ARTMAP is a collective of anthropologists, artists and hackers. It was first constituted as a research network on "special effects". Then it moved on to various other topics including ambient environments, micro-macro scale plays, lo-tech systems, virtuosity, architecture techniques, show machines… I was an active member of that group for a few years. That’s where my work on virtuosity comes from (see this publication and this one).

I created the first website of the group in 2006. It was my first attempt at a collaborative website. I used Joomla 1.5. The platform never actually worked in a truly collaborative way. Some 15 members had accounts on it but only 3 or 4 of them ever connected to post something. I was very happy however with this experience. For one thing, it made me understand the challenges faced by collaborative websites in the humanities (why people didn’t have time to write and debate online, whereas they seemed to have plenty of it to do that on paper). Also, it proved that 3 or 4 active people on a website are enough to make it lively, dynamic and attractive. Finally, I learned a lot about the way CMS work.

The site I built is no longer online. I administered it from 2006 to 2009. In 2010 Joffrey Becker took over. He chose to migrate the contents to Wordpress. The currently visible site is mostly his work, with older and newer contents.