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2002 marks the tenth anniversary of the ACTLab. It's been quite a rollercoaster.
When we started, the Web didn't exist, and email was all but unknown at UT.
Then, as now, our primary emphasis wasn't on computer skills but on conceptual thinking,
self-motivation, group effort, risktaking, and making stuff.
Our students were (and are) an eclectic mixture of ages, experience, disciplines,
and skills.
They came from the departments of Art, English, History, Anthropology, Computer Science,
Rhetoric, Latin-American Studies, Theater and Dance, Performance Studies, and Radio-
Television-Film, to name a few. Some were fresh out of high school, some had had careers
of their own.
The ACTLab's first floor plan had a seminar table in the middle of the room, and the
walls lined with workstations. Hackers at the workstations turned from their work to add
comments to the discussions at the seminar table. Final projects took any form -
construction, installation, painting, sculpture, collage, sound, music, digital-fu,
text, or online interactive-fu such as web-based projects.
We participated in the birth of the World-Wide Web, and, after its inception, students built new ACTLab web pages every year or so.
Here's one from 1995 and one from
1996. Not all the links work on the historically
interesting pages, but they represent an amazing and transformative time in the history of online
interaction.
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