SHORT REVIEWS June 96

Arts / Education

ART REVIEWS

ART SERVICES & ORGANIZATIONS

ART PROJECTS

VIRTUAL GALLERIES

WEB MUSEUMS


Educational Sites

Contents

Home

Art Services & Organizations


"ART CELLAR EXCHANGE "
http://www.artcellarex.com/ace/
If you want to find knowledgeable help regarding the business of art, specifically the transfer of money and art between buyer and seller, then this site is an excellent place to go. The ins and outs of Art Cellar Exchange's approach to the fine arts market are presented by links to specific topics, including "Buying," "Selling," and "Transactions." Visitors can click on "Ask Arty" to have their own questions answered.

"WORD "
http://rampages.onramp.net/~voorhees/index.htm

This is a site with a unique blend of local flavor--Dallas, Texas--and cosmopolitan "webishness." It strives to cover both arts and literature resources on the Web, keeping in mind the local community from which it springs. It can be said to either benefit or suffer--depending on one's point-of-view--from the anarchic, folkish spirit of its founder Jonathan Van Voorhees . The site generally shows evidence of careful craftsmanship and a concern for getting good work to the people who would appreciate it.

"WORLD WIDE ARTS RESOURCES "
http://wwar.com/

Whether or not World Wide Arts Resources actually provides, as it states, the "most comprehensive information available," it certainly provides a lot of information and will doubtless be a welcomed resource for the arts online. The site claims to have "the only major artists index on the Internet." As promised, the names of many famous artists reside in their index, although enough contemporary artists have no entry to warrant questioning whether any such index will not finally need competitors offering different perspectives.

ART SERVICES & ORGANIZATIONS

ART PROJECTS

VIRTUAL GALLERIES

WEB MUSEUMS


Educational Sites

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Arts Projects


"ARCTIC CIRCLE "
http://www.thing.net/~circle/index.html

Arctic Circle is a 'travel-as-art-as-information' project by artists Felix Stephan Huber and Philip Pocock ; by continuously uploading their travel documentation to cyberspace's InfoHighway, they documented their road trip in a camper van up the Alaska, Klondike and Dempster Highways to the arctic sea. As "an investigation into loneliness and ubiquity," arctic circle tries to create a connection between the virtual and physical travel space. Being there or being digital.


"BODY MISSING "
http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing

The Body Missing Project is a collaborative inquiry--led by Vera Frenkel and numerous artists and writers--into the art theft policies of the Third Reich and the fate of artworks missing after World War II. The "Transit Bar," a bar in Linz, functions as a center and graphic interface for the discussions on the curious relation of art and politics. The handwritten map of the website manages to capture the project's spirit: the investigation conducted in texts and images is an ongoing conversation with the past, recalling "missing bodies" through a web of personal stories.


"THE FILE ROOM "
http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu

The File Room provides an indexed and illustrated history of censorship throughout time and throughout the world. The site's title might lead one to expect a rather dull interface; however, the importance of the material collected here is matched by the effort that has effectively been put into making the visitor's experience a user-friendly and engaging one. The File Room began as an artist's project by Muntadas and is now produced by the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, IL, with the support of the School of Art and Design and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Cases are indexed by date, grounds for censorship, location and medium.

ART SERVICES & ORGANIZATIONS

ART PROJECTS

VIRTUAL GALLERIES

WEB MUSEUMS


Educational Sites

Contents

Home
"ONLINE TV "
http://zero.tolerance.org/onlinetv.htm

Designed by Andreas Troeger , this site offers its visitors real time transmissions of exterior scenes in New York City shot with a camera attached to a computer. The rapidity with which the images change is at most every sixty seconds, but perhaps because of this limitation, or perhaps because of the aura of randomness, there is a poetic majesty to this constantly evolving project.


"SIBERIAN DEAL "
http://www.t0.or.at/~siberian/vrteil.htm

This project by Eva Wohlgemuth and Kathy Rae Huffman is based on the idea of trading real objects and virtual information, and establishes a contact between Siberia and Cyberia. During a trip to Siberia organized via Internet and e-mail, typical western objects were traded for local objects from Siberian people. The latter objects were then brought back to Vienna. The website documents the journey as well as the deals and people involved, and thus explores parameters of communication.

ART SERVICES & ORGANIZATIONS

ART PROJECTS

VIRTUAL GALLERIES


WEB MUSEUMS


Educational Sites

Contents

Home

Virtual Galleries


"SITO/SYNERGY "
http://www.sito.org/

SITO (previously called OTIS--a lawsuit filed by the Otis College of Art and Design changed that) bills itself as "a place for image-makers and image-lovers to exchange ideas." The site features extensive "Artchives" as well as exhibits. What distinguishes SITO from many other virtual galleries is the "Synergy" section, which features collaborative, interactive projects; among them are "Corpse"--a revamp of the classic "exquisite corpse" drawing exercise--and "PANIC"--a project that gathered artists in real-time to manipulate images.

