ART : Computer Art’s Not So Nerdy Anymore

Computer art used to look like a nerd at a party. Too doggedly earnest, too klutzy, too frankly unartistic, it seemed fated to stand around awkwardly in a shirt with a plastic pen-protector while everyone else was wearing black leather.

During the past few years, artists have been using computers in more sophisticated ways that frequently involve subtle layering and repetition of imagery. Yet the “garbage in, garbage out” truism remains as valid for computer art as for any other computer-generated product. There is no electronic way to compensate for an artist’s lack of sensitivity or imagination.

The temptation among users of today’s increasingly refined software is to fall under the spell of an amazing variety of options--dazzling ways of recombining, recoloring, distorting and repeating imagery--without having a clear creative agenda. On the other hand, when an artist has a worthy idea requiring the kind of grunt work only a computer can do, it can make a splendid silent partner.

Coincidentally, two concurrent community college exhibits--”Collaborations: The Computer as Assistant” at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana (to Feb. 23) and “Digitized Images” at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa (to March 3)--offer a chance to see a range of work by 11 California artists.

At Rancho Santiago, the most fully resolved pieces are Eudice Feder’s abstract drawings, made with the assistance of a computer language called SIMULA and drawn by a drum plotter equipped with four felt-tip color pens. Using only ultra-thin straight lines, variously aligned and clustered, Feder achieves delicate moire effects--blue-and-rose curves of color with a blurred, wavy appearance--and radiant minimalist patterns that poetically mirror the natural qualities suggested by the some of her titles: “Pillar of Smoke,” “Arctic Flame,” “Wild Wind.”

Michael Johnson combines his own photographs with postcards and various offset-printed materials, combining elements of Southern California landscapes with famous works of art in ink-jet “paintings” on canvas. These are really electronic collages, created with software that composes and rearranges visual data stored in the computer as digital information.

The big, garishly colored canvases have something of the off-register blurriness of the cheesy painting reproductions sold in dime stores. Johnson turns this built-in liability to good advantage in “Jupiter Startles Leda” (a reference to the Greek myth in which the god Jupiter comes to Leda disguised as a swan), in which bits and pieces of imagery create an unreal world of acid colors and multiple reflections.

Deborah Sokolove Colman uses laser- and ink jet-printing to create identical copies of a single image, which she uses as the raw material for constructions pieced together out of industrial scrap materials.

In “Yearcycles,” the image of a tree repeats with subtle color changes on four copper squares--one for each season--held together by tiny rings. On the back of each square, Colman attaches a brief poem evoking sensory aspects of the season. Perhaps in future projects Colman’s sensitivity and craftsmanship will lead her to visual imagery offering more substance and surprise.

At Orange Coast College, the emphasis is on the ways computer treatments of imagery can either repeat it in ever-changing sequences or render it more indistinct and ambiguous.

In Carol Flax’s hands, family photographs are altered on a computer-graphics paint system to present multiple, coloristically varied views of the same person or object. Flax still seems to be figuring out what she wants to do with her new toys, and it isn’t always easy to tell whether her approach is conceptually based or just dreamily intuitive.

Joel Slayton’s “image-processed” video portraits veer in and out of recognizability, sometimes looking relatively lifelike and sometimes frankly punctuated with pixels, the little squares that compose the image. In a statement printed in the accompanying brochure (which neglects to supply a checklist and titles for illustrated works!), Slayton explains that he is playing with “notions of information identity and media appearance”--in other words, with the amount of visual information the viewer needs to make sense of an image, and with the ways people’s identities come across on TV.

Donna Westerman marries computer-derived imagery to the unlikeliest and most domestic of crafts--sewing. In her color Xerox piece, “Julie of the Wolves,” separately printed images of wolves crowd the face of a woman who looks like an Eskimo or Inuit tribeswoman. Tiny embroidered wolves, stitches and loose bits of thread give the piece an introverted and vulnerable look.

There is a welcome aura of restlessness and experimentation in these works, even if not all are successful. When the pieces seem deficient, the problem is generally too much trust in the powers of the computer god and seemingly insufficient input from the artist.

At Rancho Santiago, for example, Christa Schubert’s busily layered black-and-white geometric patterns hardly appear to go beyond a basic exploration of the graphics capacities of the computer programs her husband is credited with devising for her. Similarly, Neil Chapman’s distortions of videotaped images of the human face don’t break out of a cramped formula, and Charlotte Myers’ industrial landscapes seem relatively predictable treatments of compressed and expanded space.

Susan Felter’s and Joan Salinger’s works at Orange Coast deliberately suggest the look of commercial art (video games, neon, advertisements) in lightweight-verging-on-cutesy guises. But the process of figuring out how to reflect the popular imagery of our era without co-opting its mind-set is part of the ongoing challenge of computer art.

“Collaborations: The Computer as Assistant” remains through Thursday at Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery, Building C, 17th St. at Bristol in Santa Ana. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, and 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday. Information: (714) 667-3177. “Digitized Images” is on view through March 3 at the Orange Coast College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road in Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, evenings by appointment. Information: (714) 432-5039. Both exhibits are free.