Among the 1,000 pre-registrants for the Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art, taking place in Chicago today through Saturday, is the unprecedented presence of the contemporary fine art world's most respected institutions: New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.
ISEA '97 is gathering artists, curators, educators, scientists, and public-policy planners from more than 40 nations to celebrate and discuss artwork which utilizes electronic technology as a prerequisite for production.
Unlike past participants, this year's choice of speakers and presenters lean heavily away from technical concerns in their talks.
"There are few 'how-to' events this year," explains Shawn Decker, chair of ISEA '97 and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "This is a big change for ISEA that has been slowly developing over the last decade. Our programs for ISEA '97 were chosen with a focus on ideas, concepts, and theories. This is because for artists, as for people as a whole, new media is not outside their realm of experience any more."
At the same time, Decker points out, high technology is often ghetto-ized, and input from artists and academics on the evolution of computer culture is often overlooked. "Ideas from other areas, such as the arts or education, don't appear at other media-based conferences. We feel it's important to burst that bubble, so we're making a conscious effort to do so here."
Observes Christa Sommerer, an Austrian artist and professor at Japan's International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences: "ISEA '97 is very open. It's not like Siggraph, where there is a much more rigid acceptance policy for artists. Still, unlike other electronic art festivals, like Ars Electronica, ISEA is more of a forum where people actually discuss issues rather than just look at work. ISEA is a real forum. It's an opportunity for both veterans of the art world and young artists to learn about a field that's wide open, yet has been expanding and developing over the last five to eight years."
ISEA '97's honorary chair is media star Laurie Anderson. Beyond her enduring celebrity, Anderson was chosen as a symbol for the lasting power of electronic art's value beyond mere novelty. "She's not the latest, newest, hottest thing, but we admire her continuation to transcend the categories of pop and high art by creating and commenting on content in her experiments with new media."
Highlights of the symposium include appearances by keynote speakers Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, who kicks off the conference talks on Wednesday; communications attorney and Temple University professor Nolan Bowie, who speaks on issues of equal access to information; and Mexican-born performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña, who examines cross-cultural concerns as expressed in his electronic art.
The convention has previously been held in Montreal, Rotterdam, Minneapolis, Groningen, Helsinki, Sydney, and Utrecht. Changing the location each year is by stipulation of the parent company, the International Society on the Electronic Arts, hoping to change the atmosphere of the event and to allow people within that region the possibility of participating. The venue for this year's conference is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of America's foremost art schools.
So why Chicago? Conference coordinator Joelle Ration draws a parallel between the not-so-obvious choice of the Windy City and Linz, Austria, home of Ars Electronica. "It seems that these less predictable sites lend themselves to such events, and draw a critical mass," he says.
Along with the conference, the school is promoting a larger, city-wide celebration of electronic art - featuring more than 170 artists from 22 nations exhibiting at over a dozen sites throughout Chicago, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, the University of Illinois, and Chicago's Electronic Visualization Lab.
