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Ongoing Projects

Ripple

ThoughtMesh

The Pool

Variable Media Network

Forging the Future

Cross-Cultural Partnership

Digital Curation program

Recent Projects

Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage

LongGreenHouse

RFC

Connected Knowledge 2007

Connected Knowledge 2006

At the Edge of Art

Open Art Network

Altered Presence

In the Presence of the Sacred

Intellectual Commons

U-Me Vote

War Games

Cracking the Codes

Code and Creativity

Distributed Creativity

CodePlay

Mind Sets

Marcel

Research Interests

Indigenous Media

Game Design

Open Software

Network Studies

Research Fellows

John Bell

Craig Dietrich and Vanessa Vobis

Sarah Last

Miigam'agan & gkisedtanamoogk

Julia and Charles Yelton

Morgane Stricot

Learn more about Still Water by choosing from the links at left.

Still Water, a New Media program of the University of Maine at Orono, was founded in 2002 by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to promote network art and culture. Although the program's title derives from the name of a river that flows alongside the physical facility, "still water" also connotes the values electronic and cultural networks need to thrive.

These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations as the need arises; and stillness, a rare quality in today's frenetic culture but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center--for a successful network has none--but a medium primed for the transmission of multiple waves of culture.

In fall of 2003, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito opened the Still Water Lab on the fourth floor of the University of Maine's Chadbourne Hall.

Outfitted with 17-inch PowerBooks, Linux and Windows desktop computers, and 42-inch flat screens, the lab is meant as a flexible multi-purpose space for ongoing new media projects open to community observation or participation. The lab is a hub for ultra-high bandwidth Internet 2 multicasts and networked performances.

...about Still Water co-founders Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, or for a press kit and images about the Still Water itself, please visit

http://newmedia.umaine.edu/stillwater/press.html

Or feel free to contact us directly.

Choose an ongoing project from the links at left.

The Ripple initiative aims to listen and respond to community need with practical tools from digital designs to websites to mobile apps. Firms dedicated to helping local ecosystems to thrive are especially encouraged to apply. We see this as a fulfillment of the University of Maine’s obligation as a land- and sea-grant university to serve the earth and its people.

Nonprofits and businesses working for public causes will be able to apply for support from faculty and students in New Media and other programs. For their part, students who participate in Ripple earn hands-on experience working with clients for the public good, and make connections that can be valuable for their future careers.

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The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of documentation systems, The Pool stimulates collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects.

The Pool's structure emphasizes distributed learning and authorship. Contributors can propose a concept for others to implement, or respond to invitations to explore, debug, or remix existing works. Thanks to an innovative graphical interface, when Pool surfers review artworks, programs, and texts, the ratings they give these works ensure that the best of them will be most visible to future surfers.

Even in its beta version, The Pool made the top headline in Wired magazine's online news site in 2003. Soon afterward the Wired profile was blogged by over 40 online commentators, becoming the fourth-most commonly cited article in blogs worldwide as of late December 2003. Visit site...

Founded in 2002, the Variable Media Network is a consortium of museums and archives dedicated to preserving endangered artworks according to the artists' preferences as to how their works might be translated to new mediums once their current ones become obsolete.

The Variable Media Network's paradigm and projects have been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ArtNews, Wired, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Network has produced the exhibition Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice, the publication Permanence Through Change, and the conferences Preserving the Immaterial and Echoes of Art.

Visit site...dp_art dp_network dp_time dp_transformation

Choose a recent project from the links at left.

Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage is a sustainable community on the coast of Maine that has been called "the future of housing."

Still Water Co-Directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito are founding members of the Ecovillage, along with 20 other families dedicated to this self-developed and self-financed neighborhood. Its home design, by G•O Logic, won the 2011 LEED Project of the Year.

Apart from net-zero energy homes, the project features a Book of Commons ensuring that all residents share in a large Common House, food growing in their backyard, and governance by consensus. Blais conducted an analysis of energy production and cost savings for the community that revealed a family of four could save over $100,000 in 20 years by living in cohousing.

The project has been the subject of numerous television, newspaper, and radio stories.

Visit site...

LongGreenHouse is a collaboration of Still Water, ESTIA, Anikwom, and Wassokeag. Our goal is to create Living/Learning Centers for Sustainability combining Digital Culture, Permaculture and Indigenous Culture.

