Sentences scroll up the computer screen one after another and jostle for attention. Rules of punctuation go out the window in the heat of discussion. Class is winding down.
DanaC: Speaking of art, will anyone be at the Art Institute on Sat.?
Lizbe: I hope to go on Friday
noreenb: Tim & I are going Tuesday. I have a wedding Saturday.
DanaC: Well, look, if you change your mind and go to the Art Institute I’ll put on a mum from my garden. Little white one. Look for me.
JanetC: I’ll look for you
JanetC: I want to see Max Ernst again. . .
Next month, Jay Boersma and his students will wrap up their contemporary art survey class at Governor’s State University in south suburban University Park, and later, over a potluck dinner, this tight-knit group will all see each other-for the first time.
“The Gallery Electric,” a little experiment in one of the possible futures of art and education, is logged onto from eight computers across Illinois at 7:30 on Thursday evenings. Under Boersma’s guidance, students from Chicago’s North Side to its far south suburbs all the way west to the Mississippi trade insights and debate via modem the merits of contemporary art seen on their weekly solo forays to Chicago art galleries and museums. As “virtual classmates,” they mostly know one another only by their log-on monikers: Jay, DanaC, chrizzo, noreenb and the rest.
Conducted on the Internet computer network in “chat-groups,” one-on-one E-mail and on an electronic mailing list, which allows each student to send musings or inquiries simultaneously to everyone else, the course is the first of its kind in the Chicago area. A number of colleges and universities around the country also offer what is called “distance learning” in subjects such as business and engineering, but as far as Boersma knows no one has attempted an electronic art course.
Boersma, an artist himself, says that he first used Internet as a source of material for his own work, which utilizes photographic imagery. “Someone had told me there was a big stash of photographs stored somewhere on it, and since my work is done on a computer and I do a lot of collage, I thought I could get some images this way.
“As it turned out, the images on Internet were fairly useless for me-most of it was sort of raunchy college-student erotica-but in the process I became fascinated by the Internet itself and this huge community that I didn’t know existed.”
The Internet, a vast “network of networks” linking computer users around the world, allows anyone with a modem to access other users and institutions: electronic bulletin boards devoted to everything from Elvis sightings to astrophysics; libraries; colleges and so on. Boersma figured the contemporary art survey and criticism course he has taught for a few years at Governor’s State might lend itself to the Internet treatment and suggested to the university that he give it a try.
Says Boersma, “It’s amazing how quickly the technology has become invisible. It really only took two weeks before we were on with the business of talking about art.”
Jay: … recommendation that the next time you visit a museum, you try envisioning male heads on all the female bodies you see (on the walls, that is) has been a very enlightening exercise for many of my students …
DanaC: It’s an excellent idea.
noreenb: After taking Drawing II (a requirement), life drawing, I wanted to draw figures more often.
Lizbe: I will never look at nudes again in my old way.
Boersma says he organizes the class around selected exhibitions that illustrate both the breadth of artmaking to be seen in the city and trends in the art world, from the current Fluxus exhibitions to smaller one-person shows in gritty River West spaces. Assigned readings complement what the students have viewed.
On Thursdays they employ the Internet Relay Chat, or “chat-group,” the virtual classroom for The Gallery Electric, says Boersma. Each person’s input is automatically preceded by their log-on name. “All of us log on at the same time at what feels like the same place. There’s very, very intense interaction, very rapid-fire: You’re typing a line while someone else’s line is appearing on screen, and you’re responding to that and someone else has introduced a new topic.
“Then we use the mailing list to flesh out and follow up on topics that were just hit upon during the class session, so the two balance each other real well.”
Class papers and assignments are handed in on one-to-one E-mail to Boersma, and some students will gab a while during the week on E-mail as well. But the chat-group forms the core of the experience, the high-tech, cybernetic version of class time in a traditional course.
Says student Janet Cowser, herself a community-college instructor, “You don’t know what anyone looks like; you can only guess their ages by references and context clues. And people interact more freely, without some of the prejudices they might have otherwise.”
Boersma thinks that “maybe it’s because their identities are protected and they don’t feel as vulnerable. Frequently, people are hesitant in speaking about art because they’re uncertain about it and it’s a mystery to a lot of us. Here, there are some people who really shine in the chat group, who think quick and type fast, but on the E-mail mailing list are outdone by others who have a more leisurely, academic method.”
Still, the transition to electronic art appreciation has not been flawlessly smooth. Cowser feels that for some students who might not have much experience discussing art, a course by computer “might be a little more difficult, because the rest of the class aren’t there to smile at them and encourage them.”
Boersma has found that he has to be quite specific in pointing the class to individual artworks to look at each week. “Early on, I had the class go down to look at the Max Ernst show, which is huge, and they came back and everyone had looked at completely different works so we couldn’t focus the discussion at all. Now I’ll try to say `Look at these five pieces.”‘
The Gallery Electric is just sticking a toe in the water of 21st Century technology and thus far hasn’t found it particularly shocking.
Boersma is already envisioning more elaborate applications: art history courses, for instance, wherein each student at the course’s start is given a compact computer disk with reproductions of Rembrandts and Van Goghs and Rauschenbergs, eliminating the need to leave one’s home for a museum or a darkened classroom slide show.
“I’d like to see if I could use a laptop with a modem and go teach a class from an artist’s studio one week,” Boersma says.
Already, electronic bulletin board services offer services such as art-related mail exchanges and public domain software. A California outfit features Art Com, “an on-line magazine forum dedicated to the interface of contemporary art and new communications technologies,” there’s an on-line “Native American Share-Art Gallery,” and artists themselves are now dabbling in virtual reality artworks.
Though much of the computer technology was initially off-putting to some of Boersma’s students, they have quickly found that its communicative capabilities still touch something fundamentally human and intellectually freewheeling.
For Thursday night’s virtual classroom, says Cowser, “Jay likes for us to get there a couple of minutes early for `hallway chat.’ Then in class, sometimes it’s challenging just to keep up with the conversation, trying to type fast enough to get in your two-cents’ worth on the screen before the conversation has drifted off in another direction. We get to the point after about two hours of this where we’re just exhausted and not making a whole lot of sense anymore, and it’s time to stop.
“We’re truly bonded as a group, and we want to see each other’s faces. We had to miss a class session recently and some people were sending each other E-mail messages anyway: `Are you still there?’ `Is everybody okay?’ “
Jay: Info: Sunday, Chicago Tribune article on Sally Mann, also in Sunday Mag section, article on Max Ernst …
DanaC: So, goodnight??
Jay: Let’s follow this up with email, ok?
JanetC: Everyone did good job!
GaryF: Thanks all, goodnight
DanaC: Goodnight
Jay: ‘nite
JanetC: Goodnight, Gary . . .
+++ Signoff: noreenb ((no.)gallerye)
+++ Signoff: DanaC (GalleryE)
GaryF: This is like the end of the Waltons
