February 14, 1999

Out of the Ether, a New Continent of Art

By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

he proposal sent by e-mail seemed typical enough, full of talk about "digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms and knowbots." Anyone who has ever waded past the low breakers of America Online's chat rooms and taken a dunk in cyberspace has bumped into the same scientific jargon, into the discussion groups and Web sites of geeks at work.

	James Estrin/The New York Times
	Starting with images from a full-body laser scanner, Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcalt, seen in their Brooklyn studio, create photographic self-portraits using cartography software.

But what was startling was the proposal's subject: not an engineering conference but "Life 2.0," an international art competition mating digital media with a high-tech project of simulating evolution. Recursive chaotic algorithms? Digital genetics? Welcome to an entirely new art world. Welcome to the next century.

With the stealth force of technology slipping under every door of modern life, this new art is suddenly gaining critical mass, moving closer to the mainstream. There are festivals dedicated to it from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles, Linz to Liverpool. A smartly produced new magazine, ArtByte, covers its every pulse. The ZKM (German initials for the Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo are young museums with a single focus on the digital and electronic.

Meanwhile, traditional institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the new contemporary-art museum Kiasma in Helsinki are broadening their collections and exhibition programs to include works on CD-ROMs and the Web, with a keen interest in objects full of chips and code and, yes, artificial life.

If anything characterizes this work, it's the fashionable taste for sociology over the sublime so typical in the art world today. But no generality is general enough for a field that's like a new continent heaving into view.

"It's impossible to call what's going on a movement," says Sarah Rogers, director of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and curator of the recent exhibition there, "Body Mecanique: Artistic Explorations of Digital Realms." "It's not limited by any medium. People are coming from painting, architecture, sculpture, engineering, dance, video, film. There are people working alone. There are people gathering together. In that sense, it connects with older, more utopian times -- with the Bauhaus, the Suprematists, the Constructivists, who worked across disciplines and were fascinated with technology. But you can hardly talk about 'technology' as if there was one unified approach. It's too difficult now, too messy. Artists are using technology in so many different ways."

One thing is certain. As you peruse the exhibitions, the catalogs and online sites, no great acumen is required to distinguish the stuff obsessed with high-tech showboating from the work that's sophisticated, ingenious and provocative. In either case, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of new media things ticking, shuttering, flashing and often disappearing, and Ms. Rogers' show served as a kind of agnostic bellwether for all that.

It encompassed everything from the septugenarian choreographer Merce Cunningham's collaboration with artists and architects to create a software-driven spectacle of skeletal forms dancing on a screen, to a computer game, devised by the husband and wife team Janine Ciricione and Michael Ferraro, replete with Surrealist-inspired landscapes, a plot derived from "Dead Souls," Gogol's metaphysical novel of lost identity, and, of course, a joystick.

This work seemed at least passably recognizable for anyone with a reasonable knowledge of modern art and the occasional video game. And there was a range of sculpture, painting and video works involving computers in one way or another that, for all their varying degrees of science-project familiarity or real poetic punch, still felt like safe ground.

But then there was "Embryonic Housing," the architect Greg Lynn's 3,000 digitally generated forms for housing structures that are biomorphic and strange and glowing, like the abstract shapes of a next-century Brancusi.

Here is where the question of what constitutes the art in techno-art begins to seem like a highly ethereal crap shoot.

The approach to an answer for critics and curators already swept up by new media might easily be called environmental. Barbara London, the video curator at the Museum of Modern Art, says matter of factly: "Well, technology is part of our landscape. We're all involved with computers, e-mailing, faxing. This new work represents the world as it is now, just as the Modernists decades ago reacted to what they saw. We're inching our way toward something else that we can't even fathom yet."

Natalie Jeremijenko has her own sense of the question, sitting for an interview in the one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan she shares with her husband and their 11-month-old girl named e -- just e. Her explanation of the child's name -- "It's interactive; you can make of it what you will" -- is a sly mix of the earnest and the mischievous, and it's telling indeed.

Ms. Jeremijenko, 32, an Australian PhD candidate in engineering, now lecturing on product design in the department of mechanical engineering at Yale, has made some of the most abstruse and provocative works of techno-art over the last decade.

"What is the art in techno-art?" she echoes. "In a general sense, I think about this work as an opportunity for social change when everything in our culture of new technologies is up for grabs. I consider my work a kind of pseudoproduct, a device that functions, and its function is to offer a vision of how things could look different -- which is what artists are about."

She picks up a little aluminum box a bit larger than an ice cube with a Motorola chip inside. "This is a piece I made three years ago called 'Voice Box,"' and she hands over a business-card-size card that has a photo of the box and the words: "object oriented sound recordsplays(GT)stores 12 sec 3D digital sound. . . . smart device will trigger when picked up, moved, thrown or dropped PROVIDES UNSCRIPTED OPPORTUNITY TO BE HEARD. open to record insert voice."

She made 100 of the boxes for an exhibition in Los Angeles, where they were scattered on shelves and plinths. Visitors picked them up, talked into them, stacked them to create instant sound sculptures.

