Projects
Often working collaboratively, Ippolito’s work traverses digital art, new media, and community building. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Maine’s New Media Department where he teaches classes on programming, online culture, issues of variable media, and viral media. With Joline Blais in 2002, he co-founded Still Water, a new media lab at the University of Maine at Orono devoted to studying and building creative networks.
In the 1990s, Ippolito worked with artists Janet Cohen and Keith Frank creating works that exposed the adversarial side of collaboration (Agree to Disagree and the Unreliable Archivist). During this time he also curated the Worlds of Nam June Paik and Virtual Reality: an Emerging Medium at the Guggenheim.
In the 2000s, Ippolito began working with collaborators John Bell and Craig Dietrich on digital tools. These projects include the distributed publication tool ThoughtMesh, a 2005 Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular commission that has grown to include conference proceedings, poetry, and full length books. ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online, which gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites. Authors can choose to post an essay in a central repository hosted by the Vectors program at USC, the sponsor of this project, or to self-archive an essay on their own Web site. Stemming from research into variable media at the Guggenheim, the team is producing the Variable Media Questionnaire and the Metaserver, a lightweight metadata registry that automatically connects related data in separate repositories.
Ippolito and collaborators, including Bell, Blais, and Owen Smith, developed The Pool, an online project design workspace noted by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a "new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs." The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of documentation systems, The Pool stimulates collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects.
Additional projects include MARCEL, a permanent high band-width network for artistic experimentation, and the Maine Intellectual Commons Web site, helping to establish standards for creative and scholarly research that contribute to a culture of sharing.
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