Based on the Wabanaki Longhouse model and permaculture design principles, this living/learning center features a multi-age school (Wassookeag), college student interns, and a team of hands-on advisors. LongGreenHouse will produce its own food in sustainable gardens, food forests, aquaculture and a four-season greenhouse, and aim at total recycling of all organic matter and zero waste. The house will be retro-fit with passive solar heat and active solar hot water, rainwater collecting, grey water management, and stream revitalization. Peace initiatives will focus on relations to all local living beings, including indigenous life forms and indigenous peoples as well as exploring strategies for becoming indigenous. Visit site...

Founded in 2003, the Open Art Network is the first project to originate at Still Water itself. The Open Art Network aims to empower artists working in digital formats by devising and promoting standards that encourage an open architecture for the Internet and digital media.

Funded by a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Art Network already includes projects by a half-dozen artists, including jodi, Mark Napier, and Mark Daggett, with more projects in the pipeline.

The Open Art Network is also taking the lead in developing a new form of open license that mandates access to the source media for digital art.

Visit site...

Still Water, along with the University of Maine's Collaborative Media Lab, has played a strong role in the development of MARCEL, an ultrahigh-bandwidth network dedicated to uniting artists and scientists in cross-cultural and cross-discipline presentations, performances, and conversations.

Still Water has coordinated MARCEL teleconferences on network collaboration, digital video archiving, and the future of code.

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In the Presence of the Sacred will explore interactive storytelling ceremonies between Native American and local storytellers using Access Grid hi-bandwidth videoconferencing technology.

The Passamaquoddy word kehsatokot signifies length of a "braid" or "story", from their tradition of telling stories as they braid the ceremonial sweetgrass. This "braiding", "kestakenikan" will be the model for both the technique of storytelling, and the content of the stories.

A story-braid is a live interweaving of stories in which each storyteller adds her strand, but in a way that respects and honors the other strands. In the end an interactively produced story emerges that becomes greater than the sum of its strands.

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Mind Sets, an exhibition proposal for the Guggenheim museum, attempts to create a miniature Internet--a glimpse behind the computer screen at the vertiginous matrix of information that holds our society together. The exhibition design, by the New York-based architecture firm LOT/EK, fills Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda with a metal lattice, allowing visitors for the first time in the building's history to walk out into the cavernous interior.

The selection and placement of the projects on view will be determined by visitors' choices rather than by a predetermined curatorial agenda. Technical experts from the University of Maine and other prominent media labs will be contributing to the design of this unusual environment. Visit site.

Choose a research interests from the links at left.

To study indigenous media is to study what it means to be and become indigenous, and how and why we would reclaim and protect our ecological "commons," both bioregional and electronic.

Indigenous media practitioners explore new political strategies and tools, especially the power of networking like-minded communities for local/global actions and sharing of resources. Yet they also attempt to learn from the social, cultural and ecological practices of indigenous peoples, especially those in our own regions. Conversely, Indigenous media practitioners are often committed to helping indigenous people regain and protect their sovereign rights.

The Dawn Commons, an indigenous media project co-ordinated by Still Water co-director Joline Blais, is an open resource for community building and political action for local cultures from the St Lawrence River to the Gulf of Maine, from the tip of Provincetown to the Gaspé Peninsula. The Dawn Commons also seeks to form alliances and networks with indigenous groups across the Americas and across the world to help each other defend and protect our local communities and bioregions.

Now that the market for electronic games has surpassed that of the movie industry, it is all the more critical to understand the appeal of this new form of storytelling as well as the ideologies hidden or overt in commercial games.

Still Water co-director Joline Blais's research takes a hard look at the dangers inherent in this addictive medium, but also explores its potential by envisioning games that go beyond the shoot-em-up model to investigate alternative forms of conflict resolution.

Genre-breaking game designs that UMaine students are developing in conjunction with this research include Breakdown, whose protagonist is a five-year-old girl with the capacity to remake the world, Eagle and Condor, a conflict resolution game based on an ancient Hopi prophecy, and GIY (Grow It Yourself), an Alternative Reality Game for connecting students to the land.

The success of free and open computer applications such as Apache, Gnu/Linux, and Firefox proves that economies outside the capitalist model are not merely possible but also extraordinarily productive.

Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito investigates open software both as a theoretical paradigm and as a practical method for building applications.

Still Water projects frequently run on PHP, MySQL, and other open server languages, but Ippolito is especially interested in hybrid client-side techniques such as DHTML, object-oriented JavaScript, and remote scripting.

The battle lines between network and hierarchic culture are drawn across much of today's technological landscape--from the crackdown on filesharing networks, to the surge in open software development, to military attempts to defeat terrorism with an "army of one."

