a visual arts news channel – to feed the curiosity and also as a tool for artists to be part of the community: you need to know where the party is to party.
Doing the work
The basic material for ratsdeville was out there: all the communiqués, press releases, invitations to events, etc. were circulating via private email lists. The method is fairly simple: I signed up to every single mailing list I could from the visual arts’ world in Montreal – galleries, artist run centres, cultural centres, and artists independently. At first, no one knew me or the blog, obviously. In time, the reputation built up and soon enough, people were adding me on their media lists without me asking.
> Next: It takes some of you
< Previous: Artist not a profession (for me)
Éric Bolduc XYZ 