Upon entering the InterCommunication Center, a media museum that opens in Tokyo this Friday, visitors will encounter Toshio Iwai's "Seven Memories of Media Technology" - pillars showcasing both physical and "virtual" objects ranging from a book to a personal computer.
"I was very conscious of the fact that it was likely to be the first thing visitors would see at ICC," says Iwai, whose work appeared in the 1996 "Mediascape" at New York's Guggenheim Museum. "I thought that the work itself should ... aid in the general public's understanding of media art and media communications."
The result - an iconization of everyday technology, "turning the absolutely commonplace machines that I have always used into art" - provides a fitting introduction to ICC, the world's first large-scale museum devoted to art that incorporates the most advanced technologies. Funded by NTT as part of a series of projects launched in 1990 to commemorate 100 years of telephone service, ICC takes up three stories in Tokyo's Opera City Tower. Its holdings feature work by an international roster of new-media artists, including Iwai, Karl Sims, Dumb Type, Heri Dono, the team of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Gregory Barsamian.
"We now require an art museum that can accommodate the digitalization and programatization of the artist's consciousness and message amidst the current informationalization of society," says ICC spokesperson ManAbu Kuneida. Besides the display of artwork, the museum also aims to foster communication and to teach. "A place is sought that provides the general public, not just specialists, with hands-on experience and education in new electronic media that have just arrived," Kuneida says.
The artwork is categorized according to one of ten concepts - machine, media, perception, space, time, material, communication, information, game, and life - constituting the "ICC Matrix," a thematic structure that defines a "new" genre of art.
According to Jonathan Crary, professor of art history at Columbia University, who was present at ICC's planning conferences three years ago, ICC is paradoxical in that it identifies itself as both a museum and a daring symbol of "a fluid new art cosmos" in its promotional literature. Ironically, observes Crary, ICC preserves the notion of a traditional museum while claiming to take an innovative approach. Still, he feels that presentation of interactive multimedia art - often "impermanent, non-saleable art objects" - within the validating context of a permanent museum bestows today's technology-based art with "stability and a certain market visibility."
Beyond the permanent collection, ICC presents temporary exhibitions. Its first show will be "The Mirage City - Another Utopia," on display from 19 April through 13 July. It consists of an interactive model of a utopian community designed by Arata Isozaki. ICC also houses a theater, screening films on 20th-century technology-based art (such as the work of television artist Nam June Paik), and an electronic library of images chronicling the development of media art.
While a media art museum may be a novelty, artists have always experimented with new media. Alan Rath, an artist and MIT-educated engineer who recently displayed a series of programmed, robotic sculptures at Otso Gallery in Helsinki, Finland, cites the use of welded steel by David Smith after the Industrial Revolution, and the use of the printing press by Albrecht Dürer in the 15th century, as evidence of an historical tradition of experimenting with emerging technologies.
