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Bits of Beauty -- Page Two (of two)
Beauty, too easily come by, too much a function of the digital technology itself, is an unsolved problem for cyberart. The twentieth century has taught us to see beauty in ugliness and in the ordinary, or to cultivate other values in art -- experimentation with its very ground rules, for example, and appreciation for the conceptual rather than only the perceptual. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp displayed an inverted urinal and challenged the art world to say why a well-designed upside-down piss pot could not be art. No conclusive answer was forthcoming. Though digital art is only now unfolding, its aesthetic is in some ways pre-Duchampian. Everything troubling and difficult is excised from art, and the ancien régime of the visual -- Duchamp would have said the retinal -- is restored to power. Nevertheless, computers do foster at least one powerful vein of resistance to retinal rule: their facility with interactivity makes for new ways to define and behave toward an artwork.
![]() Radial Entity, by Dennis Miller
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.
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.
Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. More on Technology and Digital Culture in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Harvey Blume, a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a frequent contributor to Atlantic Unbound. Images: Radial Entity, © 1999 by Dennis Miller; Galápagos, © 1997 by Karl Sims; Ajna 3, 3-D print, 11" x 6" x 9", private collection, courtesy of Central Fine Arts, New York, © 1998 by Michael Rees. Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. |
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