Produced as part of the pilot year of Dalton’s Original Minds program, the Original Minds Presents Sarah Sze web site utilized all of Dalton’s technical resources to document and share the presence of a visiting artist (Sarah Sze) with the extended Dalton Community. The Original Minds program is focused on personal interaction between the visiting Mind individual and the students. The combination of the Artists busy schedule and the ambitious school-wide interdisciplinary goals of the program meant that only a fraction of the community had the chance to participate first hand in the various event and activities. To solve this problem and make the program accessible to more of the community more of the time, Dalton turned to the web as a distribution medium for digital documentation.
Using the Internet allowed the School to distribute any and every form of digital media produced. Accordingly, the site provided access to hundreds of still images, student comments, audio recordings in mp3 format, movies, and slideshows in mpeg format, virtual recreations of situations and events in Quicktime VR, and access to events live via streaming internet video. Additionally, the documentation process itself gave interested students more opportunities to participate in the program. Because the site was accessible via the Internet and not just the schools intranet, its content was available to community members who did not have regular intranet access, such as parents or alumni. This helped the program realize a broad influence and sense of inclusion beyond the it’s initial physical and temporal limits.