Ratava's Line :: A Little Note about Collaboration ::

This project is a collaborative effort between the students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada and students at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City, USA.

Collaboration occurred entirely via virtual online systems -- no-one from
FIT and SFU (including the faculty) ever met physically during the project.

The SFU students in Steve DiPaola Immersive Enviroments 4th year class started with proposals from outside sources for a collaborative immersive environment project and as a group voted for a proposal from Daria Dorosh to work with her fashion students to explore issues of fashion, artwork and virtuality. They then worked with students at FIT via several online collaboration systems in an iterative process. Collaboration took place at many levels of the project:

- creating and translating fashion designs to explore how they relate to virtual environments
- exploring how virtual worlds can support artists (artwork is included from NYC and Vancouver)
- interactive narrative performance (characters are played by actors simultaneously from both coasts/countries)
- how collaborative projects can bring people and countries together
- exploring as a group that never met the issues of the "real" and the virtual.