Art on the move

The first problem is what to call it.

Digital art? That’s the popular name for art made with computers, but it falls short of describing the full range of possibilities, from works viewed on computer screens to light projections that tell stories, explore scientific concepts or fill entire rooms with kinetic images.

Consider Jeremy Blake’s seductive mixed-media digital animations -- or, as he calls them, time-based paintings. Visitors who wander into his show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sit on benches in a large, darkened gallery and watch a three-screen projection based on the bizarre gothic mansion in San Jose known as the Winchester Mystery House. Images of the rambling residence, built over four decades by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, blend with fluid abstractions and shots of movie palaces, cartoons and cowboys in a dreamlike collage of sights and sounds.

Another current exhibition, “AIM VI: Technological Pervasions” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, explores the impact of surveillance in daily life. Part of USC’s annual festival of time-based media, the show encompasses Internet projects, wireless technology, hardware design, digital video and interactive installations.

Labeling all these works “digital art” is like calling painting “oil art” or sculpture “stone art,” said Benjamin Weil, a former curator at SFMOMA who organized Blake’s exhibition and is now curatorial chair at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York. “Pretty much everything is digital now.”

What’s more, said artist Victoria Vesna, who heads UCLA’s department of design/media arts, the notion of digital art is way too 20th century. And way too limited. For adventurous artists in this field of hybrid art forms, digital technology is more than a tool, she said. It’s a medium or subject matter.

Those who work the territory tend to avoid labels or invent their own. When pressed, they suggest one of three catchall terms: “new media,” “media arts” or just “media.”

But basic as it is, the name thing is merely an indicator of the confusion swirling around a field that refuses to sit still. Art of the Digital Age may be changing ideas about what art can be, but most of the art world isn’t ready for it.

Even as kids raised on video games are turning into new-media artists, art schools are scrambling to update curricula and keep abreast of ever-changing technology. Few museums have the equipment needed to show new-media art or employ curators and conservators who are well versed in the field. Most commercial galleries are leery of exhibiting art that doesn’t have a ready market, and collectors of new-media works are few and far between.

“People don’t know what to do with it,” Vesna said. “There is no market for this work. If you look at a Who’s Who of the media arts world, nine out of 10 people are working at universities. The reason isn’t a secret. There’s no other way we can support ourselves.”

That’s beginning to change.

New-media art -- to choose one imperfect term -- has proliferated as more and more students enter art schools with portfolios of computer skills, and tech-savvy professional artists experiment with online art, robotics, virtual reality and interactivity.

“I think this will make art of the 21st century as different from art of the 20th century as it is from art of the 19th century,” said art/tech guru Stephen Nowlin, who directs the gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “That’s a statement of faith,” he added, but it’s based on 30 years of experience -- and the fact that new-media art looms large on exhibition agendas.

In Southern California, Jennifer Steinkamp -- who essentially paints moving images with light -- is creating a computer-generated installation to be unveiled in May at ACME, a mid-Wilshire Boulevard gallery. Jessica Bronson, a sculptor of moving images, is designing a large video installation and a smaller moving-text piece for a fall show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Jim Campbell, who describes himself as an electronic artist and focuses on time, memory and perception, is preparing an installation for Caltech’s stately Atheneum, in conjunction with “AxS,” an art and science exhibition opening in June at the Armory. He will temporarily replace a clock and paintings in the Atheneum lobby with illuminated moving pictures from his “Ambiguous Icons” series, an investigation of how much visual information is absolutely necessary for people to perceive images.

Artists such as these are enjoying some success in the marketplace. Steinkamp, who teaches at UCLA and is represented by L.A.’s ACME and New York’s Lehmann Maupin galleries, has sold works to such private collectors as Blake Byrne in Los Angeles, Marty Margolies in Miami and Sarah Elson in London. Paul Pfeiffer, who digitally edits photographs and film footage of Hollywood movies and sports events, has sold his work at the high-profile Gagosian Gallery in New York to clients such as the Broad Art Foundation in Santa Monica.

WHO’S EQUIPPED?

Museums are also adding new-media works to their collections. Campbell is represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley and SFMOMA. Michael Naimark, a new-media pioneer, has works in the permanent collections of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. Among recent acquisitions at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Talo/The House,” a three-screen DVD projection installation jointly purchased with the Art Institute of Chicago. Teaming up on acquisitions of easily transportable DVDs makes economic sense, though each museum must have its own equipment.

Artists also derive income from grants and commissions for special projects. Campbell has been supported by the Rockefeller, Langlois and Fleishacker foundations. Natalie Bookchin, a CalArts professor, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Christian Moeller, who teaches at UCLA, has done ambitious commissions in Frankfurt, Berlin, London and Tokyo. But for many leading figures, teaching pays the bills, provides studio space and offers a stimulating environment for cross-disciplinary exploration.

No forward-thinking art school can afford to ignore new media, but ways of dealing with it vary greatly. At UCLA, Vesna has transformed the former design department into design/media arts. At UC San Diego, a new-media powerhouse, the visual arts curriculum offers courses on such subjects as digital imaging, virtual environments and the history of art and technology, while the university’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts facilitates “the invention of new art forms that arise out of the developments of digital technologies,” as the mission statement puts it.

“At CalArts,” said painter Tom Lawson, dean of the school of art, “we are strenuously opposed to thinking about art through its media. We have absorbed this new thing into our old procedure, so that students can work in the digital art area without the ghettoization of a digital art program.”

