The Pool
By John Bell, Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, Matt James, and Justin Russell
Sunday 25 May
11:00am - 1:30pm
LOCATION: NSC 218 [TO BE CONFIRMED]
A project of the University of Maine's Still Water program, The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of
documentation systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. We are training revolutionaries--not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing
them to a process in which sharing is the norm rather than hoarding.
For the Free Cooperation conference, Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and their students will walk conference participants through the current version of The Pool and lead a discussion on the promise and pitfalls of networked collaboration, from the
technology of trust metrics to the politics of shared learning.
For more information, see Michelle Delio's article on The Pool in Wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,61585,00.html.
Still Water, a New Media program of the University of Maine at Orono, was founded in 2002 by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to promote network art and culture. Although the program's title derives from the name of a river that flows alongside the
physical facility, "still water" also connotes the values electronic and cultural networks need to thrive. These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations as the need arises; and
stillness, a rare quality in today's frenetic culture but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center--for a successful network has none--but a medium primed for the transmission of multiple waves of culture.
Still Water projects include The Pool, Codeplay, the Open Art Network, and the Variable Media Network.
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/stillwater/