Features: April 8, 2002

Coast-to-Coast Electronic Arts Project

Fourth- and fifth-grade children in separate classrooms in New York and California will collaborate to draw pictures simultaneously through the Web in a first-of-its kind electronic arts project.

New York's portion of the event will take place Friday, April 12, at 2 p.m. at the Ark Community Charter School in Troy.

The project is a collaboration between Pauline Oliveros, research professor of electronic arts at Rensselaer, and Moira Roth, Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in California.

Seventeen students from Pam Hollinde¹s class at the Ark Community Charter School in Troy and from Sarah Hluchan¹s class at Mills College Children¹s School in Oakland, Calif., will use an Internet-based drawing tool, which is based on networking technology called WebTeam. Students will collaborate on pictures while listening to a series of stories about love, memory, dreams, knowledge, and the future.

WebTeam was produced by Rensselaer¹s Academy of Electronic Media under a grant from the National Science Foundation. It allows real-time collaboration for applications such as drawing, circuit design, or other real-time cooperative activities over the Internet. The children will be able to work together face-to-face via a Webcam. Viewers can read more information on the project online at http://www.academy.rpi.edu/projects/
libraryofmaps.

The youths will use electronic tablets connected to computers to paint colorful lines and shapes that WebTeam then will transfer instantaneously to all the other connected computers for review by each respective grade school.

The results of the children's collaborations will be part of an electronic arts performance, titled "Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts," which will take place at 7 p.m. in Rensselaer's West Hall Auditorium on April 18. The performance, a culmination of Oliveros's graduate course, Arts Practicum, also will be based on Roth's stories and will include video installations and a specialized camera that produces sound by tracking the motion of the performers.