Art Dept. Adds New Media Prof

"I've never been a junkie, but I've had a film-making habit," said Rian Brown-Orso, the recent addition to the art department staff, as professor of New Media.

Her "habit" is evident at once when sitting in her high-tech office, which is crowded with not one, but two Macintosh G4 supercomputers, a shelf of digital video cameras and equipment, piles of computer and video magazines, and editing machinery. While all this

technology is impressive, she regards it as merely a means to achieve her art form.

Dressed youthfully in a stylish leather vest, casual red shoes and chunky silver jewelry, Brown-Orso is an embodiment of her professional focus. "I'm an artist, not a technician, and Iąm mainly concerned with the message, not the medium," she said.

The 50-person waiting lists for both her courses, "Concepts and Processes: Lines of Flight ‹ The Relationship Between Sound and Image," and "Concepts and Processes: Video-Art," show just how desperate Obies have been for these courses.

Previously lacking in computer-based video production and editing, the Art department has undergone several changes in an attempt to keep up with the digital revolution. In addition to hiring Brown-Orso, who is familiar with these areas of study, the department has invested in a new video editing lab, including digital editing stations, an audio suite and Sony digital video camcorders.

New media, according to Brown-Orso, is a buzzword, a sexy term easily misconstrued. While people assume new media is anything related to digital computer art, the term encompasses film-making, graphic design, sound design, computer graphics and web design.

Brown-Orso, a self-defined West Coast artist, comes to Oberlin from a previous teaching position the University of California, San Diego, where she also obtained her masters degree in Fine Arts. She listed the Allen Memorial Museum as one of Oberlin's main attractions, and plans on integrating its collections into her classes. She is impressed with the museum's strength in contemporary art, and called its curators Śradical and innovative."

Trained by traditional art schools, Brown-Orso is enthusiastic about working in a smaller, more intimate liberal arts environment where she can exchange ideas with students from a wide variety of disciplines. According to her, Oberlin's New Media division is in its formative years.

"I feel as though I'm walking into something that I can create," she said. "Oberlin's art department has been extremely generous and welcoming," she added, saying that she's optimistic and excited about mentoring students who are "very bright, so turned on, so innovative ‹ a fertile group to work with."

While she is well versed in all aspects of new media, Brown-Orso admittedly favors video and the traditional 16mm format. "Digital and film are like apples and oranges," she said. "I'd like to create a dialogue between both of them ‹ I'm not interested in changing film."

One of Brown-Orso's prime motivations is to revolutionize the teaching of new media. "I feel it's important for students to develop a language to express digital material," she said.

Her artistic accomplishments include numerous films, both autobiographical and documentary-style, several of which have received honors in the festival circuit. The Presence of Water, an autobiographical essay about the birth of her first child, was shot in Italy, where she lived for several years with her Italian husband and her son. She is currently wrapping up a short film titled The Settler, which is a digital science fiction piece about Mars, filmed in the deserts of Southern California.

Brown-Orso loves to travel, and the transition from California to Ohio seems to have been a smooth one for her. She even made it to the Lorain County Fair, where she enjoyed the Demolition Derby, an annual celebration of road rage. "It was the perfect outlet for southern California traffic ‹ every town should have one," she said with a smile.