"They were about what people said, not the technology," Ms. Jeremijenko says. "I thought of them as celebrating the social possibilities of interaction. But they were also about how we use things, what we expect a recording device to look like, to be like."

Her latest project, "OneTree," is a likely candidate for "Life 2.0." Working with tree specialists in California, she engineered 100 genetic clones of a hybrid walnut appropriately named a paradox tree. Recently exhibited as specimens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, they will be planted next year around the Bay Area to show how the social environment and climate affect each tree's growth -- her argument against the notion that biotech companies churning out clones can promise an industrial uniformity for living things.

In the meantime, you can buy her CD-ROM "Mutate" to grow your own artificial tree, exfoliating among the electrons of your personal PC.

The evident social provocation of Ms. Jeremijenko's brave new boxes and carbon-copy trees is simply one point on new media's wild compass. Meanwhile, the internal twitch of art criticizing art has already seized the field.

Artists and computer hackers are dissecting, morphing, reformulating and parodying the graphic styles, the interfaces and means of navigation that come as the packaged code, the terra firma of their programs and video games.

By its own pretzel logic, this work is no different from that of any group of artists reacting to the constraints of the art canon it inherited. The roiling debates, the examples and counterexamples of digital styles, give off the distinct whiff of history in the making, or at least of historical curiosity.

"Beyond the Interface," an online exhibition viewable at the Walker Art Center's site (www.walkerart.org/gallery9/beyondinterface), offers two dozen glimpses into the reimagining of how a computer's interface might look and act. Coming in June, "Cracking the Maze," a Web show with accompanying text at switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze, will present a far stranger efflorescence of the new media culture.

The exhibition will survey patch art, what its curator, Anne-Marie Schleiner, calls "the natural outgrowth of the huge youth gaming culture that inserts new code or changes the code of computer games like Tomb Raider and Doom to alter their look or action."

Changing landscapes, costumes or the sex of game characters (the SimCopter hack from www.rtmark.com); parodying shoot-'em-ups ("Control Space" from www.jodi.org/ctrl-space); even, perhaps outrageously, trying to induce convulsions and blurred vision in information-weary users (Parangari Cutiri's epileptic game patch for Ms. Schleiner's show).

"You could liken it to graffiti art," Ms. Schleiner says, "though I think with the number of young gamers out there, it's really an infiltration of pop culture on a much broader scale."

Sorting through this limitless variety of Web works is like "catching a dragon by its tail and figuring out from its scales whether it's a good dragon or a bad dragon," according to Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Lately, he has been snatching up Web sites for the museum's permanent collection, but he sighs at the hugeness of the task. "If we're lucky, a hundred years from now curators will see these things and think of them as more than place-holders, see them as early works of lasting value."

The question of how they will actually see them is another matter. Will there be computers that can still read them, similar software still available, CD-ROMs and their players, even the World Wide Web as we know it today? Lots of curators and collectors are holding back for these very reasons, but others are just leaping into the technological void.

"If we don't start now, it will be impossible to catch up," says Tuula Arkio, director of the Kiasma contemporary art museum in Helsinki, which has been commissioning as well as collecting new media works. "We'll do what we can and worry later. But this isn't only a problem for collections," she adds. "It's a problem for every part of society today, and surely for the artists themselves."

Two artists who stand at these crossroads typify the tug of technology and the real need to have stable, conventional works to show. Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, sculptors in their 40s, have been working for the last year with a high-end full-body scanner, the Cyberware WB4, making images of themselves that they convert into large photographic prints; pictures of startlingly reconfigured flesh that aren't quite like anything else in the long history of the nude.

The WB4 collects thousands of surface points of the body with lasers, which are then translated by cartography software, so that the body becomes an infinitely variable topography. "Initially, what excited us was the idea of simultaneity, the way you can see the figure from all different angles at one time," Ms. LoCurto says, sitting in front of a computer in the couple's studio in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn."It went back for us to Cubism."

"But what has become so mesmerzing," she continues, "is that the process is sculptural and yet, because it's all done on computer, it has become so abstract that the work is like pure idea. It's incredibly seductive, and yet it's scary that objects just don't mean so much to me anymore. They feel, in a way, like nothing more than the artifacts of the idea."

Standing in front of a long horizontal print that's somewhere between a Rorschach and a Francis Bacon, with a little bit of Cubist Picasso thrown in, Outcault adds, "I suppose kids in the future, growing up with joysticks in their hands and staring at monitors, won't need physical objects the way we do. But it's funny. We bring people in and show them the images on the screen and they somehow can't see them. They've got to see the prints, then they can make them out. I guess that's a good reason to not go digital all the way."

With an exhibition of the work scheduled for the List Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 2000, they have clearly set their course. Yet going digital would seem to be the way that an astonishing corps of artists are building an art world with different rules, different tools and imaginations that start from here and will end up someplace after Modernism.

"We've been making marks for an awfully long time," Ms. Rogers says. "And even if that mark is made with a keyboard and a mouse, the process is still going to go on and on for a very long time to come."

Steven Henry Madoff is executive editor of Joe, a forthcoming cultural magazine from Time Inc. and Starbucks.