Holly Courts Mural (1980; destroyed)
One of the most promising new artforms of the past quarter-century has
been the community mural. In no small part that's because a neighborhood's
history can be given form and celebrated in public. How might that artform
move, in form and content, into the shared digital realm? In this presentation,
the artist discusses historical motifs in murals in San Francisco and the
development of appropriate subject matter for a physical site; plus his
nine-step "Tennis Game" community process
that allows for maximum group input while maintaining artistic professionalism
that works for adults, schoolchildren, or a neighborhood group of all ages.
Now the potential has opened up for historical multimedia to be electronic,
published on disk, displayed in kiosks and situated the World Wide Web,
whose sites is not physical but a node in cyberspace. Can we paint murals
here? How can collaborative group processes that work in a neighborhood
be applied to this space? What graphic user interface and usability lessons
from commercial multimedia must we know?