Web Museums


"ARTSERVE "
http://rubens.anu.edu.au

Australian National University offers access to an impressive collection of images (reportedly 16,000 and growing) related to the history of arts and architecture. Among the featured categories are classical art & architecture, a survey of "Western Art"--a survey still under construction--as well as contemporary architecture in Hong Kong. A new service called "ImageServe" provides tutorials on Art History, reference works and source images for Architectural History.


EDUCATION REVIEWS


ARCHAEOLOGY

ARTS EDUCATION

GENERAL

HISTORY

INFORMATION
FOR
EDUCATORS


LITERATURE


Arts

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Archaeology


"FALLEN TIMBERS BATTLEFIELD"
http://www.heidelberg.edu/FallenTimbers/
This archaeological project is maintained by Heidelberg College. Everything at this site is neatly indexed on the homepage: "documents," "photo gallery," "press archives," but there is little synergy between the material. The site exhibits careful and dedicated work; still, it would be desirable if some "embodiment" of this work risked displaying it by presenting it in a way that wouldn't be possible in a different medium. As it is, everything here remains loyal to traditional forms of presenting academic material.

Arts Education


"ARTS-EDGE"
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/
Arts-Edge is an information network created by The John F. Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. It is designed to provide teachers, students and artists with access to educational resources, professional development opportunities and special projects that support the arts as a core subject area in the K12 curriculum. Among the services featured at the site are NewsBreak--focusing on newsworthy developments and information about arts education issues--a Job Listings page, and the K12ARTSED Listserv, with close to 300 subscribers from all over the world.

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARTS EDUCATION

GENERAL

HISTORY

INFORMATION
FOR
EDUCATORS


LITERATURE


Arts

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General


"GLOBAL SCHOOLNET FOUNDATION"
http://www.gsn.org/
As a non-profit corporation that has been in the business of advancing instructional applications of telecommunications since 1985, Global SchoolNet Foundation has gained among the K12 community the reputation of being an honest broker for educators and corporate sponsors alike--at least in the United States. It strives to serve a diverse constituency with a wide range of levels of access to the Web, e-mail, and other forms of telecommunications. The site offers a free registry of curriculum projects on the Net--an excellent source for getting a sense of what's actually going on in classrooms.


"THE JASON PROJECT"
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/scripts/JASON.html

This website was inspired by the outpouring of mail Dr. Robert D. Ballard received in 1989 when he discovered the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The idea was to allow students to share the desire for learning that animates scientists and engineers. Described as a global field trip, the site is intended for young people in grades 4 through 8. The enthusiasm and attention to detail evident in the messages students post in the Student Discussion Groups are an indicator of the success this site enjoys.


"ON-LINE REFERENCE WORKS"
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/references.html/

This is your basic meat and potatoes kind of site, a hearty serving of links to your basic reference works on the Web: dictionaries, maps, directories, etc. Maintained by Carnegie Mellon University, this site has no graphics, just the links; modest and soft-spoken, it does its job well and deserves our tanks....we mean thanks.

History


"HISTORY COMPUTERIZATION PROJECT"
http://www.history.la.ca.us/history
The Regional History Center of the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles City Historical Society are building a history information network for the exchange of information between historians, libraries, archives, museums and historical societies. The project employs the History Database program, running on IBM PC compatible computers. The History Computerization Project data will be posted on the Internet, so that those who use the History Database program for their own cataloging or individual research will be able to exchange records with the master database. A free, printed History Database Tutorial can be requested online.

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARTS EDUCATION

GENERAL

HISTORY

INFORMATION
FOR
EDUCATORS


LITERATURE


Arts

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Information for Educators


"EPICENTER"
http://www.epicent.com
The Education Process Improvement Center supplies schools with methodologies to improve both their curriculum development processes and their administrative functions. The site provides information on the "Curriculum Improvement Model" and the "Management Improvement Model" as well as information on educational software and on the latest research in the effective use of technology for education..
"InSITE"
http://teach.virginia.edu/insite

This site maintained by the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) is dedicated to exploring ways in which the Internet can benefit teacher education programs around the world. It provides access to a comprehensive list of sites for teacher educators, technology coordinators, and other educational professionals. It also features links to professional organizations as well as to electronic journals and publications for teacher educators.

"NATIONAL LIBRARY OF EDUCATION"
http://www.ed.gov/

This site is the U.S. Education Department's official site for providing educational resources addressing the K12 age group. Forget whatever you might expect in the way of government inefficiency, this site has justly gained high points for being well-organized and inclusive. One of the site's most attractive features is a clickable U.S. map, allowing visitors to find educational resources in their own location.

ARCHAEOLOGY

ARTS EDUCATION

GENERAL

HISTORY

INFORMATION
FOR
EDUCATORS


LITERATURE


Arts

Contents

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Literature


"AMERICAN VERSE PROJECT"
http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/amverse/
The American Verse Project--a collaboration between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press--provides access to an archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. So far, the archive features more than 30 books, including poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson and William Cullen Bryant. The texts may be copied freely by individuals for personal use, research, and teaching, and may be linked to in Internet editions of all kinds, including for-profit works. Scholars interested in adding to these texts are asked to seek the permission of the University of Michigan Press.