The origins of this movie began as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s MultiMedia Playground event, an ongoing exhibit that gathered volunteers, equipment and technological advances together to show and explore the ‘on-ramps to the Information SuperHighway.’ Areas dedicated to the Internet, CD-ROM titles, virtual reality and production tools were well attended and offered hands-on availabilty in a living exhibit type of format. (The Exploratorium’s forté as a museum and a place to learn.)
I was part of a team of artists that had familiarity with multimedia tools, such as Photoshop, Premiere, Director, and 3-D modelling software. Our mission was to create artistic pieces that would be accessible from an interface designed to display them after the Playground exhibit was over—an archive of the time and place. We had an incredible array of machinery and software to work with and during our daily volunteer time we could play with it and explain, to those that dropped by the exhibit area, how we were using the tools. I met, talked, and taught an enormous amount of people who were extremely interested in creating and realizing their own creative ideas. They knew the tools were available and here they could see how they worked in practice.
This is the piece that I was working on during my volunteer time. I had always been fascinated with the sculptures of the women that graced the architecture of the Palace of Fine Arts (home of the Exploratorium and BMUG West). Their faces were rarely seen or photographed due to their placement on the colonnade. (I was only able to unearth one taken during the reconstruction when the Women were disassembled.) They were concieved by sculptor, Ulric Ellerhusen, to express the melancholy of life without ART… They are referred to as the Weeping Women, but I think they have better things to do. Perhaps late at night, they are working on their own art, probably on computers and together, helping one another. No one is the wiser, of course, but the work continues…
I would like to thank all the people that contributed: Ali Sant, Ron Hipschman, Anne Jennings and especially Mike Kotski, all of the Exploratorium staff. John Karr’s music, found on TV-ROM Too, was perfect to set the mood. And lastly, all the other artists I had the pleasure of working with at the MultiMedia Playground.
Two versions are included: a 640 x 480 Graphics-compressed version and a 320 x 240 version compressed with the Video Compressor.