In all of these clashes, Still Water researchers see their role as demonstrating how networks can help us learn, create, and even survive. Networks are here to stay. We can resist them in vain, or we can embrace them, adapting them to constructive purposes like building communities or waging politics.

Networks are proliferating and evolving so quickly in contemporary culture that it is difficult even to list their many mutations--instant messaging, blogs, wikis, mobile-phone texting, social networks, trust metrics, broadcatching. Still Water researchers investigate these forms not by conducting controlled experiments in a laboratory, but by introducing experimental ideas and applications into the uncontrolled wilderness of today's new media ecosystem.

Still Water Research Fellows participate in Still Water programs and pursue their own research under its umbrella. Research Fellows study, critique, and/or build networks--whether electronic, natural, or indigenous.

Find out more about past Research Fellows via the links at left.

In the winter of 2012, Morgane Stricot was a Still Water Research Fellow in Residence exploring variable media approaches to conserving digital art. Morgane was in the 4th year of the Conservation-Restoration Department of the École d'Art d'Avignon, where she worked with Lionel Broye in the Laboratoire des Variables Médias.

Morgane interviewed a half-dozen prominent artists about how their work should be preserved in the future, including Nicolas Frespech, SR Labo, Scott Snibbe, Lia, and Annie Abrahams. These interviews are now accessible via the Variable Media Questionnaire for the benefit of future artists, historians, and conservators.

Morgane focused particularly on hybrid approaches to preservation of interactive art. For example, several of the artists she interviewed have reinterpreted for iPhone or iPad apps works originally made as net art or installations.

Following her Fellowship in Still Water, Morgane goes to ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe) to see the installation and conservation practices of this largest collection of digital art firsthand.

Still Water Senior Researcher John Bell is a web developer and data artist at the University of Maine. He has contributed to the development of The Pool, a system for fostering and documenting distributed creativity in digital arts; released several open-source web authoring tools; and given birth to an artificial intelligence that accidentally committed suicide. Many of his projects focus on trust in online communities and maintaining intellectual integrity in environments where there are few consequences to ignoring it. His work has been featured in Wired online and he presented CodePlay@UMe at Ars Electronica's Electrolobby Kitchen in 2003.

As Still Water Research Fellow, John has been the primary developer on the Variable Media Network's Forging the Future project and contributed his innovative Telamon software to Still Water's ThoughtMesh distributed publishing tool. John is also adjunct faculty in the U-Me New Media department.

In John's own words:

Much of my previous work has been focused on the democratization of information that is made possible by network technologies; I bought in to the early ideals and optimism about how the Internet was going to transform education, information sharing, and social discourse in general. The most obvious expression of this was ALICE, an AI that I designed to see how well the modern Internet lived up to those early ideals and express its conclusions emotionally. Unfortunately ALICE became so depressed that it committed suicide shortly before I presented it publicly at Ars Electronica in 2003, but that ironically demonstrates how much potential for self-criticism the modern Internet retains.

Though ALICE only judged the current state of the Internet, most of my projects have focused on trying to promote the early Internet ethos rather than just express my disappointment in its current role as a niche of Internet culture. My work on The Pool has supported open culture and encouraged the sharing of intellectual labor. One of my major contributions to the Variable Media Questionnaire has been an epistemological shift from a work being defined by its components to its being defined by the perceptions of its consumers. Re:Poste was intended to combat the growing problem of sloppy journalism and online echo chamber reality by introducing expert community feedback to websites that had been broadcast-only. In many ways I even see the Design Patterns for New Media class I developed and am teaching as my local contribution to the global intellectual and educational principles I support in my online work.

German-born Vanessa Vobis is an installation and multimedia artist whose research focuses on the underside of biological and cultural systems. Her custom-built ecosystems such as Plot, Body Beasts, and The Crystal World suggest natural history dioramas that are both otherworldly and familiar, repellent and compelling. Vobis co-founded the Species Science Lab with Craig Dietrich (below) to explore on the continuum from the microscopic to the transnational. Her quirky subject matter ranges from dust mites and microflora to oddities found at Walmart and Dollar Stores. Recently exhibited in Sweden, Estonia, and the Netherlands, her videos have won a Silver Eddy at the Cedar Rapids Film Festival. Vobis has a degree in art history and art practice from UC Berkeley and a MFA in Printmaking and Intermedia from the University of Iowa.

