From mikemosh@mail.well.com Thu Sep 11 13:33:15 1997 Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 12:56:59 -0800 From: Mike Mosher To: conference@h-net.msu.edu Cc: melanie@h-net2.h-net.msu.edu Subject: Proposal for "Envisioning the Future" [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] Community History Visualized: Murals in Place and Cyberspace Mike Mosher, Artist/Designer/Educator 302 Easy St. #19, Mountain View CA 94043 One of the most promising new artforms of the past quarter-century has been the community mural. In no small part it is because in it a neighborhood's history can be collectively 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 community murals and the development of appropriate subject matter for a physical site. In painting historical murals in San Francisco like "The Mission Reds at Woodwards' Gardens" (1982) and "The City's Music" (1990), he's developed a nine-step "Tennis Game" community process that allows for maximum group input while maintaining artistic professionalism. This process 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? What past community mural lessons apply? 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? Several community-based websites and multimedia projects with historical content will be studied for answers, as well as the artist's own mural-faced kiosks like "Collaborationation" (1992) and "Christopher Cumulonimbus" (1991) of which these are but fragments of the murals assembling history in both paint and pixel he hopes to paint in the future. Access to the Web or even computers cannot be considered universal. Yet as cyberspace the World Wide Web changes accepted definitions of community, memory, narrative and access to archived sources, lessons in community mural organization and painting can meet challenges of giving understandable, usable, visually attractive form to the histories we will build. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Mosher has painted and organized over a dozen public murals in San Francisco 1980-1990, as well as others in Mountain View CA, Hanover NH and Ann Arbor MI. He has taught at San Francisco State University Inter-Arts Center and San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program, University of San Francisco Professional Studies Program, and Caņada College in Redwood City CA. His essay "Towards Community Art Machines" appeared in the online publication BAD SUBJECTS and appears in the upcoming anthology _Bad Subjects_ (NYU Press, sched. September 1997). Mike has also designed multimedia for Apple Computer, IBM Almaden Research Center, Cisco Systems and other Silicon Valley companies. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I am planing at this time to attend this conference. Yet in the event I am unable, I will prepare it as a poster. I will however be out of town and offline 5/26 - 6/25, so please correspond regarding this proposal after that date. Thank You, --Mike Mosher