Computer racing game

In this autobiographical arts-based research study, the authors use data from personal experience and education theory to correlate the use of interactive computer hypertext with an expansive and meaningful way of knowing in art education. The authors share their creation of a computer hypertext consisting of text, images, and video in response to Jasper Johns's 1983 painting Racing Thoughts. Because of the linking possibilities available with hypertext, the authors made connections in and between both real and imagined vast experiences. From Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to the British Broadcast Corporation's television series Changing Rooms, the connective possibilities made apparent in the hypertext seemed to alter the authors' thinking. The complexity and ill-structuredness intrinsic to computer hypertext appears to authentically represent "the ambiguity that may be characteristic of a work of art" (Efland 2002, p. 11) and may readily facilitate a form of Spiro and Jehng's (1990) cognitive flexibility theory for art education. The implications of this research extend the integration of computer technology in art education as a means for promoting relevant, meaningful, and connective ways of knowing in and through the study of art.

Take an object.

Do something to it.

Do something else to it.1

(Jasper Johns in Rosenthal, 1990, p. 16)

In 1983, artist Jasper Johns created and re-created objects to capture his own Racing Thoughts with encaustic paint on canvas. Illustrating his penchant toward dichotomy, Johns purposefully used objects that provoke multiple meanings, representations, and associations. As the title of the painting suggests, Johns (as well as the viewers of his painting) continually search to make sense of their racing thoughts and the myriad of relationships around them. In the words of hypertext theory pioneer Theodor Nelson, all human beings have a need to understand "how the constant separation and reconnection and perpetual change into new arrangements is... how all relationships are constantly changing-and you can hardly hold onto it-you can, you can not, you can't really visualize or express it" (Nelson in Wolf, 1995, p. 2).

This constant quest to visualize, express, and understand the myriad of relationships or racing thoughts that resulted from our study, teaching, and living led us to interactive computer hypertext.2 Writing collaboratively and sharing a computer hypertext file as we did when analyzing Johns's Racing Thoughts provides an opportunity for capturing and critically analyzing ideas and connections associated with cognitive flexibility theory (Spiro & Jehng, 1990). We believe that sharing our collaboration in this article as a form of autobiographical research will serve to illustrate the manner in which a hypertext-induced way of knowing permeates most every aspect of our lives and in the process reveals a connective and expansive approach to art education. Such connective and expansive experiences promote complication and ambiguity that are likely to inspire more meaningful and relevant ways of knowing than the traditional linear or compartmentalized approaches do in art education.

The notion of hypertext began in 1945 with Vannevar Bush's3 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "As We May Think." Working with the scientific community to continue their great strides in research and discovery after World War II, Bush proposed a mechanically linked information-retrieval machine, called a "memex." Twenty years later, Theodor Nelson coined the term "hypertext" and explained it as text that branches and allows choices "connected by links which offer the reader (and creator) different pathways" using the computer (Landow, 1992, p. 4).

In the hypertextual computer program Storyspace(TM)4 boxes, called writing spaces or lexia, may contain information as well as other boxes of data in the form of written text, images, sound, and video. Entire boxes and/or key words, phrases, images or parts of images may be linked to form associative and connective paths throughout the Storyspace(TM) web. Storyspace(TM) provides three possible overviews of a constructed web-the chart view, the outline view, and the Storyspace(TM) view. The Storyspace(TM) view is a graphic representation of the web depicted as writing spaces in the form of boxes and links represented by arrows. A reader or writer of a Storyspace(TM) web can see, access, and comment directly on any or all areas in each of these views. Storyspace(TM) readers create their own paths throughout the web by choosing the order in which they read and add comments, notes, images, and video. This adaptable Storyspace(TM) characteristic acts as a compelling device-challenging the readers to change the structure of the original web and thereby make it more than it was before they encountered it.

Like Johns's idea of taking an object, doing something to it, and doing something else to it, interactive computer hypertext provides the reader and the writer the ability to create, organize, and rearrange spaces (or thoughts) on the computer. Each space may contain a variety of contents and be linked electronically to other spaces. Because of the changeable nature of these spaces, hypertext provides a site for continual redirection in the cognitive processes of thinking, interpreting, and knowing by both the writer and the reader. Such redirection and reflection is made possible through computer hypertext because of the case with which the computer allows readers and writers to maneuver through past, present, and future thinking. Unlike note cards, books or papers, with computer hypertext visible links between thoughts, ideas, images, and parts of images can be created. In a way, the thinking process of readers and writers can be traced or tracked by following paths throughout the web. Challenges, questions, and comparisons can be added directly in a space and accessed by a mere click of the mouse, opening multiple spaces at a time rather than shuffling through pages of a book or scraps of paper.

Johns's painting and its title, Racing Thoughts, epitomize the kind of thinking and associating we engage in as art educators, through our work with interactive computer hypertext. Since 1995, we have used hypertext to develop thematic units of instruction, write and explore criticism and aesthetics, create online course design and classroom presentations, track our research, write, and make art.5 With each experience, we find that the hypertextual process provokes our thinking to move backward and forward, linking information from past research, thoughts, and ideas to new readings and practice visible and accessible on our computer screens. Like Bush's imagined "memex," our Storyspace(TM) files afford us the luxury of hindsight, middle sight, and foresight in our thinking and thereby provoke us to move beyond the obvious and into realms of understanding and connecting we would not have considered through a traditional and linear approach to study.

Racing Thoughts: A Hypertextual Response

Our two-person collaborative hypertextual reading of Racing Thoughts began with an image of the work in a Storyspace(TM) web. We then took turns linking it to information and images that strengthened our own understanding of the painting. As if playing a game of catch on a lazy spring afternoon, one of us would make additions to the hypertext and return it to the other by way of e-mail.6 We color-coded our additions so that we could track our contributions and the progress of the hypertext as it developed. The key to this process was the quest for visual and contextual information we determined to be associated with the work that somehow demanded exploration. Similarly, hypertext author and theorist Michael Joyce (1991), in the directions for reading his hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story, encourages readers to interact with the text through the "pursuit of texture." In this way, we were following Johns's advice each time we did something to his work, an image in the work, or a concept related to the work, and [when we] then did something else to it.

The very fact that we exchanged our own interpretations and investigations of the work with each other mirrors the visual dichotomy of Johns's Racing Thoughts. Indeed, our own thoughts began to race when one of us received a message from the other containing the latest additions to the hypertext. Because we were reading the hypertext interpretation through the other person's latest response, we each viewed the work and the hypertext, if only briefly, from the other person's perspective. Through this virtual collaboration we were afforded an opportunity to see the text of the work from an angle that we had not provided for ourselves. In effect, the work, both through and as hypertext, became more to us collectively than it could have been to either of us individually.