Racing Thoughts: Altering Our Ways of Knowing and Being in Art through Computer Hypertext

Abstract

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 Grünewald'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.