RESOURCES

Resource of the Month

FluidArts invites artists, scientists and educators to suggest inspiring or exceptional resources, particularly online projects, to be featured in this section of FluidArts.

This Month: Brain Opera
An interactive exhibition detailing the intricate cohesion of emotions and thoughts with the creation of collaborative music, created by MIT Media Lab.
Think music. Think intrinsic. Intense. Mysterious. Evocative. Have you ever seen animals tapping their feet to rhythm? What is it about music that enables you to think about three or four things at a time? Where does music come from? Is there a science of music? Brain Opera challenges visitors to ponder some 'heady' ideas about this art form and poses a new philosophy  of music which synthesizes science, art, and psychology. Based on principles outlined in Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind, Brain Opera represents the collaborative work of real and online audiences utilizing hyperinstruments  in response to cues from highly textual and evocative environments. The first Brain Opera was performed in the MIT Media lab in 1996, and moved last year to Vienna's House of Music. The web site provides applets for experimenting with hyperinstruments.

Art Site of the Month

Vincent van Gogh: A Handshake in Thought.
A richly contextualized exhibition of art, Van Gogh's work is sorted into four virtual galleries, categorized by quotes and letters written during the actual time of the arts' creation. The exhibition provides the audience with an intimate glimpse into the life and the mind of the artist and his contemporaries. Memoirs of Johanna van Gogh Bonger are poignantly excerpted, providing details about van Gogh's family and life.

Section I - Advanced Literacy

Arts and Sciences Projects and Sites

Digibodies - Digitized Bodies-Virtual Spectacles
Digibodies, or the Digitized Bodies-Virtual Spectacle Project, brings together performance art and video work, online discussions and digital exhibitions that reflect upon the digital world and its effect upon physical bodies. The questions raised are profound and provocative: how is contemporary techno-science reconfiguring the dichotomies of nature/artifice, real/virtual, body/embodiment, as well as the current classification of gender? How can we decipher the ambiguities surrounding the documented data body? How can we preserve our individual integrity without becoming mere electronic spectacles? How can we use the term "intimate" (perception), in an age when, to quote Barbara Stafford, "the computer-mediated milieu renders the body nakedly public"? Several artists from around the world are represented here. Dibibodies is a collaboration between The InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre of Toronto, Canada, the Ludwig Museum Budapest/Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary, the C3 Center for Culture & Communication, Budapest, Hungary and the Langlois Foundation, Montreal, Canada. Digibodies also sponsors Virtual Spectacles Public Lectures, which are described online and via email. Digibodies events are curated by Nina Czegledy.

SETI Australia Centre
SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. More specifically, it is a series of experiments being carried out by independent groups around the globe. Southern SERENDIP, SETI Australia's research project, is one of the three largest SETI programs. This project uses SETI as a science education tool in all New South Wales high schools, as well as a media and public outreach program. In its search for life, Southern SERENDIP scans 58 million radio channels every 1.7 seconds. The technology used was developed at the Space Sciences Lab by the SERENDIP group at U.C. Berkeley which has its Northern Hemisphere SETI project on the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico. At this web site, you will find educational resources (lesson plans, curricula, and life in the universe links) as well as reports on international SETI efforts.

Education and Literacy Projects and Sites

Netizens, Netfringers and Outsiders
Brazilian electronic artist and computer graphics professor Rejane Spitz, along with a set of student-artists, interviewed a range of Brazilians about the Internet and the impact of the new technology upon their lives. Responses of these citizens - including a fisherman, a doctor, a sanitation engineer, a prostitute, and more - are chronicled at this web site. Underlining the vastness of the digital divide, Spitz and company's efforts raise important questions about this disparity including ways to address and eventually solve it.

Champions of Change
The US President's Committee on The Arts and the Humanities, 2000 - The research and documentation presented in this report were originally intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of arts integration into traditional curriculum in inner city and geographically remote schools in the United States. However, the report's findings offer irrefutable evidence of the power of the arts as a catalyst for personal and cultural empowerment in diverse educational arenas around the world. Champions of Change is hosted on ArtsEdge, a project funded by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts, with assistance from the United States Department of Education.

Greenstar
Greenstar's solar-powered delivers electricity, electronic commerce, pure water, education and tele-medicine to villages in the developing world, including India and Jamaica. In addition, using the Internet, Greenstar brings local products, including art, music, photography, legends and storytelling to the world. (For more information about Greenstar, visit Jamaica IT.

