LOLA (Lehman OnLine Archives)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
LOLA (Lehman OnLine Archives) will provide a much-needed, permanent archive
for resources to be posted on the World Wide Web. LOLA will bring
together--and "cross-fertilize"--the cultural resources of the Lehman
College Art Gallery, the Lehman College Library, and the art and math
departments. It will house new and existing cultural and art-historical
materials, which fall into three categories:
1) LOLA will provide a computer-server home for "homeless," pioneering
online artworks such as the acclaimed File Room (1994), Antonio
Muntadas's interactive archive of social and cultural censorship, which was
produced as a conceptual artwork by the non-profit Randolph Street Gallery
in Chicago, which recently went bankrupt.
2) LOLA will produce, develp, and present new online projects, the first
being the online adaptation of the illustrated book, The Harlem Renaissance:
Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (1995), by Steven Watson,
and the digitization and online archiving of the physical archive of
avant-garde performance documents of the past two decades owned by Franklin
Furnace, the noted New York organization devoted to artists' books and
performance.
3) LOLA will consolidate and make more accessible existing online projects
which the gallery has produced including The World's First Collaborative
Sentence (1995), Douglas Davis's landmark online artwork now jointly
owned by the Lehman College Art Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American
Art, and TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, the first American
online journal about online art and cyber-culpture founded by Robert Atkins
in 1995 and comprising a history of the early years of online art, discourse
and documentation.
NEED
Understanding the online medium requires a broad and unprecedented field of
analysis. The Internet and online media are hybrid--this is a medium in
which production and destribution, design, aesthetics and economics are
intextricably linked. It differs from previous media by aggregating vast new
audiences and offering outreach possibilities; it redefines presenters' and
funders' traditional ways of thinking, especially in relation to seemingly
familiar categories ranging from audiences to collections and preservation.
What will happen, for instance, to online artworks when the software for a
work's production and distribution are no longer cuurent? (This has already
happened.) What are a commissioning institution's responsibilities to an
online artwork and its creator, as with Muntadas's File Room? How
can we design projects for a single audience when an online projects is
available to so many different audiences throughout the world? How do we
deal with a medium that combines the static images of visual art and the
time-based nature of performance and film?
LOLA will grapple with the implications of pressing issues like these
because they are no longer theoretical for the Lehman College Art Gallery,
which must manage its online collection and build on its foundation of
experimentation. LOLA will provide educational, exhibition and production
opportunities for diverse bodies of scholars, students and artists, while
tapping into a potentially vast audience online. This project will be a
model for other cultural institutions.
IMPLEMENTATION
To create LOLA, the Art Gallery has established partnerships with the Lehman
College Library, as well as the art and math departments. The Gallery will
work closely with the Library to identify and acquire for LOLA archives
relevant to library and information studies, and archives that can serve as
resources for students and faculty in a wide number of departments and
programs. Franklin Furnace's physical archive of performance documents will
be housed in the Library.
Lehman College Art Gallery will also work closely with faculty in the art
and mathematics departments to supervise the computer programming and graphic design necessary for the production,
operation and maintenance of LOLA.
Such "real-world" project experience--rather than the "make-work" nature of
so many clasroom assignments--is, of course, invaluable for studients. In
the prodess, LOLA will provide Lehman College's extraordinarily diverse
student body with opportunities for valuable career training in
computer-related programming, design and production fields that might
otherwise be unavailable to them. This project will create a national model
designed to attract and train the skilled designers and technicians needed by
artists to work in this collaborative medium. Over the next two years, it is
expected that LOLA will serve 200,000 people, 20% of whom are expected to be
repeat, site visitors.
Unlike the art-museum storage-room or traditional archive, LOLA will be
dynamic, mirroring the intellectual ferment and educational mission of the
college (and CUNY system) on whose server it will reside. In addition to
being utilized as a vehicle for career training, it will also function as a
curriculum resource in many classrooms. The online adapation of The Harlem
Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930, for instance, might
be utilized in African-American history, art history, music, art,
literature, and cultural studies courses. It will also serve as a compelling
reource for under-served African-American communities in the Bronx and
throughout New York, as well the potentially vast, world-wide online
audiences which will have access to the site.
LOLA's online resources will be complemented and broadened by public
programs including lectures and symposia. It is expected, for instance, that
The File Room will be contextualized and made accessible by a
conference collaboratively produced with organizations involved with
censorship and human rights including agencies of the Unitied Nations, the
National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Campaign for Freedom of
Expression and the ACLU. These, too, will be supplemented with online
research through webcasting and an email symposium, which will recapitulate
and extend the dialogue begun in the actual symposium.