CalArts’ photography program became “photography and media” as the school grappled with photography’s encroachment on film-based photography. Integrated media -- a graduate program run by experimental filmmaker Tom Leeser with faculty specialists and visiting artists -- was established to encourage interdisciplinary investigations. To broaden its reach beyond the campus, the program collaborates with such institutions as Eyebeam in New York and publishes an online journal, viralnet (www.viralnet.net ), that explores the social and political impact of technology.

But everything is in flux in a field where computer operating systems and hardware are constantly changing and artists must upgrade or reconfigure their work every few years to make it accessible.

“There’s a built-in obsolescence with work that’s technology-dependent,” said Bronson, who teaches at CalArts. “Conceptually, that’s kind of interesting. It means that the work is always morphing or evolving, having to change to exist.” It also means that teaching new media is not a job for professors who want to deliver the same lectures or pose the same questions year after year.

“It’s like looking at the storm as it happens,” Leeser said of his work at CalArts.

And, as Lawson noted, “Everyone teaches everyone.”

Students often arrive on campus with formidable computer skills, but they may not have what they need to express their ideas. And ideas, not technology, are the point.

“We pursue and promote the notion of content,” Leeser said, “whether the content is form-related or narrative-based. There has to be some reason to use the technology as opposed to allowing the technology to drive the work.”

CHALLENGES AHEAD

Upon leaving art school, most artists have a tough time finding exhibition spaces and making a living. It’s even more daunting for new-media artists who try to work with traditional museums and galleries. While relatively nimble institutions, such as New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art and Southern California’s Orange County Museum of Art, have dedicated spaces to new-media programs, others struggle to adapt. The high-ceilinged, white spaces designed for large paintings and sculptures don’t necessarily lend themselves to art that needs darkened rooms, projectors, DVD players, amplifiers, speakers, digital sync devices and lots of electrical outlets.

“When I talked to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego about doing a show there,” Bronson said, “my first question was: ‘What kind of equipment do you have?’ I often feel like an architect, working within an existing space with a set of limitations. I have what I think are amazing installation ideas that people have liked, but when it comes down to it, there hasn’t been the equipment or the money. So they are just models, like architects’ unrealized projects.”

Even if equipment is available, installation can be a problem. Vesna and her colleagues who designed a 2003-04 interactive exhibition on nanotechnology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art requested three weeks to set up the immensely complicated show, which called for 23 computers and 11 projectors hidden from public view.

“We got two days,” she said.

Another bugaboo is troubleshooting, Weil said, citing a colleague’s quip, to the effect that a technology show with 80% of the equipment working at any one time is about as good as it gets.

European institutions such as ZKM in Karlsruhe and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, have been in the forefront of new media, but American museums have become much more active in the last few years. Two landmark shows appeared in 2001: “BitStreams” at the Whitney and “010101: Art in Technological Times” at SFMOMA. The Whitney Biennial Exhibition included Internet art for the first time in 2000; new-media works by artists such as Blake and Campbell were in the past two editions. Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center eliminated its new-media program amid a 2002 budget crunch, but LACMA has plans to launch itself in the field. Museums such as L.A.’s MOCA also have set up digital galleries on their websites.

Part of the growing acceptance of new media is a matter of familiarity and experience. But moving pictures projected on walls are easier for museums to deal with than works shown on computer monitors. And interactivity, which breaks down traditional boundaries between artists and their audiences, remains a challenge.

“Web-based projects that you can access from your home or office make museums obsolete, in a way,” said Ralph Rugoff, director of the gallery at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. “Museums try to maintain their sense of ownership of the work, but the great thing about it is that you can see it somewhere else.”

Bookchin, who makes network-based art, has given that a lot of thought. “When galleries put a computer in their space,” she said, “it feels like an educational display or a place to check your e-mail, whereas coming upon this work at your home can be really extraordinary because it’s not a space artists usually have access to unless you are a collector.”

The onslaught of new media is such a big challenge, she said, that “it’s not clear how traditional institutions can serve it without actually changing themselves or changing the work to look more like what they do. I think that conflict will resolve itself, but maybe not in ways that we expect.”

Meanwhile, the new breed of art seems to have a life of its own. No one claims that painting and sculpture will disappear, but the digital revolution has touched visual art in profound ways that question the traditional balance of power.

“I think there should be a way for visual artists to use the network to have more of a peer-to-peer review of their work,” Bookchin said. “In the way journalists can gain visibility and work independently through blogs or musicians can gain audiences of millions without signing with a record company, artists could use these popular new peer-to-peer networks as a bottom-up way of gaining attention. It could be a parallel way of gaining visibility to the one that is so top-down right now.”

Questioning established systems is often part of being a new-media artist, Bronson said. “One thing I am inspired by is that I see students taking the power into their own hands. They are questioning the existence of the gallery system because a lot of the work exists on the Internet or it’s interactive work and it’s meant to be in a more public space,” she said.

“Being an artist in this culture is like being a guerrilla. You have to have multiple identities to survive. It’s sort of criminal to say to someone in a graduate program you are going to have to have two careers, one to sustain you and one that is your art making. But students who embrace that are more free to do what they want to do. I don’t know what a traditional artist is anymore.”

Contact Suzanne Muchnic at calendar.letters@latimes.com.