Section II - Intermediate Literacy

Arts and Sciences Projects and Sites

NASA Space Science Education Resource Directory
For two years, the Berkeley and Goddard Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum has led the development of this resource in collaboration with the Origins Forum at Space Telescope Science Institute. The web-based directory provides easy access to high-quality, online space science educational resources for teachers and students from kindergarten through high school.

ArtsEdNet
The Getty Institute's multi-level educational site explores a range of art making from Hindu sculpture in India to the environmental architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the role of African-American painter Jacob Lawrence as a storyteller. A gallery contains images from several diverse cultures; the site is animated by virtual reality impressions related to diverse topics including Space Art and Trajan's Rome. There are also general educational materials (e.g. art history lesson plans and curriculum ideas, links to national standards for studying the visual arts).

Education and Literacy Projects and Sites

Artful Minds
An inspired tour de force of virtual learning environments. Thinkquest's Artful Minds is a techno-edu masterpiece, blending cognitive research on learning theory with vital art education. The project champions the goals of cultural literacy, global citizenry and life long learning through a series of exceptionally refined primers: Brain Bootcamp, Visualize the Arts, and Getting Connected. Each of these sections provides a complete template to inform instruction - Basic topic information, Recommended Resources, Webquests and Theory into Practice Toolboxes. Educators can interact with each other and add content to the site in the dynamic "Behind the Palette" interface.

Media Literacy List Columbia University - Informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. Columbia University provides an invaluable resource for educating learners about the role media plays in producing meaning and constructing reality. The outcome of media literacy, they posit, is the synchronization of the skills necessary to create media products within the students' unique cultural context.

DoubleTake Online Classroom Companion
A teaching guide celebrating documentary photography, created by the Center for Document Studies and DoubleTake magazine. Evocatively illustrated by photographer Wendy Ewald, the DoubleTake teachers' guide offers thoughtful suggestions for teachers of all forms of narrative. The subject index contains over two dozen "curriculum friendly" themes ranging from Personal Narrative/Reflection, and Death and Dying, to World Cultures. (The guide is intended be used with the award-winning literary magazine, DoubleTake; much support material is available online.) The activity manual includes lesson strategies for select themes from the subject index (Work, Place, Identity, Race). These themes seem particularly meaningful to high school students. Like the magazine, the teachers guide encourages the exploration of fiction, poetry, photography and essays focusing on "the extraordinary lives of everyday people." Moreover, the guide aims to inspire students to "notice the details of their lives, to remember, to imagine, and to learn..."

Power Up
Power UP's mission is to bridge the digital divide and to meet the needs of young people in the digital age. Power UP and its partners - national and local, public and private companies - recruit and train a diverse group of volunteers (community members, parents, friends, or older youth) to work with children, providing technical expertise, operational support, and other assistance to help these children fulfill their potential in the digital age.

Section III - Beginning Literacy

Arts and Sciences Projects and Sites

ArtsEdNet
See description in Intermediate Literacy.

Science NetLinks
From How Science Works and the Living Environment, to Cross Cutting themes (concepts shared by different fields, e.g. system, scale, change and constancy) and Historical Perspectives on Science, this site probes/spins out myriad of facets of the sciences. These K-12 education links have been screened by a panel selected by the site's sponsor, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Cells Alive
In the search for universal absolutes, perhaps nothing is less debatable than the scientific fact that all living creatures have cells. One of the first and finest science education sites online, Cells Alive continues to win accolades for its all encompassing guided journey through the biological basics of existence. Superb photographs and videos do dramatic justice to a robust index of information on such divergent topics as E coli and the dynamics of bacterial growth, bacteria, cell mutations, the anatomy of a splinter and antibody production. 

Morton Subtonick's "Creating Music"
Creating Music is a site for those curious about music and eager to create it using digital means. Creatingmusic.com is an evolving environment for online music exploration. By following the simple directions viewers make music by drawing; they then can adjust the composition changing voices, tempo, volume, etc.

SETI Australia Centre
Please see the educational content and links at this site. Included are educational modules using SETI to teach science for ages 7 to 10.

Education and Literacy Projects and Sites

World Links for Development (World Bank)
The World Links for Development (WorLD) program provides Internet connectivity and training for teachers, teacher trainers and students in developing countries in the use of technology in education. WorLD then links students and teachers in secondary schools in developing countries with schools in industrialized countries for collaborative learning via the Internet.

Funding Sources:
The following sources are particularly interested in funding projects incorporating the arts, science, technology and education.

The Sciart Consortium
The Sciart Consortium provides funding for projects that are partnerships between artists and scientists.