While the visitors at Siggraph busy themselves with the legerdemain of the lamascope and other emergent technologies, the "LA Digilante" exhibition at the Museum of Art Downtown Los Angeles wants to tell the flip side - the digital arts' distinctly low-fi, fugitive history. The month-long retrospective, which opened Tuesday just blocks away from the massive computer-art festival, provides a counterpoint to hype by highlighting the decade-long struggle of LA new-media artists to get into the spotlight.
The Digilantes, a loose collective of digital artists living in LA, started in 1984 as an effort to "embarrass art galleries and academia about digital art - to show them their own aesthetic palette was limited," says Digilante founder Michael Masucci. At the time, new-media work was a "bastard art that nobody recognized," Masucci recalls. "The only way it could be recognized was [if] it was self-exhibited."
In that spirit, the group held guerrilla expositions in attics and garages, aggressively acting to bring both attention and legitimacy to the digital medium. For one of the first "online chats" in 1987, the Digilantes hosted a radio program with Arthur C. Clarke (from his home in Sri Lanka) in which listeners could call in questions, and the group would send the text by modem and read the author's response on the air. Though a single question-and-answer exchange could take more than 20 minutes, the Digilantes wanted to "show the inevitability" of digital conversations, says Masucci.
The show is constructed as a time line of the group's work, and while the initial work "is obviously crude," says Masucci, "you see a maturation in the art and a maturation in the tools." Some of the work may inspire nostalgia, like artist Michael R. Wright's ASCII color portraits, fashioned from strips of computer paper with the "tractor feet" perforations left on.
In a sense, the show attempts to separate the hard-scrabble history of digital art from the new mythology. "A lot of the momentum is being taken by Pixar," Masucci says, "but there's a whole aesthetic that has been worked out. [Digital art] is not just Toy Story."
With a clear chronology of work, it's evident that affordable technology was able to radically reshape the aesthetic vision. When it was introduced in 1990, the Video Toaster, a video compositing console that ran off a Commodore Amiga system, handed artists high-quality production capabilities for US$6,000.
"The Toaster suddenly gave us capabilities we couldn't even dream about the year before," says Masucci, who runs video-art production studio EZTV. "It still does things faster than AVID," a modern editing terminal.
By delineating the development, the show also hopes to legitimize the market for it. "You don't see a lot of [digital art] in SoHo," exhibiting artist Victor Acevedo says. "As long as it's been around, you don't see it in the galleries ... or the marketplace."
Acevedo says the absence of a market has blocked the ascendance of a new-media "star" artist. "There is no digital artist with the stature of Schnabel or Basquiat ... not because the work isn't good, but the structure of the marketplace isn't there," says Acevedo. "We're looking to create a space for people to rise to the top."
But as with any new technology, the culture has to acclimate first. "It took 150 years for photos to be acceptable as a viable fine-art artifact," Acevedo adds. "I hope it won't take that long for [digital art]."
