Forget those millions of colors, gigabytes of memory, stacks of CPUs and fancy 3-D renderings: New York City's latest digital art exhibit is strictly a 512-Kbyte thing. MacClassic, opening 6 September at Manhattan's Postmaster Gallery, brings together 13 digital artists, designers, and hackers to create art and installations using ancient Macintosh computers.
"Digital art is immaterial - it doesn't have a physical presence except on a screen, but at the same time all these works are connected to specific hardware and software," explains Tamas Banovich, curator of the exhibit. "I wanted to do something really simple that refers back to the computer itself and deals with its physicality, the computer's meaning as an object."
Although he describes himself as "not very interested in technology," Banovich was fascinated with what he calls the young new breed of intelligent artists and hackers weaned on Macintoshes. To get their perspectives on their cultural icon, he tracked down a diverse group of digital creatives - including the creators of jodi.org; HotWired designer Erik Adigard; David Karam of Post Tool design; Ervin Redl; and Terbo Ted - and figuratively presented them with an archaic Macintosh, from a 512-Kbyte machine up to the MacClassic.
The pieces that emerged range from a Mac that is painted like a canvas, to a slide projector controlled by and projected onto a Mac, to a Mac robot, to simple games and mini-programs. All the pieces are challenged by the restrictions of 10-inch, black and white monitors, and the fact that the ancient computers had little to no hard drive. (As Banovich puts it, "You have to write really good code to fit in a 512K computer.")
The artists, for their part, were intrigued by the prospect of reviving old Macs as a new medium - what Adigard calls the "saint and martyr" of computers to which today's digital designs trace their roots. (Several of the artists had also participated in a previous Postmaster digital art show from last year, Can You Digit.)
"I've wanted to do a show with obsolete technology for a while," says David Karam, who contributes a type of "advanced Tamagotchi" program to the show. "There's a certain elegance to it because it's so unburdened by interface and the stupidity of the last five years. Everything's always on forward motion, bigger and bigger and bigger - instead of paring it down and streamlining. It gets cumbersome.
"It's good to break out of that fuzzy layered Photoshop 3-D thing and think a new way."
