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TheAestheticsof

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I Media:A Conversation with Margaret Crane, Ken Goldberg and Randall Packer

page 4: Margaret Crane/Jon Winet Burning Issuesfrom General Hospital

page 5 left: Randall Packer,Arches Music Theater

right: Ken Goldberg, visitingfaculty, te/egarden.aec.at

At the end of the 19th century debateflourished about the artistic valueof the relatively new medium knownas photography. Today, as we reachthe new millennium, the newest tech-nology to be taken up by artists-computers-are stirring a similardebate. Artists Margaret Crane, KenGoldberg and Randall Packer creatework that is viewed or producedthrough a computer. In early June,Paul Klein, the director of the SanFrancisco Art Institute's Center forDigital Media, sat down with themto discuss the aesthetics of digitalmedia. What follows is a portion ofthat conversation. If you'd like toread the entire interview log on towww.sfai.edu/cdm/mediatheory.

Paul Klein: The technical compo-nents of digital media, have trans-formed categories that are central totraditional artistic production, suchas beauty, skill, form and content.How do you ease the fears of artistsand curators who adhere to the

established boundaries and categoriesassociated with modernism?

Randall Packer: I think in a wayit's up to artists to develop new ideasand do new work that's powerful

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which shows the expressive possibilityof new media. The dissolution of theobject terrifies museum people.

Margaret Crane: I think the notionof beauty, skill, form and contentdoesn't disappear. The same thingsfor doing a painting or installationshould be kept in mind for digitalmedia. What we find in digital mediais made in the commercial world andit really doesn't have an art schooland art historical background, and Ithink it's often impoverished. If youlook on the Web or think about theworld of games and interactive CDs,they are pretty ugly and content free.I think art students with their back-ground really can bring to digital art afoundation of aesthetics and politics.

Randall Packer: I somewhat dis-agree. We have kind of a reversalwhere artists are sort of following thedevelopments that are coming fromthe industry and coming from thecommercial sector. I think that's a pos-itive thing. It's collaborative and it's anexchange of ideas and technology.

Ken Goldberg: I think there is adistinction between just a gallery onthe Web, where you're scanning in

images or making digital images withPhotos hop and other tools versus con-ceptual works that really question themedium itself. That's where you getinto the realm of more conceptualartwork which has been the ground-ing of 20th century art. I think there'sa small but growing area of digital artwhich questions it's own foundation.They're not just using it as a tool. ButI think there is still some potential forincluding the object in this realm.

Randall Packer: The transforma-

tion of how new media's impactinggalleries and museums is that the lossof the obj ect is the loss of the gallery.You're dealing with light and yourdealing with time, neither of whichreally make sense in the context oftypical exhibition space. There is acollision between how we experienceart in a digital domain and the physi-cality of exhibition space.

Paul Klein: Digital art has beenvulgar, formulaic, all effect/no sub-stance and much worse. What role do

you see for places like the ArtInstitute to motivate artists to work

more substantially with digitalmedia. Also, students tell me about"screen impotence." For some of them,screens are a distancing and contain-ment medium for images. Since muchwork you do involves screen presenta-tion, what do you think about thiscriticism?

Margaret Crane: I wish digitalmedia was more vulgar. It's seemsuptight and passionless. The vulgarityof modern life needs to be a part ofdigital media, more vibrant, morechallenging, fleshier, grittier.

Ken Goldberg: I think most cura-tors, museum goers, and artists lookat the screen and just feel nothing,no attachment. But there are tech-niques for getting the body involvedand having mechanisms at a distance

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and having installations and perfor-mances that involve digital media,but also keep the body involved.

Randall Packer: With the advent of

desktop media, the personal comput-er was designed as an office tool andthere's this medium that has come out

of something that was created inXerox Parc for the paperless office.Suddenly, it's being used to createdigital artwork. I think its veryimportant to not let the media bedominated by the desktop reality.

Paul Klein: For artists, the Internetpromised open access, globalexhibition space outside of traditionalvenues, collaborative art making andmuch more. All three of you areinvolved with art forms that use theInternet, why do you think it remainsa viable space for artists even as itbecomes more commercialized andmainstream?

Randall Packer: I'd actually like touse Ken's Telegarden as an exampleof what I think really works on theWeb. What is really exciting aboutthe Web is that it has so much to do

with the real world. It is like publicspace. The Telegarden encouragesvirtual community in an imaginativeway and it uses the garden as ametaphor for bringing people togeth-er. Also, Jenny Holzer's PleaseChange Beliefs leverages itself oninteraction, activity, and the peopleusing it.

Margaret Crane: The idea ofaudience-targeted audiences, generalaudiences, how do you speak topeople in a certain amount of time?This all works perfectly in anelectronic environment.

Ken Goldberg: Web art is some-thing that is open 24 hours a day andwill stay up indefinitely and you seehow many people are coming to seeyour work. And they'll leave com-ments. It's a great way to get a senseof how your work is being received.

Paul Klein: With digital aestheticsnow seeming to be in an ultra-realistmode, is "technology and the senses"an oxymoron? In other words, isexpressive artmaking within technolo-gy still possible?

Margaret Crane: Well, I guess I'mthinking about the Web sites my stu-dents make which I think are veryexpressive. They have an art back-ground, but they were individual,they were funny, lots of emotionalcontent as well as artistic content.

Randall Packer: In using technolo-gy, it's not really the technology,it's how the work engages peopleabout issues that is what art's allabout. But the other thing is that it isa new medium and requires a wholenew set of aesthetics and new criteriafor perception and understanding. Ikeep thinking about Maholy Nagy'swork, The Light Space Modulator,which was created in 1930. It's con-sidered to one of the first electronicworks. It must have seemed like some

mechanical thing, what does thathave to do with art? It's such anengaging, beautiful, moving experi-ence that it transcends its mechanical

apparatus and becomes artwork.

Ken Goldberg: What the digitalworld needs to learn from places likethe Art Institute is everything aboutaesthetics, about conceptual andtheoretical issues-how to bring those

into play. I've just been rereading--..David King's book on beauty andthose things are very important. Onceyou understand them you can rejectthem, but you can't just walk awaywithout understanding them.

Margaret Crane: I've been think-ing along those lines lately and Ifound myself really interested inreading about early 20th centuryfilmmakers. I'm fascinated by D. W.Griffith and Eisenstein and people Ihadn't thought about since I was anundergraduate. They were creatingthis incredible visual grammar thathas lasted, and I don't think digitaltechnology has that yet. Now it's awonderful time and we will help con-ceptualize it.

Ken Goldberg: The art world tendsto look at us as this ghettoized, freakphenomenon, and we should take thepositive out of that marginalization.We are trying to find a voice in thismedium and it's going to take sometime.

Margaret Crane is an artist whose collaborativework with Jon Winet titled Nightfall recently wasshown at the Verba Buena Center for theArts. She is a visiting artist who teaches in theNew Genres Department and in the Center forDigital Media. To view her work log on towww.pair.xerox.com/cw

Ken Goldberg is an artist and Associate Professorof Industrial Engineering and OperationsResearch at the University of California, Berkeley.He will be teaching a graduate seminar at the ArtInstitute during the Spring 1999 semester. Toview his work log on to www.ken.goldberg.net

Randall Packer is a multimedia artist and Directorof Multimedia at the San Jose Museum of Art. Heis a visiting lecturer in Digital Media in theDepartment of Art Practice at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. To view his work log-on towww.zakros.com. or to view work at the San JoseMuseum of Art log on to www.sjmusart.org

To view work created by San Francisco ArtInstitute students log on to www.sfai.edu/cdm