NEW YORK - Digital artists are taking their latest stab at the Big Apple with The Digital Salon: the School of Visual Art's 5th annual new-media exhibit. In the past, an exhibition of so-called "computer art" was sure to draw sneers from the insular New York gallery-mongers; what would it be, they might ask, but a bunch of PCs in an expensively track-lit room? Recently, however, NYC organizations such as AdaWeb and the Foundation for Digital Culture have been trying to broaden their field by supplanting "computer" with "digital." Similarly, SVA's Digital Salon (part of the school's 50th anniversary celebration) encouraged a more ambitious selection of work - although, during last night's opening, the computer projects seemed to garner most of the attention.
After receiving more than 600 entries from across the world and over the Internet, 60 artists, animators, and Web designers were selected for the final exhibit (which will be featured along with critical essays in a special issue of Leonardo, MIT's Journal for the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology). Of course, surfing online submissions proved to be a tempestuous task for the global jury. "In Finland, our jurors have to pay a lot of money to be online," says Digital Salon director Kirsten Solberg, "so if they couldn't connect to a site after a few times, they just had to say 'the hell with it.'"
As a result, the Salon's Web-based projects are high in concept, but low in kilobytes. A site called "Sampling Space" is described by its creator, Animal with No Name, as "an exercise in bandwidth economy." It features audio and QuickTime loops that are intended to play well over modems of any speed. Other sites in the exhibit are more text-based, such as the online documentary, "Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of July." The subtext for struggling digerati designers in Silicon Alley: Forget the bells and whistles of plug-ins and think about the audience.
This techno-pragmatic attitude imbues the Salon's offline works as well. Kevin and Jennifer McCoy graphed a computer monitor into a trash-picked stove for their digital video installation, "Small Appliances." "We didn't want to depend too much on computer savvy," says McCoy. Viewers maneuver a mouse over the soap-bubble screen, which triggers audio and video riffs about women and their use of technology. "Hopefully, this is homey enough so people can feel comfortable about exploring the piece," McCoy says.
Yesterday, people seemed especially comfortable staring into the tower of monitors that displayed the Salon's digital animation (22 shorts, averaging only one or two minutes in length - a telling sign of how much time and money it takes to produce even a brief piece). Many of the videos' themes deal with the frustrations of humans and their machines. In "F8" by Michael Clausen, an old man wrestles a vending machine for a bag of pork rinds. "Wonder" by Shih-Wei Wang is like a Residents-style, Really Bad Day on the Midway; a robot accordionist is flattened by a post-apocalyptic steamroller.
CD-ROM artist Jutta Kirchgeorg expresses similar views in "The Information Age," a satirical history of telecommunications that grows increasingly out of control the longer a viewer stays connected. At one point, the screen blisters with random Netscape logos or spits out lines from an anonymous hacker who alleges to know everything about the user. The message for one audience member, nevertheless, seemed lost in the medium.
"Everyone who's been online knows their information can be hacked," said Adnan Ashraf, a hypertext fiction student, "it's just the whole paranoid computer-art thing."
