WHAT happens to art galleries when their exhibition areas become the spaces within computers?
We are living in an increasingly digital culture, Roy Ascott says, yet European arts institutions are among the last to notice these changes, "Museums and galleries are sticking their heads in the sand - like the fire buckets of sand that sit beside their paintings - as if they are hoping for the debate about digital culture to go away. But it won't."
Artists' digital paintboxes can now zoom in on the tiniest fragments in a sound or image, copy and paste them, and turn them inside out, but let's not get too hung up with tools.
"None of us are remotely interested in bits of metal, screens, as material lumps of stuff on the tablecloth," Ascott says. "The interfaces do count, obviously, but for us digital arts are not about machines - it's not techie in the sense of fetishising objects - it's about processes. There is a problem of seeing new media solely as tools rather than as a new environment.
Ascott was in Dublin's Arthouse multimedia centre last week to co ordinate Sensing the Future, a two day conference about how art and technology relate to each other.
The event's main focus - besides a lot of discussions and debates - was a series of presentations by 10 of Ascott's PhD students from the CAiiA research centre at the University of Wales. Mostly late thirtysomethings, the 10 include several leading international figures in the expanding field of digital art.
A common theme of their work is our changing sense of place, and of the human body, and of the shifting boundaries between public and private spaces.
Victoria Vesna's BodiesOc INCorporated project, for example, is a Web based identity game about, well, bodies. First, players have to wade through various convoluted consent forms where you sign away everything to her Bodies Online Corporation. These are all based on real forms by the Disney empire, "but with absolutely nonsensical changes", Vesna says.
Then you build your own virtual body out of predefined body parts, sounds and textures (behind the scenes, it's all VRML and Java). Next, neglectful owners find their bodies shipped - over to subsidiaries of the main corporation - the grey zone of LimboOnline and eventually bodies end up in the baroque region of Necropolis Online.
The project works on many levels, from "how we form an emotional attachment to our bodies" to the meaning of corporate bodies, and some of the "bodies" have also been exhibited in galleries. It's both funny, spooky, silly and profound, and on the Web at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc
A sign of the times: another leading American artist at the conference, Joseph Nechvatall, has a New York postal address, a Web site in Germany and an email address in France.
He blows up and digitally manipulates images of popular icons, "then I use this big, robotic, digital machine that does the painting". It outputs the image onto an enormous painted canvas. Why a painting rather than staying on a computer screen? Because, in particular, viewing a painting involves what he calls "deep time" - more contemplation and imagination work by participants or viewers (or, as he calls them, the viewpant"!).
While artist in residence at the Louis Pasteur Institute in France, he began applying computer viruses to his raw images. "The virus eats the previous image away."
After the computer virus series he worked on images of biological viruses, from Aids to Ebola. Then he created a series dealing with sexuality and repression on the Net. After downloading porn images from the a/t.sex binaries newsgroups on Usenet, he zoomed in on the images and turned them into much more abstract landscapes, while still trying to retain hints of their figurative origins.
Bill Seaman's almost mesmerising works are another good example of how artists straddle both digital and more traditional artforms. He spans videodiscs, video, photography and audio compositions, and much of his latest work emphasises the use of weighted (or semi controlled) randomness to generate clusters of poetry or 3D landscapes.
Like many of the weekend's speakers, Australian artist Jill Scott described her particular journey towards new media and work practices. Her works include Frontiers of Utopia, which explores the different ideas about utopia of eight women across the generations, from an Irish socialist immigrant in the 1900s to a political refuge from Tiananmen Square. In another work, The DigitalBodyAutomata, she explores how technology has transformed the human body in science and myth, from Pandora and Frankenstein's monster to the cyborgs of the future.
Dew Harrison described how she is organising a collaborative Internet based project between 25 artists across the world (see http://caiimind.nsad.newport.ac.uk/lead.html). Through their network of individual Web sites, each of them explores a separate element in Duchamp's complex "Large Glass" project (or The Bride Stripped Bare). They range from poets and "traditional painters" to engineers and mathematicians.
"Each is taking one element in the Glass and then interconnecting them. The project is growing by very organic methods and you do feel that you lose control over it," she explains. "And, we never meet physically - it's all done by email."
Polish born artist Miroslaw Rogala built his Electronic Garden/NatuRealizaton istallation last summer in a public park in Chicago popularly known as Bughouse Square. It's a free speech corner, so the project explores the nature of free speech in public areas. A pagoda like lattice with speakers is connected to two dozen speech fragments - by the likes of Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow and Studs Terkel - and when members of the public step into the spaces they trigger off the sounds (via infrared sensors). There's a parallel Web based version too (at http://www.mcs.net/~~ rogala/eGarden). "The World Wide Web is today's Bughouse Square," Rogala says.
Gillian Hunt's research has concentrated on Gordon Pask's pioneering theories about cybernetics and architecture, seeing buildings as communications systems. The discussion afterwards about smart materials and intelligent buildings inevitably touched on Arthouse's own architecture, which has its own bugs and glitches.
The main meeting room, described by Roy Ascott at one point as a "church like darkened space", is quite noisy and badly ventilated, with hard chairs, and the seating arrangements mean most members of the audience can't see any subtitles on the bottom of the main projection screen. And without any real podium, when the speakers are seated many punters can't see them.
Char Davies's 3D Osmose world is probably the best known of all the pieces. It's an immersive experience, with strong analogies to scuba diving, she explains. The interface is sublime: besides donning a VR headset, you're strapped into a chest harness which measures your ribcage as it expands and contracts - "You have to dress like a diver entering the sea" and participants use their lungs in order to rise or fall in the immersive space.
So, you start off in a realm of Cartseian co ordinates, which melt away to a forest clearing. This in turn leads to other regions such as an underworld of roots, and sections of alphanumeric characters (the actual code involved in the Osmose program!) and quotations which you fly through. As virtual worlds go, it's melancholic, contemplative, almost psychedelic.
To create these 3D images of delicate transparency and luminosity, in real time, and at the quality she demanded, Davies found that she required gargantuan computer power. While the experience is far removed from the high speed "rush" of more commercial VR environments, ironically the high end Silicon Graphics Onyx machines which Osmose depends upon are the same ones that fighter pilots train on.
Participants describe the Osmose experience as "like dying and going to heaven", and "very meditative". Maybe it really is like a near death experience, or using a diving suit, or hang gliding perhaps, what with its emphasis on being only partially disembodied or gravity free. But here I'm just guessing.
Obviously the high end projects couldn't be carted over to Dublin for the day, but it's a pity that most of the examples on ordinary CD Roms and Web pages were being shown "second hand", particularly given the media involved.
It's a reminder of how disappointing or frustrating it is to watch over someone else's shoulder as they click away at a Web site or CD Rom.
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