Ditch the Slide Projector: An Art Professor Brings Paintings to Life With Software

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By SCOTT CARLSON

Denver

Unless you're a professor in fine arts, architecture, or art history, or someone who gives elaborate, illustrated talks about your sabbatical research to captive dinner guests, you might not know that the sturdy old Kodak slide projector is now a bona fide technological relic. Kodak, yielding to the digital age, stopped manufacturing it last year.

For art-history professors like M.E. Warlick, that was a watershed moment. The slide projector had long been her companion in the classroom. It was the tool she used to illuminate -- quite literally -- Jackson Pollock's progression between the graffitilike Pasiphaë, painted in 1943, and his splattered and dripped Number 1, 1950.

"We all saw the writing on the wall when Kodak got out of the business," says Ms. Warlick, an associate professor of art history at the University of Denver.

Now when she discusses Pollock in class, as she did on a recent morning here, she brings up his paintings on two digital projectors. She starts with his early work, which was similar to that of Thomas Hart Benton, his mentor. She calls up a photo of Benton, along with an image of his painting The Wreck of the Old '97.' She returns to Pollock -- to midcareer work that reflects the influence of Picasso. Then she displays his iconic later work, the splatter paintings. Ms. Warlick peppers the lecture with pictures of Pollock -- first sitting next to his Model A, then stretched out in a dancelike pose, dribbling paint on an enormous canvas.

Ms. Warlick controls all of these images from a computer at the front of the room, using a program known as Duvaga -- short for the Denver University Visual Art Gallery Application, a homegrown database of images. In some ways it works like an old slide projector. But because Ms. Warlick doesn't have to lecture in lockstep with the order of slides in a carousel, she can be much more free-form, jumping back and forth between images.

The database, always a work in progress, is a collaboration among professors and staff members here. A few years ago, when the slide projector began to look like it was on the way out, Ms. Warlick and other professors visited other Denver colleges to find out how they were presenting images to students in classes.

"At that point," she says, "a lot of people were trying to figure out how to do it on Blackboard or PowerPoint, or put them on CD." Those options weren't appealing. Blackboard -- commercial software that helps professors manage courses and create Web sites -- is clunky, she says, and PowerPoint, Microsoft's popular presentation software, is "inane" because it offers little flexibility. And a CD wouldn't allow any flexibility at all. Yet she found that those were the only options for her peers at other institutions. "A lot of professors are really sort of run by their tech people: 'We'll put up one projector in the classroom, and you'll run it on PowerPoint' -- end of conversation," she says. "We were lucky here."

Other tools that attempt to reinvent the slide projector are also hitting the market, like ARTstor, a similar software package and online database that was released in April by a nonprofit group (The Chronicle, April 16).

The technology staff at the Denver Center for Teaching and Learning gave Duvaga features that Ms. Warlick and other professors requested. Instructors can set up various galleries of pictures -- Ms. Warlick has by far the most galleries -- to display in courses, pulling the pictures from a database of about 15,000 images. Arranging the pictures for display is easy. The program works like a virtual light table, with images lined up on the screen -- just grab images and drag them into order.

But the program does much more than that. It is a learning tool for professors and students outside of the classroom as well. The program allows students to create their own galleries, to which they can refer when studying. Mary Olson, a freshman, says she uses a feature that allows her to display images side by side to study the differences between similar artists.

The display features allow users to zoom in on any portion of the painting to study details. Ms. Warlick calls up the picture of a crowned Jesus in Jan Van Eyck's The Ghent Altar, and then zooms in on the precious stones carefully painted on the crown. Jewels were thought to carry symbolic power when Van Eyck painted this, she notes, so seeing the stones up close might provide an opportunity for students and professors to identify them.

Duvaga also allows students to test themselves. The program displays a dozen images from a gallery, along with a list of artists and titles on the side of the screen. Users just click on the names and drag them beneath the images. The computer will let users know whether they can tell a Thomas Anshutz from a Thomas Eakins.

Not just art professors can use the database. Margaret Whitt, a professor of English who specializes in Southern literature, has a gallery of images of sites made famous during the civil-rights era. David Shneer, an assistant professor of history who directs Denver's Jewish-studies program, has collected images of Holocaust sites. William Temple Davis, an associate professor of theater, has various images of lit stages for a course on theater lighting.

For Ms. Warlick's department, perhaps the most challenging aspect of the database is digitizing the images. The University of Denver has a slide collection of more than 150,000 images, housed in metal file cabinets in a library upstairs from Ms. Warlick's office. There, staff members, including student workers, spend as much as 30 minutes per slide scanning, naming, cleaning, and adjusting the images for color.

"A literature professor might not care that there is too much green in a Picasso, but we really care," says Ms. Warlick. She used to love the warm intensity of an image projected through an old-fashioned slide machine, but says she has gotten used to the cool, crisp digital image. Occasionally, she encounters a glitch -- during her lecture, one image of a Pollock painting won't load, so Ms. Warlick has to pull up the image from another online source.

On that recent day in class, Ms. Warlick played a clip from Mona Lisa Smile -- the scene in which the dainty and refined young ladies from Wellesley College encounter an abstract Pollock painting for the first time. The clip came from a cued-up videotape. Soon, she says, Duvaga will allow her to play film clips that have been digitized and stored in the database.

It's just another way that new technology has freed up her lecture -- gotten it off the carousel, so to speak. "To think of something in class and say, 'Let's pull that up,'" she says, "that has given me so much more flexibility."