Saturday, October 3, 2009



Siberian Deal Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth, 1995

The mission of the Siberian Deal was, as the producers put it: "...trading real objects and virtual information. At these two levels the project explores values and concepts for East and West. It tries to establish contacts and to find out parameters of communication with people in Russia/Siberia."

In the west, we have grown up with a very specific image of Siberia, given to us by Hollywood and the news media: a harsh, inhospitable, frozen wasteland where the only people are those sent there as punishment for crimes committed against the Soviet Union. This project portrays Siberia differently. It is still harsh, but it is portrayed more warmly, as a quaint, old world region. It focuses less on the environment and more on the people.

Part of the site focuses on the "deals" in which rather than buy stuff form the Siberians, they use items obtained in the west to trade for comparably valued items from Siberia. In that way it acts as more of a cultural exchange between nations and peoples.

An amusing anecdote from the end of the travel log is that they had to communicate through pictures in order to tell the restaurant what they wanted to eat for dinner, which is a nice analogy for the internet since so much of internet communication is done through images.

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