above, at the Mobius Gallery showing interactive Imaging New England CD projected onto wall. Posters & maps mounted on foam board attached to wall.
Photo by Craig Freeman.

Interactive Exhibition CD Available by Request
Sample audio here, WAV file >>

.K12: A Project for Imaging New England

From September 2000 until April 2001 I worked on a series of montages and digital audio interviews called ".k12". I created the series as part of a collaborative exhibition called "Imaging New England" along with two colleagues, John Craig Freeman & Margaret Wagner. The exhibit opened in April of 2001 at the Mobius Gallery in Boston, MA. A main component of this exhibit is an interactive CD with digital video, photography, and audio of all three artists. The exhibition was part of the 2001 Boston Cyberarts Festival. In October 2001, the exhibit traveled to the Lincoln Gallery, Beaver Country Day School, in Chestnut Hill Massachusetts where we gave a presentation to the students.


For my part in this exhibit, I focused on issues of equity in public education. As a former educator of over seven years in urban school systems and a parent of young children, I have a special interest in the political and economic debates surrounding public education. I am continually amazed at the lack of funding for basic functions in public schools. Lately, I have been furious over the rhetoric and millions poured into private testing companies without adequate resources going to the classrooms. For ".k12", I interviewed politicians, teachers, and students about their perceptions of critical issues facing urban school systems. The audio portions of these interviews are integrated into the "Imaging New England" interactive CD. I also chose 12 quotes and transformed them into 16 x 20" posters for the exhibit. Low resolution small-scale files of some of these posters link from the thumbnails on this page. I digitized the interviews and pulled what I thought were the most relevant clips.




Press Release: April 2001

"Imaging New England" is an interdisciplinary collaborative research initiative, conducted across institutions and over distances. It uses new technology to bring disparate bodies of knowledge together through the investigation of place. Our method attempts to bridge the gaps between esoteric understanding, which has developed as a result of ridged industrial specialization, and more experiential interactions.
The method we used in creating this work began with organizational meetings to identify a site or place of investigation. Ultimately, we each developed ideas pertaining to this site and combined the results for this installation. The sites include the greater Boston area and the Merrimack Valley. This exhibit will take on many forms, including interactive virtual reality, photographic installation, video and sculptural elements. This exhibition is happening in conjunction with the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
The artists currently involved in this collaboration are John Craig Freeman, Lisa Link, and Margaret Wagner. All three artists have worked with the issues and politics of place before in their own work. John Craig Freeman is currently an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Lisa Link is an independent artist, and Margaret Wagner is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.