Content

1  ART AS THE LANGUAGE OF MULTICULTURAL LEARNING  4

2  COMBINING ART AND TECHNOLOGY: WHAT'S BEING DONE NOW.  4

3  A NATIONAL GALLERY IN EVERY SCHOOL: INTERACTIVE VIDEO  5

4  EXPLORING ANCIENT CHINA, THE MAYAN EMPIRE, AND MORE:INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA  6

5  A POEM, A PAINTING, AND A SYMPHONY: THE INDIVIDUAL MASTERWORK AS A GATEWAY  

TO  THE WORLD.  6

6  USING MULTIMEDIA TO PROMOTE MULTICULTURAL UNDERSTANDING: THE OJIBWE  

CURRICULUM  CROSSROADS PROJECT  8

7  BRINGING THE LEARNER INTO THE CREATIVE PROCESS: NEWBOOK/WARSAW 1939  8

8  EXPANDING CINEMA ARTS: CREATING INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA IN THE CLASSROOM.  9

9  STEPPING INTO THE VIDEO DISPLAY: CURRENT VIRTUAL REALITY PROJECTS  9

10  CREATING VIRTUAL WORKS OF ART:THE BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS  10

11  THE NEXT STEP: MAKING THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES MORE POWERFUL AND ACCESSIBLE.  10

12  EXPANDING THE INFORMATION SPACE.  11

13  EXPANDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MULTIMEDIA CREATIVITY  12

14  ENHANCING INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION IN MULTIMEDIA ENVIRONMENTS  13

15  ZOOMING INTO THE VIRTUAL FUTURE  14

16  INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY AND REDUCING COST  14

17  THE END RESULT: A REVOLUTION IN LEARNING  15

18  MAKING IT HAPPEN  15

19  NOTES  16

20  REFERENCES  18

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The elimination of artificial cultural, social, and political barriers created by the cold war has added momentum to the technological forces that are rapidly uniting the world in a single global economy. However, the world's growing interdependence cannot guarantee peace or productivity where historical separatism and cultural ignorance persist. Fortunately, the same information revolution that is energizing world economic integration can be directed toward promoting multicultural understanding. In this paper we explore the use of art, our shared human language, in conjunction with interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and other new media technologies as a means to bridge disparate cultures, thereby creating a truly global society.

Long heralded by visionaries, the Creative and Innovative Age has arrived at last. A revolution without geographic, political, or cultural boundaries, it has overtaken us with no end in sight. New communications and media technologies are making it possible for us to manipulate and move vast quantities of information to learn, create, and interact in ways considered impossible only a few years ago. Teleconferencing and global computer networks offer unprecedented possibilities for human interaction. Historic upheavals, too, are furthering freedom of communications. While countless details are still being worked out, the globalization of markets -- whether of goods or ideas -- is a reality. Regrettably, the barriers dividing countries and peoples are not entirely gone. Even where walls have been physically dismantled, ancient enmities and strife continue to threaten world peace. In spite of the fact that a global economy already exists -- with shared scientific and technological ideas, a single electronics industry, communications relay satellites, and a growing international fiber optics network -- historical and cultural distances continue to divide people and nations.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, the world is so inextricably interconnected that cultural and economic isolationism is unthinkable, even if it were desirable. The future that can be built together, with respect and understanding for every contributing culture, is far richer, materially and spiritually, than any that can be envisioned alone. Global and individual wealth and well-being depend upon mutual respect and understanding.

Perhaps the most effective thing that can be done to promote multicultural understanding is to use the new technologies -- with their powerful capacity for shaping and delivering human interchange -- as virtual bridges across the vast distances separating cultures. However, if the information revolution is to fulfill its promise, these bridges must carry information that truly enriches and enlightens humanity. While the new technologies are still young and malleable, and their applications unlimited, it is essential that they be harnessed to a universal language through which our most deeply held values,

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aspirations, and beliefs can be communicated. Taking into consideration the special attributes, temporary limitations, and enormous potentials of the information revolution, we propose art as that language. Combining ancient and contemporary arts with the new technologies will greatly enhance multicultural learning and understanding.

1 ART AS THE LANGUAGE OF MULTICULTURAL LEARNING

There can be no more distilled expression of a culture than its works of art. In creating art, consciously or not, artists are attempting to communicate at a powerful emotional level to those within their own culture. The best work transcends its cultural matrix and speaks directly to our common humanity. This is why art serves so superbly as a universal language -- as a means toward understanding the history, culture, and values of other peoples (1).

While there are countless disciplines, which might reasonably serve as a means to understanding culture, such as history, sociology, mathematics, and science, only art lends itself to the full range of experiential capabilities offered by the new technologies. Numerous seminal projects explore art's natural capacity for communication through visual, aural, and spatial means -- the very means Information Age technologies so powerfully enhance. Furthermore, there are philosophically compelling reasons why art is uniquely suited as the language of a new multicultural learning. Art has always been central to human society, our own late twentieth-century American tendency to treat it as peripheral to the main concerns of life notwithstanding. From the day man began to dwell in caves and hunt large beasts, drawing pictographs on cavern walls, art has served both as material evidence of our vision and as an essential means of transmitting our values from one generation to the next. Life is celebrated in song, film, narrative, dance, and myriad other art forms, from the implements and ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony to the expressive form of Michelangelo's David to the line and color of an O'Keefe.