Still Water Senior Researcher Craig Dietrich develops systems for creative and scholarly examinations of transnational culture. Armed with early exposure to online environments such as LamdaMOO and Silicon Valley's TechMOOseum, and a 2008 Intermedia MFA from the University of Iowa, Dietrich works in both traditional and new media. Dietrich's offline production includes plywood recreations of airports and mall storefronts for the project USA Today. His online collaborations have harnessed database-driven interactive media, cell-phone texting (Z1SMS), and Dashboard widgets and streaming video (Iowa City Senior Center Television Online! and The Daily Palette, both with Jon Winet). Recent collaborations include the Mukurtu Archive and Plateau People's Web Portal content manager based on Aboriginal cultural protocols, ThoughtMesh, a semantic online publishing system produced by Still Water and the Vectors Journal. Dietrich presents often on new media, project development, and globalization and has recently exhibited at ZeroOne, San Jose and Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids with Vanessa Vobis (above). Dietrich is also on the editorial staff of USC's Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

Wabanaki elders Miigam'agan and gkisedtanamoogk became the first Still Water Research Fellows in 2007, but their ongoing participation in Still Water programs has a longer history. They have participated in the Cross-Cultural Partnership initiative, the Connected Knowledge summits in 2006 and 2007, classes in indigenous media, and LongGreenHouse.

Miigam'agan is a member of the Mi'kmaq Nation, founder of the Elders and Youth Council, and cofounder of the Wabanaki Nations Cultural Resource Center, Apart from her activities as a Still Water Research Fellow at the University of Maine, she is also affiliated with the Wabanaki Mental Health, Bangor, First Nation Task Force on Youth Suicide Prevention, NB. Her life-work is dedicated to supporting empowerment for women, youth, families and communities and preserving and teaching Wabanaki Longhouse culture and spirituality.

gkisedtanamoogk brings to Still Water a background in finding creative ways to bridge the socio-political polarization of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island and the newcomer nation-states of North America. His professional background is in human and community development and his interests include Law, History, and Spirituality. He is Wampanoag from the Federation of the Pokaunauket and practices the Ceremonial Life of his People; he is Otter and Turtle Clan; married with three Children; Education and Cultural Specialist and co-founder of the Anikwom Wholelife Center in Maine, whose work and proximity correlates to the Wabanaki Confederacy Territories. gkisedtanamoogk is currently adjunct faculty at the University of Maine at Orono.

A specialist in art outside the box, artist and curator Sarah Last has produced cutting-edge installations and festivals for the better part of a decade in the Australian outback. As curator at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga Space Program, and director of the Booranga Writers' Centre, Sarah has organized unusual site-specific audio programs in abandoned factories, on moving railroad cars, and in the open paddocks of New South Wales. Her "Unsound" festivals probe unexpected territories, both figuratively and literally; for one festival, Sarah helped Australian artist Alan Lamb string wire for vast distances over the Australian desert and listen to its resonance frequencies using styrofoam boxes. Sarah has been an artist-in-residence at the NSW Arts Gunnery Studios in Sydney and was awarded an inaugural 'ArtsLab' grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. She has been a visiting Still Water Research Fellow in fall 2005 and fall 2007.

Australians Julia and Charles Yelton are internationally recognized experts in the study of sustainable design known as Permaculture. Armed with backgrounds in computer engineering, ceramics, and landscape design, the Yeltons cut their Permaculture teeth at Australia's Crystal Waters community, then went on to work with the INSAN Permaculture Institute in Nepal, hill tribes in northern Thailand, an alternative energy group in Wales, and a natural Permaculture village in Bali. In Whitefield, Maine, the Yeltons established a passive-solar, energy-efficient homestead with a four-season garden to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to grow lettuce in January--not to mention staying warm without oil or gas and redirecting waste water and food to build fertile soil.

Since establishing a presence in Maine, the Yeltons have joined in a number of projects by the local ESTIA eco-peace community established by U-Me Peace Studies professor Emily Markides, including leading U-Me students on a two-week Permaculture intervention in Hawai'i's main island and coordinating the design and growth of a community food forest on the island of Cyprus. Julia and Charles are hands-on advisors to Still Water's LongGreenHouse project, where in fall 2007 they joined U-Me students led by Markides and Still Water co-director Joline Blais in erecting a 50-foot greenhouse, coldframe, and 200 running feet of swaled gardens.

In a world of shrinking energy resources, Charles and Julia Yelton offer a positive and practical approach to redesigning environments and livestyles to live more lightly on the planet.