KIDART

The First Year of

The KIDLINK Gallery of Computer Art

1991-1992

Kidlink opened its Gallery of Computer Art in July of 1991 with Dan Wheeler as curator. The first picture in the collection was this one submitted by Sean Keithly of Des Moines, Washington, USA:

It was soon followed by this one from Jeremy Naylor in Tawa, New Zealand:

In those early days of computer graphics it was not easy to draw on a computer, nor was it easy to get or send images from or to other people. The World Wide Web did not yet exist. All we had was email and the email programs of that time could not send attachments. Image files had to be laboriously converted to text form before they were sent and converted back by the person who received them. This is what the first few lines of Sean's message looked like when we received it:

begin 644 sean.gif
M1TE&.#=AT`**`H```````.[N[BP`````T`**`@`"^XR/J<OM#Z.<M-J+L]Z\
M^P^&XDB6YHFFZLJV[@O'\DS7]HWG^L[W_@\,"H?$HO&(3"J7S*;S"8U*I]2J
M]8K-:K?<KO<+#HO'Y++YC$ZKU^RV^PV/R^?TNOV.S^OW_+[_#Q@H.$A8:'B(
MF*BXR-CH^`@9*3E)66EYB9FIN<G9Z?D)&BHZ2EIJ>HJ:JKK*VNKZ"ALK.TM;
M:WN+FZN[R]OK^PL<+#Q,7&Q\C)RLO,S<[/P,'2T]35UM?8V=K;W-W>U]#1`N

We had to give people long and involved instructions about how to get the programs they needed to do these conversions. It is not surprising that the next group of works in the gallery arrived via an easier route: fax. Kidlink volunteer Richard Naylor in New Zealand organized an exchange of art using fax to send the works. These were then scanned and put in the gallery. We received two groups of images in July, 1991. The first group came from the Young Persons Festival, Wellington, New Zealand. Click on the images to see them full size:

 

 

The second group came from the DIGITAL Art-i-Fax Celebration in Auckland, New Zealand. These showed kids' ideas for their dream computers:

 

After this flurry of activity in July, nothing more was received by the gallery until December when we got this Christmas card from Ida Berg Meyer in Denmark.

The next batch of entries came from Kirill Lygovsky (age 11), a talented artist in Protvino, Russia. They came with a note saying that the first three were done in honor of the centenary of J.R.R. Tolkien (born 1892 January 3), beloved author of The Lord of the Ring:

Hobbitany from the Elrond's Castle

Tolkien

Mines of Moria (A Journey in the Dark)

My native land (Protva River)

These were followed in January 1992 by another group from Protvino done by Denis Pchelkin (age 10):

My Fairy-land I

My Fairyland II

My Fairyland III

My Fairyland IV

My Fairyland V

 

In March, Kirill Lygovsky finished his series inspired by Tolkien with this one titled "The End of the Evil Power (Minas-Tirith)"

 

By the end of the gallery's first year, these had also been added:

Ryan Hanson
Seattle, Washington, USA

Natasha and Claire
Wisley, U.K.

 

Sean Keithly
Des Moines, Washington USA

 

 

Jessica Hanson
Seattle, Washington, USA

 

The last group of images were done by seventh grade students at the Pittsford Middle School in Pittsford, New York, USA. They were created on Apple IIgs computers using the Dazzle Draw program. They were submitted in January, 1992, by their art teacher, Carol Robertson. One of the big challenges during those early years was dealing with incompatible file formats. We were not able to get them converted to GIF format and added to the collection until August, 1992.

Alexandra Winquist

Ayesha Rajpal

Christina Russo

Emily Caviglia

Milissa Baer

Natalie LaMarque

Rebecca Miller

Sara Remington

That's it! These are the 32 images on display at the end of the first year of the Kidlink Gallery of Computer Art. Of course, "on display" did not mean that you could see them like you can now on this page. It meant that they were stored on a mainframe computer at North Dakota State University. In order to see the image, you had to send an email message requesting the files. When you received the text files, you had to convert each one back into an image file. Finally, you had to have a program that would display GIF files, the new format that was making it possible for the first time to share graphics files across different kinds of computers.

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Page maintained by Dan Wheeler

Updated 2002 May 27. Copyright © 2001 Kidlink . All rights reserved.

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