Fineart Forum and F.A.S.T.: Experiments in Electronic Publishing in the Arts

have lost the thread of the conversation that inspired the work or for a young poet to lose precious ground because ofa misunderstanding. Very often, because of time constraints and varied schedules among the participants , poets can be left floundering for weeks before their revised work is reviewed a second time. The poetry conference was established in reaction against these and other drawbacks of conventional poetry workshops. Poets write from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, but the one thing they have in common is the need to know right away if they have hit the mark or missed it entirely . The poetry conference provides this kind of accessibility. The poet, equipped with a personal computer , modem and telecommunications software package, accesses the host computer and logs onto the system by typing his or her user 'ID and password. Once these have been verified, the host system displays an entry prompt. The poet need only type the command 'g poet' in order to be transferred into the poetry conference . From a list of topics, the poet selects a subject for reading and/or responding. He or she has the option of typing a response directly from the computer keyboard or sending a prepared poem or document via the telecommunications package. Quite often feedback will begin coming in from other poets throughout the country within 24 hours, while the poet is still in the midst of appraising the poem or project. Another advantage to this electronic-workshop method is that the author has the benefit of gathering responses from poets nationwide to gain a better perspective of the poem's accessibility to a broader audience. This not only saves time but provides additional inspiration to the poet to continue the work. The online poetry conference extends even farther beyond the customary workshop/seminar by providing the poet with a forum for informal exchanges as well as critiquing of poems. Evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of accomplished poets, lists of favorite poetry books, references for poesy and poetic terms, fundamentals for reading to an audience, and the political value of poetry in society are only a sampling of subjects that are available to the poet online. Perhaps the best feature ofall is that this arena, spawned by the high-tech industry, allows the poet to gain perspectives and make contact with people and poetry around the world on the poet's traditional meager budget. Fineart Forum and F.A.S.T.: Experiments in Electronic Publishing in the Arts RogerF. Malina In January 1988 I was approached by Raymond Lauzzana with a proposal that ISAST become involved with an electronic bulletin board project called Fineart Forum. Ray Lauzzana, then teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had been distributing Fineart Forum over the academic networks since May 1987. It was carried at that time through Bitnet , CSNET, ARPA, Internet and Janet. There were some 200 subscribers and presumably many times more readers since Fineart Forum was being distributed and posted on various electronic buIletin boards. Lauzzana envisaged Fineart Forum as a mechanism to distribute information throughout the high-technology arts community, with a focus on artists and scientists involved in the application of computing to fine arts. Fineart Forum was distributed free to the subscriber, as required for noncommercial use of the academic netRoger F. MaHna (astronomer, art journal editor). Box 75. 1442A Walnut Street. Berkeley. CA 94709. U.S.A. Received 24Janllary 1991. 228 Art/Science Forum works, and the material was not copyrighted . At the same time that Lauzzana approached me, I was involved in a (U.S.) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) program caIled "telescience". This program , funded through NASA's studies for the U.S. Space Station, sought to explore how computers and communication networks would change the way scientific research would be conducted in the future. It was clear to NASA planners that, for an orbiting laboratory like the space station to be fuIly productive, effective working links had to be provided between the researchers in orbit and those on the ground. NASA funded a number of pilot programs and studies to explore these issues. One such project involved a NASA astronomical satellite project caIled the Extreme...