An Artist for New Media: Barbara Rose Haum

A few years ago, a colleague from Information Technology Services described an Internet2 event that was performed by New York University led by Dr. Barbara Rose Haum with a University in Israel . I immediately got in touch with her as I am always searching for collaborators to bring new perspectives and energy to I2 events.

Dr. Haum proved to be a delightful, open spirit with strongly original ideas and a zest for what we both agreed is a powerful new expressive medium for the arts.

"I absolutely agree," she remarked upon my comment that I regarded I2 as a new medium, "one-hundred percent!" This enthusiasm was typical of Barbara. When she committed to anything, it was one-hundred percent and more. She went on to speculate that her passion for I2 collaborations would now be the focus of her professional and scholarly work. For my part, I was delighted to have discovered such a gifted and congenial fellow artist, and that we could share in developing I2 in the context of our alliance with arts technology as a means for extending the creative process.

We decided that we would begin by designing and teaching interdisciplinary courses on arts collaboration and Internet2. We finished these courses quickly and began teaching them in the Fall of 2006. It was an exciting time. Barbara was an innovative, creative spirit who easily embraced new media and technology. These media gave her an opportunity to extend her work as a visual artist of images, text, and dramatic revelations of sacred text.

We worked on a collaborative project with UCI. Our theme, Voices of Thallasus, focused on music and films created with sounds and images of the sea. Barbara came to the rehearsal with a huge, thick rope, some canvas, and other items she had found on the weekend at the beach, These immediately became important artifacts for our I2 production. Barbara had an eye and ear and a sensibility that connected elements, processed them, appropriated them as artistic presence and expression. The future was filled with ideas for collaborative projects and distant partners. In Internet2, she had found the medium where her originality could flourish and soar.

We began teaching our new course in the Fall, but quite suddenly, she was torn from us, taken by leukemia that at first appeared diagnosed as treatable and curable. Barbara would overcome this calamity and be back with us by Spring. But that was not to be. We never knew that the prognosis had suddenly turned so negative, and so we were taken by surprise that this dear, disarming, ebullient artist would not return to our collaboration.

I knew Barbara for scarcely a year and a half, but her presence and energy were so incandescent that she illuminated this emerging landscape like an exploding star. Even now, her wonderful voice speaks to us through the fabulous insights she possessed about this new medium where all borders dissolve in the electronic immediacy of time and space. The lives she touched with her art, her vision, her teaching, remain inspired to celebrate her work in new collaborations.