Historically, art has been a significant force for the preservation of culture; yet it has also been a primary agent in the transformation and revitalization of civilizations. For example, the art of the Italian Renaissance did not merely document the intellectual and Cultural Revolution then occurring; it fueled the changes in perception that redefined humanity for European civilization well beyond the bounds of the Italian peninsula and the fifteenth century. Art is no less appropriate to fuel the revolution at hand. Mankind is redefined in terms of an expanded worldview.

2 COMBINING ART AND TECHNOLOGY: WHAT'S BEING DONE NOW

Interactive multimedia technologies offer remarkable possibilities for learning through art. A review of current projects clearly demonstrates that art linked with and enhanced by media technologies has the potential to serve as a primary vehicle for increasing multicultural understanding. In these projects the very nature of learning is being expanded and democratized. Beyond them, the new virtual reality (VR) technology

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offers visions of art encounters that were previously unimaginable: virtual walks around the precincts of an ancient temple-city; dances with partners in other time zones; entirely new meanings for theater-in-the-round. While skeptics may believe we are years away from realizing such possibilities, American researchers are currently touring virtual architecture (2), and Japanese department store customers are renovating their kitchens in cyberspace (3). For all the new technologies, advances are being made at an astonishing pace.

3 A NATIONAL GALLERY IN EVERY SCHOOL: INTERACTIVE VIDEO

Museums, universities, businesses, foundations, artists, and others are engaged in ongoing research into computer-aided art exploration and its positive implications for society. Already, efforts such as the National Gallery's American art videodisk project offer the public significant learning opportunities beyond those available a mere two or three years ago. The museum has digitized a library of 10,000 images from its American art collection onto a single high-resolution videodisk, making its holdings widely accessible to students not only of art, but also of American history and culture. (The museum is distributing 2,500 disks to American schools free of charge.) The superior image quality and durability of the medium are obvious advantages over other methods of presentation and preservation (such as traditional slide libraries or videotape). What's more, the student can access images quickly in any desired order, request enlarged details, and retrieve and study information at his or her own pace (4). Although definitive research has yet to be done regarding the effect of interactive technologies on learning, it is arguable that the capacity for interaction is this project's most important benefit. Ample experiential evidence supports the concept that interactivity improves the learning process. Active as opposed to passive techniques of participation and exploration produce a higher level of involvement on the part of the learner and therefore a greater depth of emotional, as well as intellectual, understanding (5).

The National Gallery is not alone in exploring the possibilities of interactive videodisk; among others, institutions as venerable and diverse as the Louvre, the London National Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago have produced (or are now producing) not only videodisks, but more complex multimedia systems that allow their users to explore interactively such things as an artist's complete oeuvre, biography, techniques and materials; as well as historical maps and textual information about the period during which the artist worked (6). The Tama Techno-Art Museum, currently devoted to highdefinition, interactive exploration of the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, opened in November 1990, near Tokyo. Its designers plan to extend interactive capabilities to the works of other artists as well (7).

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4 EXPLORING ANCIENT CHINA, THE MAYAN EMPIRE, AND MORE:INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA

Numerous interactive multimedia systems are already up and running, among them the remarkable Emperor Qin project, produced under the direction of Ching-chih Chen of Simmons College School of Library and Information Sciences, and currently in use at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Much excitement was generated by the discovery in 1973 of nearly life-size terracotta warrior figures in a field outside the ancient capital of Xian, China. This project allows a multifaceted exploration of the archaeological excavation of that find, and of the lifetime of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di. Emperor Qin's vast third century B.C. burial site was found to contain an army of over 2000 of the warrior figures -- each with individual features of face and costume -- as well as other artifacts and works of art. Combining still and fullmotion video, audio, and text in English and Chinese, two impeccably researched doublesided videodisks (already being converted to alternative formats) contain hundreds of thousands of still and motion images of the excavation process and its artifacts. Included are oral interviews with Qin scholars who elucidate the significance of the find, as well as extensive text from previously unavailable Chinese sources and American publications treating the subject. An index (in English and Chinese) points the way to use at varying levels of knowledge, so that scholarly researchers, high-school students, and the interested general public all may benefit optimally from the videodisks. The individual user can browse as desired or rapidly access information anywhere in the program; peruse such information for any length of time; and rotate, zoom in on, and otherwise manipulate images and text (8).

Palenque, a program produced by the Center for Children and Technology at Bank Street College of Education in New York City, allows children to learn about Mayan art and culture through many of the same kinds of multimedia interaction. The program, for which a child narrator acts as a guide (at the main menu-level) to the Mayan city of Palenque, is built explicitly upon the thesis that an understanding of an entire culture can be achieved through initial exploration of its art (9).

5 A POEM, A PAINTING, AND A SYMPHONY: THE INDIVIDUAL MASTERWORK AS A GATEWAY TO THE WORLD

Contrasting with information projects like Emperor Qin and Palenque, which begin with relatively broad subject matter (an archaeological dig; a Mayan city-plan), are projects designed to radiate outward from a single work of art. For IBM Educational Systems, Morgan Newman and Allen De Bevoise have produced a prototypical interactive multimedia system designed around a single poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" (10). At a conference convened by the San Diego Communications Council in October 1990, Mr. James Dezell, IBM Vice President and General Manager, Educational Systems demonstrated this project. Designed primarily with high-school students in mind, the Ulysses project allows an individual to read, listen to, or see any of several different actors' dramatic readings of the poem -- making it possible, among many other things, to note and compare interpretations. The student can request definitions of words and explanations of unfamiliar phrases and literary allusions; access historical background information on the Trojan War and the poem's namesake; observe as one of several

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