Radial Entity, by Dennis Miller

From Galápagos, by Karl Sims

Karl Sims's Galápagos (DeCordova) both illustrates evolution and tests out interactivity. Galápagos consists of twelve computer screens, each wired to a platform and each displaying a cyber entity that is a unique combination of shape, rhythm, motion, and color. By stepping on the platform for a screen, the viewer selects an entity to fill all the screens with its progeny; for example, you might generate a mostly pink "species" by selecting to reproduce the pinkest entity in each generation. The success of this interactivity, though, depends on circumstance. If there are a lot of kids jumping on and off platforms, interactivity will deteriorate into interference, and natural selection will devolve into channel hopping. If, on the other hand, you have the chance to pursue your preferences down through the generations, you may find that interactivity is an unexpected route to the slow time of aesthetic contemplation.

At Boston's Computer Museum, the festival highlighted Rapid Prototyping (RP), a technology with increasing uses for industry and an obvious if not irresistible appeal to the artist. Sometimes known as "3-D printing," RP lets you model a desired object using CAD (computer-aided design), then materialize it via an RP printer in a medium such as plaster reinforced by epoxy. In other words, with RP, between the conception and the act there falls no shadow (only a fair amount of CAD). If you ever enjoyed making Xerox copies of your body parts, think of how much fun you'd have making 3-D copies of your whole body, as Tim Anderson did in the pile of replicas he calls Human Barrel Of Monkeys. Michael LaForte, another RP artist, uses the technique to clone the odds and ends of the real world such that they take on an otherworldly pallor. His radiator pipe and fire hose, for example, are like washed out ghosts of real things, waxen simulacra of themselves.

Ajna 3, by Michael Rees

The RP sculptor Michael Rees avoids the representational route altogether, however much the firms whose resources he borrows might like him to crank out recognizable shapes for purposes of publicity. Rees, who sculpted for fifteen years before starting to work with RP five years ago, is aware both of RP's danger (its rendering traditional skills unnecessary) and its promise (that of democratizing sculpture). As he puts it, art, under the impact of the computer, "may be dying but also it may be stepping out of its intellectual ghetto." As in Ajna 3, Rees's works are biomorphic in the broadest sense, exploring fantastic and sometimes slightly monstrous anatomies, and then occasionally dissecting them. His sculptures are like stand-alone special effects, leaving the viewer to piece together in imagination the worlds of which the sculptures are a part.

Much of the Boston Cyberarts Festival was simply fun, although certain pieces did seem to keep determined vigil against the possibility of humor. Denise Marika's Recoil (Yezerkian Gallery) is a video of Marika crouching, naked, as she is bombarded by miniatures of herself. You can't help but wonder why she doesn't duck instead of making herself a sitting target, or fling one of the figurines back in the direction it came from, or at least rename the work in accordance with what it really seems to signify: self-torture. There is an art-world preference for the solemn and the serious that some artists seem cautious about defying. Alexandros Psychoulis (Lionheart Gallery) has built a punching bag that knows when you hit it and even vocalizes reasons you might have done so: "for the guy that cheated on me," "for your insinuation," "for endless comparison." The talking punching bag is a great idea, but it might work better far from the conceits of the art world -- in an amusement park, say, where it could include a broader set of responses and noises.

Jen Hall points out that developments in technology, including its commercialization, have far outstripped the resources of critical discourse about art. She asks how the Boston Cyberarts Festival can correct a situation in which discussions among art students about digital work tend to end with a vapid, "It looks good." Hall's question is entirely apropos, but then, why shouldn't critical discourse play catch-up? The discourse of postmodernism has long since begun its seemingly irresistible slide into dogma. Cyberart is a kind of fresh start, giddiness and all. The critical ideas that are relevant to cyberart will have a chance to prove their worth when today's intellectual gridlock has eased up a bit. An event like the Boston Cyberarts Festival can't help but move the process along. George Fifield, the chief organizer of this year's festival, has scheduled the next one for Boston in 2001. In the meantime, for further study, there's always the national cyberfestival -- at stock markets and movie theaters near you.