"Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts" - Coast-to-Coast Electronic Arts Project

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

New York's portion of the event took place Friday, April 12, at 2 p.m. at the Ark Community Charter School in Troy. Seventeen students from the Ark Community Charter School in Troy and Mills College Children's School in Oakland, CA simultaneously used an Internet-based drawing tool called WebTeam to collaborate on creating pictures. The pictures were based on a series of stories written by Roth about love, memory, dreams, knowledge, and the future. The students used electronic tablets connected to computers to paint colorful lines and shapes that WebTeam then transfered instantaneously to a Web site for review by each respective grade school.

WebTeam was produced by Rensselaer's Academy of Electronic Media under a grant from the National Science Foundation. It allows real-time, collaborative drawing over the Internet.

The results of the children's collaborations are part of an electronic arts performance, titled "Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts," scheduled for 7 p.m. in Rensselaer's West Hall Auditorium on April 18. The performance, a culmination of Oliveros's graduate course, Arts Practicum, is based on Roth's stories and includes video installations and a specialized camera that produces sound by tracking the motion of the performers. http://www.rpi.edu/web/Campus.News/apr_02/april_8/oliveros.html