The actual implementation of Muriel Magenta’s idea for building a virtual gallery on-line proved to be a monumental task. The ASU art professor realized early on that The World’s Women On-Line! would need intense technical support. She applied for a workspace through the university’s Information Technology Office located in the new Computing Commons building.

Darel Eschbach is the executive director for Telecommunication Services at ASU. His wife, Barbara Eschbach, is facilities director for the Computing Commons. Both supported the project and involved many of their staff members.

“I think the enthusiasm that Muriel brought to the project rubs off on people,” says Darel Eschbach. “We have a basic desire to be an integrator. This is neat stuff for the artist, for the display of materials, and for our technologists. The project allowed them to move out of their normal background of bits and bytes into something a little more creative.”

Magenta was fortunate to conduct her research with no less than 14 collaborators from Information Technology, where the most recent advances in on-line communication are being studied, tested, and applied. The group designed the technical programming and interfaced the program with the Internet; they built a custom Pentium machine with a video board; and they created the environment inside the Computing Commons Gallery to connect the Internet to a video wall.

Magenta also worked with graduate research assistants and technologists at the Institute for Studies in the Arts. During the past year, they helped create a computer-generated animation, a video that blends images from the Internet with the animation, and an audio track that weaves the voices of the world’s women with the staccato sounds of a computer keyboard.—Sheilah Britton

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