Visitors might be surprised by what they'll find in the gallery portion of the sixth annual Digital Salon, an international exhibition of new media art opening Monday at New York's School of Visual Arts.
Of the 60 works on display in the school's Visual Arts Museum, 13 resemble the more traditional forms of sculpture and installation -- perhaps a welcome sign to Manhattan's skeptical art world, which often dismisses digital art in general as "uncollectible" or "undisplayable."
"People need to realize that digital art isn't just about pointing and clicking any more," says Kristen Solberg, one of the six jurors of the exhibition and the director of operations for the SVA graduate computer art department. "Now artists make digital-based work that has physicality and texture. They're not just creating screen-based art."
Indeed, instead of encountering rows of beige computer terminals flashing pixelated images or a series of framed Photoshop compositions hung side by side on a wall, visitors will witness and interact with work that's more physically complex than what's been presented in the past.
In 1993, for example, the first incarnation of the Digital Salon showcased digitally manipulated photographs; last year, high-concept, low-bandwidth Web sites and CD-ROMs took center stage.
This year, viewers will see work like Tammy Knipp's "Case Study 309," which was also presented at this year's SIGGRAPH. The piece is a 20-by-30-foot metal and plastic construction that resembles a torture chamber. Viewers lie on a rolling bed-like platform, directly underneath a large video screen, to activate the piece's kinetic movements and trigger its jarring soundtrack.
Another notable work is Michael Mateas and Marc Bohlen's Office Plant #1, a robotic tulip that blooms. One of the more unusual pieces, For Mona Lisa, is a wall-mounted installation by Jon Berge, Michelle Lach, and Chris Yoculan. It is made of birchwood, paper, and bronze, and embossed with Braille. An audio CD is programmed to start playing when a viewer walks within one foot of the piece, resulting in an aural and textual interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting. But are these sculptures or are they digital art? The answer is both, according to Bill Jones, editor of Artbyte, a Manhattan publication that chronicles the budding digital art scene. He believes the blurring of boundaries between traditional and digital art forms is a natural outgrowth of technology's ubiquity.
"Even if non-digital artists or curators subscribe to the philosophy that art isn't based on technology, the reality is that the world today is," Jones said. "No artist can reflect on the world accurately anymore without engaging in technology itself."
Digital art purists, have no fear: More "traditional" computer-based artworks are on display in the Digital Salon's gallery exhibition as well. Andrew Heilner's digital prints show the island of Manhattan replicated and arranged as microbes under a telescope. Patricia Espinosa's CD-ROM Meta-Fly allows users to experience sight and movement from the perspective of a fly. Margaret Dolinsky's surreal Dream Grrrls is an Immersadesk/CAVE virtual reality environment.
Programming for the Digital Salon also includes screenings of 35 short computer animations. Seventeen Web sites were chosen for "display" as links on the Digital Salon's home page as well, and will be accessible at computer terminals at the Visual Arts Museum. Among these is Douglas Davis' Metabody. Davis was the first artist to have a digital art piece in a museum collection, when New York's Whitney Museum bought his Web-based work, The World's First Collaborative Sentence in 1994.
The 60 gallery pieces will begin a European tour in January, and negotiations are underway to display the Digital Salon in Asia next summer.
