Kids-92 and the Creative Challenge.
The preparation for "Kids-92 celebration started imediately after the
tidying up after Kids-91...See one of the next newsletters from Odd:
All levels: The Creative Challenge
"We want the children to 'draw themselves as adults in their desired future
world'. Challenge them to use more creative ways of doing this. During KIDS-
91 we received musical compositions, video films, computer animation,
paintings, water colors, printouts from graphical computer programs,
calligraphical art, and more.
 Remember to have the students
write their name, age,. place/school CLEARLY on their contribution (front or
back). Please write name in CAPITAL latin characters. If the contribution is
chosen to be exhibited, then the audience should be able to see the correct
name of the artist!
Tell them that there is a
competition going on for chosing the most innovative creators.
Mail the Creative
Contributions to KIDS-92, 4815 Saltrod, Norway. We will add your address to
our mailing list for the final exhibition, which we plan to send back to the
world after May 18 1992."
We never had any KID's92. The name was changed again, this
time to KIDLINK. But the Celebration went on - again during the
Childrens Cultural Week in Arendal - and happened "around the clock"
in one of the Cities Warehoses. The artworks were again exhibited on the
walls...- but there were other Kidlink Celebrations too ... in other
countries... In Copenhagen Kidlink volunteers invited kids to come to the
huge "Eksperimentarium" to chat and exhibit. Soon the yearly exhibition of
KidArt grew "out of hand", out of Arendal, carried by Kidlink's volunteers
to other countries and other continents and became lots of interesting
projects of all kinds...and from now on it mainly happened "on the web"
Growing "out of hand" - Growing Online.....
The creating of Kidlink Gallery of Computer ART....
The web was developing, it was now possible to send visuals on-line ....and:
slowly the NEW way to create and share creative expressions as sounds and
visuals on the net caught the interest!!...
"The Gallery of Computer Art was opened in July - with one work created
by 12 year old Sean Keithly from DesMoines, USA. (File name: ART001-B).
Odds draft Newsletter#2, dated 6 Aug 1991
And in the third Kids-92 Newsletter, Global Networking for
youth 10-15: we can read this:
The KIDS-92 Gallery of Computer Art
One of the things that makes KIDS-92 unique, is the requirement
that the young participants respond to the four questions.
Then there is the Creative Challenge. The kids are asked to illustrate
their future vision in as many ways as they can, for example
in a drawing, a video tape, or something else. During
KIDS-91 most of them used traditional artforms. Most of the contributions
received this year have been created on computers and
sent to us by modem. The problem with computer art, is that they often are
notreproduced well on the commonly available printers. The good
news is that distribution as computer files maintains the
graphic qualities of the originals and allows them to be seen by a wider
audience. We are now in a position to take advantage of that.
On the last day of 1991, the KIDS-92 Gallery of Computer Art was officially
opened. Its curator, Dan Wheeler, together with an
eager group of volunteers, have looked into how the artwork can be viewed on
various types of microcomputers. They are now in the
process of making this information available.
GET KIDART ARTCAT or GET KIDART BINSTART
Note that our Gallery of Computer Art is just a small part of the overall
Creative Challenge. Inquiries and submissions of works in other media should
be sent to Anne-Tove Vestfossen, KIDLINK, 4815 Saltrod, NORWAY (or to her at
opresno@ulrik.uio.no).
Whether the correct date for the opening of Gallery of
Computer art is July91 or "late91" as Odd says in his second message, does
not matter much...Dan Weeler thinks July is right, and he was the first
curator!!! Look and read what he says himself at:
/KIDART/gallery1991/index.htm
"Getting started was difficult. We didn't have email
systems that could handle attachments. We also had problems with file
formats. We used GIF files but this format was not as widely accepted as it
is today. I remember getting some files from Russia that I was never able to
convert to something I could view. It was very frustrating. By the summer of
1992, we had a reasonable collection of about twenty works on display." (Dan
Wheeler, 10 years later.)
The Gallery of Computer Art had come to stay and allready
made the headlines: See this message from Odd:
Date Fri, 26 Jun 1992 140457 +0200
Reply-To KIDS-93 Project List
<KIDS-93@NDSUVM1.BITNET
Sender KIDS-93 Project List
<KIDS-93@NDSUVM1.BITNET
From opresno@extern.uio.no
Subject Media Report
Hello friends,
The Norwegian computer magazine Datatid had a very nice, 3 page story about
"The KIDLINK Gallery of Computer Art" in number 7/8 1992 p. 54-56. Seven
pictures were printed in full color. Ida Meyer Berg's, Ryan's, Chris Sanchez
(scanned from print. Will have to put into KIDART right away ;-), Kirril
Lygoskij's, and several from Denis Pscelkin in Protvino.
The accomanying text (in Norwegian, authored by the editor) was great. It
demonstrates how easy it is for (an interested) writer to
write a good KIDLINK story once they have a personal copy of KIDSHOW!"
The tecnical tools improved quickly. And very soon we were
startled by more advanced works like the above mentionned amazing computer
creations by two Russian boys: Kyril Legovsky (11), and Denis Pchelkin (10).
To see their works click on: :
/KIDART/gallery1991/index.htm
In the summer of 1992 Kyril was, with the help of
kidlink-volunteer Klaus Berg (Denmark.) invited in person to Lousiana
Gallery of Contemporary Art outside Copenhagen, Denmark, to celebrate the
opening of their department of childrens computerart..
So Dan was not alone, he found helpers. The first one Dan
recalls was Stephan de Haas (Netherlands). Stephan became the co-ordinator
of Kidlink Gallery of Computerart in 1992. And then, later, as Dan says.
Sebastian Marquez (Sweden) organized the 1995 and the1996
KIDLINK Worldwide
Computerart Exhibitions. In spite of the name, these were
fairly
independent of the KIDART Gallery. They were held in
Stockholm with
physical works of art as well as some of the works that had
been
submitted via Kidlink. I did the web pages for the 1995
Exhibition and
Lars-Erik Nilsson did the web pages for the 1996 Exhibition.
There were more Kidlink Gallery pioneers on the web to come,
and much more Art.
Patty Weeg (USA) and Isamu Shimasaki(Japan) were working with an interesting
project called
"The Bridge" - not part of the Kidlink Gallery of Computer
Art at that time, because the children were to small for the Age limits
(10-15) in Kidlink at that time...
Now as Kidlink is divided in language areas, it has been
hardly possible to keep track of all the projects and exhibitions
going on...Not all language areas have their own Kidart sites yet, but take
a look at the sites of the KidArtSpanish, -Portugese, -Icelandic, -Japanese
and -Italian ones...and of course try out all the projects, workshops
and exhibitions on /KIDART/index.html
where we try to collect "it all" .......Written here is just first part of
the KidArtHistory....
May 24th.2002 by Anne-Tove Vestfossen
Next page:
The KidArt Support Team
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