-- YWAM! has a lot more in common with other girl produced sites on the net and has been widely linked and viewed, with interest from around the (web) world including a group of young Canadian women wanting to produce the " 7 Ways.." play. YWAM! site has a sense of fun and adventure, and would, with funding, have great potential to be an ongoing net project and inner city girls info site. Question - Lylie Fisher Obviously community-based arts practice is an area that you are involving your self with, both on self initiated art oriented project and in the case with these projects community initiated. What are some of the challenges that you are facing? Answer - Melinda Rackham In general terms of community web projects I have found recurrent areas of difficulty due to funding and resource availability in the areas where it is most needed. For example, it is impossible to teach 8 girls how to make web pages on one computer in a few 2 hour sessions. Often a web site is seen as an add-on to an existing project, and Community art workers who initiate these projects are sometimes unfamiliar with web based work and the time structures that need to go into familiarising anyone with the medium and producing a site. However there is a growing awareness of the web as a distinct medium for community projects, and as the online community grows and access becomes viable, I see web based projects becoming an integral part of community art practice. Question to Robin Hooper by Lylie Fisher Can you please explain how the YWAM project was structured and who the participants were? Answer - Robin Hooper The site was designed & produced by Melinda Rackham with the content made up from young women's work created during the project. The project's participants produced a diversity of work ranging from radio to video to performance. The decision was made to bring in a designer to put together the site for a number of reasons, including: - A core aim of the project was for young women to explore how the media affects their sense of identity, body image, beauty etc. Given this subject matter , most participants were attracted to performance / theatrical skit type activity. A number of participants were 11 - 13 year old girls coming to workshops after school. (usually with a stop to McDonalds in between) Getting these jumping beans to sit down in front of a computer was a bit of a joke! So we ended up doing performance based stuff - like the rip off of "Baywatch" and "Witness"- which they really wanted to do and got a heap out of in terms of body image issues. We had one computer on line at the centre which was located in the Administration area - and workers used it during the day. Hence running workshops on the internet and web design, logistically, was a bit difficult. Question to Melinda Rackham - Lylie Fisher Can you tell me about the differences between you as a artist working independently on your own web work and the very co-operative nature of your community work? Answer - Melinda Rackham In my own work i get to direct the narrative, but it always encompasses the other, its what Donna Haraway called 'partial perspectives' the ability to span multiple positions, to know that you don't have the full story, the absolute answer. in my community work i get to structure others' narratives and content. Both are co-operative practices - i work with programmers on my own projects to fill in my technical gaps, i fill in other peoples gaps on community projects. my personal work is a document, my community work is documentary. My online work flows directly from my previous sculptural practice which focused on seduction and repulsion surrounding high art theory and the beautiful discreet object, utilising and a mix of kitsch and precious materials. online i deal with the sexual /relational nature of culture and communication. Pop culture and high theory are one and the same for me.. just differing ways that different people make sense of the electronic spaces they inhabit. BACK.......MORE.......