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MAKING A MASTERPIECE AT MoMA JavaTM Technology Enables Online Art for Kids |
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by Janice J. Heiss Visualize a Web site where children, inspired by images of some of the world's great masterpieces, create their own art with virtual paint brushes and other tools, and write a brief description of their work. Then, with a little luck, a child's creation may be chosen as part of a monthly "Visitors' Art Display" section at the site. New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has recently created such an interactive site, dubbed "Art Safari," based on JavaTM technology.
Making Art through Java Technology
Art Safari offers four ways for children to create art, all based on a single applet. By clicking on "Fantastic Animals," for instance, kids can create their own animals from shapes in a tool palette, fill the shapes with animal patterns or bright colors, and then enlarge the shape or move it around to alter its orientation. Another segment, "Recycle for Art," allows kids to click on familiar objects like tennis rackets or bowls and then rotate, enlarge, and color them to create animals or other objects. "Animals from My Country," a drawing program, enables kids to draw with various brush sizes and paint in a free-form manner. The "My Pet and Me" activity encourages users to create a portrait of themselves with an animal. Kids can submit their art to the site, where MoMA's Department of Education selects a few for display each month. A recent display showed a three-year-old girl's painting of a reindeer, next to a six-year-old boy's painting of two butterflies flying across a field, along with the children's explanations of their art. All submissions can be revisited in a section called "Find Your Submissions."
In addition to the interactive tools, the Art Safari site presents four famous art works from MoMA, all of which prominently depict animals. They are:
Children are encouraged to answer questions about each work in an open-ended fashion and to make their own discoveries about art. For example, they're asked what the lion is doing in The Sleeping Gypsy, what time of day it is, what the relation between the gypsy and the lion might be, and so on. Parents can write in answers from younger children, or let older kids interact on their own. "A wonderful component of the site is that kids from around the world are able to see what other kids have written about the four MoMA art works," notes Elaine Cohen, coordinator of education technology at MoMA, and project manager for MoMA Web sites.
Each art work links to one of the art-creating programs -- for example, Fulang-Chang and Me, which depicts artist Frida Kahlo with her pet monkey, connects to the section called "My Pet and Me." Focus groups conducted by the museum have praised everything in the Web site from the design to the questions for kids. The site is based on the book Art Safari: An Adventure in Looking, for Children and Parents, available at the Museum of Modern Art, by Joyce Raimondo. The MoMA Web site, which has an online store, generally showcases descriptions of MoMA's art. "We have focused on creating a Web site that offers an insight into everything that happens at MoMA -- from exhibitions to educational programming to images from our collection," explains Cohen.
Easy to Use, Right Off the BatHow did MoMA settle on Java technology for the Art Safari?
"We did a lot of research and talked about the pros and cons of various technologies," observes Cohen. "We wanted to make sure that children could print out their own art work, and we didn't want users to have to download plug-ins. Target browsers were Netscape NavigatorTM 3 and 4 and Internet Explorer 3 and 4. We designed it for the versions of the Java virtual machine* that run on those. The draw of Java technology was that it meant users wouldn't have to download a plug-in."
Al McElrath, lead programmer for OVEN Digital, an interactive agency specializing in the creative and strategic application of digital media, and the person who programmed Art Safari, explains how it was done. "A lot of the administrative part of the site is done using ColdFusion, which provides a database for integration. The part where the kids paint and draw is done with Java technology -- all four of the art-making activities are actually the same applet, but each is configured differently through HTML. That made it easy. I had to choose between Java technology and other tools: Java technology was more powerful and convenient, and on a PC the performance is usually faster."
What glitches did he encounter? "There were problems in getting it to work with some FTP servers but not others. And there were issues with performance on older Macs that caused some trouble," reports McElrath. He continues: "I use Linux; so I used the port of the Java Development Kit (JDKTM) 1.1 that runs on Linux. Java technology is wonderful. I would much rather write in the Java programming language than anything else and I have done stuff in virtually every other language. It is definitely easy and fun."
Art Safari's Next AdventureComing in the future from MoMA's Art Safari site: electronic greeting cards that kids can create and send.
See Also
Art Safari Homepage
OVEN Digital *As used on this web site, the terms "Java virtual machine" or "JVM" mean a virtual machine for the Java platform.
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