The project was based on manipulating images that resided on the WWW site, thus creating a derivative work of art. The images that were created were FTPed back to our site and were automatically linked to the project. The contributions have their own WWW pages and were available for others to manipulate.

There are a total of 32 groups of starter images, each encompassing an expanding structure that allows 63 images (6 generations) to evolve from the starter image. Therefore the entire ChainReaction project has the potential of containing over 2016 images when the project is complete. The project involved individuals from around the world.

The project took place in the Interactive Communities venue at the SIGGRAPH 95 conference in LA and in the CyberPort venue at ISEA95. At SIGGRAPH, we were given approximately 1200 square feet to display the images and setup the installation which allowed the SIGGRAPH participants to participate in ChainReaction. There was approximately 39,000 attendees at this year's SIGGRAPH conference. At ISEA95, we had 2 Macs and an SGI server which allowed the ISEA95 attendees to participate. SGI, Apple, HP, Infocus, and NPAC sponsored the project, providing the equipment needed.

Images that were created were displayed on the walls at SIGGRAPH via color printouts.. The WWW pages were projected on the wall and displayed on 8 computers in the installation. When participants filled out the WWW form with their information and the image was submitted via ftp, our innovative Collaboration Engine connected the image to the project and created html pages to display the image. The collaboration engine is a series of scripts which creates html pages and processes images to be linked to the project. The Collaboration Engine also displays current statistics on the progress of the project.

Send comments and suggestions to Bonnie Mitchell - bonniem@mailbox.syr.edu
last updated (8/29/95)