In Memoriam: Barbara Rose Haum

The world seems so muted and muffled with the passing of an artist who has touched and transformed many lives.

Barbara Rose Haum, a German born artist in New York City, explored the performative aspect of language. Her work revealed how values are constructed through text, through ritualistic repetition.

On March 25, 2008, Barbara Rose Haum succumbed to the leukemia that she had battled for more than a year.

We celebrate Dr. Barbara Rose Haum, whose work as a collaborative artist and Internet2 creator, enriched our lives many times over. She was at her best when crossing unknown terrain, where her originality and zest for life shaped a new sensibility. Dr Haum was on the faculty at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She was forging new territory with her remarkable Internet presence with works such as those from Torn Textbooks that included Trepassing Boundaries, 54 Weeks, Lunar Performances, and Archaeology of a Narrative.

In recent times, Dr. Haum had begun to explore Internet2 as a new medium. Her work in this area was formative, promising, and original. In 2005, she produced Trespassing Boundaries, a seminal work that led to further development as text, images, and music on the Internet. She had begun to explore I2 through scholarly writings and presentations. Her insights concerning this medium was an inspiration to her students and colleagues.

Quoting from her on-line biography:

Barbara Haum's work attempts to transform traditional readings of texts through intertwining of contemporary narratives found in newspaper clippings with fairy tales, myths and the bible. Integral to her research is the struggle to decentralize the authority of the text and to express a desire to bring "nourishment" to language in order to open up the text to gendered and cross-cultural experiences. Her installations are clusters of ordinary objects such as spoons, ink wells, goose feathers, soap dishes and spooIs of thread in combination with newspaper clippings, cookbooks, photographs of the Torah. These elements coexist in an open field with no boundaries, thus inviting viewers to question their meaning and purpose and allowing for new meanings to emerge.

Friends and admirers can sign a guestbook that has been created in honor of Dr. Haum. We share our deepest sorrow with her husband, Henri Lustiger-Thaler and her daughter Talia. We have lost a true original.

Internet2 as Metaphor for Collaboration

Laurie Faith Cranor offers a somewhat scathing estimate of the value of Internet Collaboration in which the apparent goal of the Internet collaboration is to produce some kind of "product" similar to that of face-to-face collaborations.

The Internet is often hyped as an excellent tool for facilitating collaboration between geographically distant people. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism, and creative writing. Examples of projects made possible through Internet communication abound. Indeed it is unlikely that students from around the world would have gotten together to produce this magazine had it not been for the Internet. But lost in all the excitement are the stories of the trials and tribulations of Internet collaboration. (Internet Collaboration: Good, Bad, and Downright Ugly)

Missing from Cranor's list are the performances and productions that have been an important part of I2 Collaborations since 2000: simultaneous, multimedia, multidisciplined live performances of creative artists and performers. The experience of these collaborators seldom, if ever, would be described as "bad and downright ugly." Each performance has been for simultaneous live and distant audiences and those audiences have been very enthusiastic about the gestalt of the experience, the blurring of borders, the exploration of Space, Time, and time delays, and the ideas created through the interaction. Artists remark about experiencing Internet2 as a new medium, and explore the implications of this awareness.

To be sure, as with any new technology, there are many difficulties, but overcoming these establishes new terrain. One such production faced enormous impediments, including requiring such bandwidth that Internet2 engineers discovered a traffic jam in the pipeline (at Abilene) that they hadn't known existed. The artists requirements for bandwidth and immediacy brought the problem to light. Although this created considerable difficulty, performers and artists continued to use asynchronous features of the Internet to share their ideas. A number of new works emerged for the production, including one entitled "Lost in Abilene."

Internet2 is currently going through a transformative stage in which there is less need for high tech support from ITS units of institutions. These interactive productions are much easier to mount and the new laptops make it possible to create new possibilities anywhere the Internet can be accessed. For those in the arts, Internet2 is less and less a technology, and more a metaphor for creative collaboration.