Textile weavers find new loom on the Web By Damon Shorter The traditional practice of weaving is a rarely associated with the high-tech hubbub of the information super-highway, but students in the textiles workshop at the Canberra School of Art are increasingly turning to the Internet as an electronic gallery with the capacity to reach an almost unlimited audience. Each week, about 3,000 people visit the textile workshop's Web site which features the art of many of its 39 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The site generates a steady influx of inquiries from interested members of the public, the occasional business offer from companies hoping to market students' fabric patterns, and journalists wanting to write about the group's work. Valerie Kirk, head of the workshop, says today's Web surfers are looking for more than huge slabs of information, and artists and graphic designers play an increasingly valued role in improving the aesthetic appeal of the Web. "We are past that novelty stage of down-loading everything we see on the Web and now the quality and the presentation-style is all important," she said. Fourth-year art student Karen Fearnside says the Web can be much more than a passive vehicle for presenting conventional art works, citing her favourite example - a "virtual black hole". "You are invited to visit this site, but when you get there, your computer crashes and you can't escape," she explains. "To me, that's quite exciting because there is no way that could have been done except in the realm of the computer." With the wonders of the art world freely accessible through the nearest computer terminal, will the Web cause the demise of conventional art galleries? Valerie Kirk does not think so. "What is missing from the web is the materiality of live artwork," she says. "There is a tactile quality to a gallery that could never be replicated on a computer screen ... like the paint quality of a watercolour or the consistency of the clay in a piece of sculpture. You can do different things using a computer to what you can do with a live piece, but they can not replace each other - it's like trying to represent pears with apples, they're simply not the same thing." The textiles Web site is accessible through the CSA homepage: http://www.anu.edu.au/ITA/CSA/