History

Startup
The Manitoba Visual Arts Network was started up in the summer of 1995, in response to the emerging technologies of the World Wide Web.  A number of people played a part:  Myron Turner, a mutli-media artist, who became its co-ordinator; Dale Amundson, then Director of The School of Art of the University of Manitoba and, later, Jon Tupper, then Curatorial Manager at The Winnipeg Art Gallery. We were all interested in technology and art.  Dale had long used computers in his work, and Myron Turner had started using them in 1990.  When the Mosaic browser was released, we all realized that this was a startling new development and that it could have a wide-ranging impact on the visual arts.

Early Days
1995 was, of course, early in the history of the WWW.  Dial-up was the rule and t4 connections were almost exclusively the territory of universities and governments.  Dale Amundson arranged to get mbvan space on The School of Art's server, where it had been housed until just this year. In 1995 none of Manitoba's visual arts groups had a web presence, and one of our first major undertakings was to provide web space for as many of these groups as we could.  We were given an Outreach Grant by The University of Manitoba and hired Karen Thornton to design our site and to create sites for serveral of the arts groups. Karen was a student in graphic design and later went on to take an MFA in digital arts. The original design is still viewable, but not fully functional: Original mbvan.

During these early days, a number of the groups paid a small annual membership fee for their space on the server, and we referred to them as “member groups”; but we never denied membership to any group, whether it paid or not.  Few, if any, of our members had email and so we provided web forms on our web site which people could use for sending messages to our members.  I would collect these in text files, but truthfully I can no longer remember how I got these over to our members. These very practical services became increasingly obsolete, and we began to look at other ways to serve the Manitoba visual arts community.

Projects

Community Calendar
We set up a community calendar in March 1996 to which members could post events and check for scheduling conflicts, and where people from the community could check to see what was going on.  The calendar had a three or four year period of significant activity, then gradually fell into disuse.  I'd have to guess that this was due in large part to the increasing dependence on the members' own web sites for news and announcements and to changes in their administrative staff.  After the demise of the Calendar, the Winnipeg arts community often talked about the need for a community calendar, but it has never been implemented.  All of the mbvan calendars from March 1996 to December 2003 were archived and are accessible for viewing.

Archive
One of our most ambitious projects was the Manitoba Visual Arts Network Archives Project.  The plan was to create a searchable archive of images and documentation beginning with the earliest artist run center, Plug In ICA, which was founded in 1972.  This project was assisted by the Arts Branch of the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Citizenship.  Doreen Millen, then Visual Arts Consultant at the Arts Branch, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and had more ideas for it than we could ever hope to realize.  For several summers she lent us the assistance of Krista Boryskavich, a summer intern, who did most of the research and scanning for the archive.  When Doreen could no longer spare us the use of her summer students, the project got put on hold.  I wrote all of the search software, using C and Perl, in a very non-portable way.  It's not what we would do today, when we would prefer a standard, web-accessible database, like MYSQL.

Artists' Projects
In 1999 with Manitoba Arts Council support, mbvan ran a competition in support of three artists' web projects.  Part of the aim was to familiarize the Winnipeg arts community with the kinds of things being done by artists on the web and to create an invovled interest among Manitoba artists.  This program was run in conjunction with Video Pool, which provided a an exhibition venue for one of the projects.

Forum on Art and Technology
For a few early years we ran a web-based forum on art and technology, which was made possible by the development of Java and Javascript.  But this kind of activity was superceded by sites with email-based subscription lists, which are common today.  Interestingly rhizome.org has replaced its email lists with a web-based forum, and the wiki itself is now a common format for forum-style activities.

Myron Turner
Co-ordinator