Art World Meets the Techno World : The arts: An international group of museum directors is gathering in Seattle to ponder the technological new age and the impact on institutions.

It’s a mind-boggling task, but somebody has to do it. So 115 directors and techno-whizzes from American, Canadian and Mexican art museums are taking a four-day journey into cyberspace.

They are abandoning their board meetings, budget sessions and curatorial conferences to attend a landmark meeting, starting today in Seattle, where members of the venerable Assn. of Art Museum Directors will ponder the technological future of their institutions.

The conference, “Art Museums on the Information Highway,” is the first semiannual meeting of the 160-member, New York-based association to concentrate on advanced technology. It is also the first to invite press coverage.

The point of these breakthroughs, AAMD administrators say, is to face forward.

“We felt a need for a crash course on issues of technology,” says Millicent Hall Gaudieri, AAMD executive director. “Technological changes are happening so fast, we need to become informed about the opportunities and challenges sooner rather than later. The highway has been built. If we aren’t part of it, we will be bypassed.”

Seattle had been selected for the organization’s spring 1994 meeting before the theme was chosen, but the location is perfect for a discussion of digital technology, Gaudieri says. Microsoft Corp., the computer software giant, and its subsidiary, Continuum Corp., which has been buying nonexclusive digital reproduction rights to museums’ art collections, are both located nearby.

Even so, the conference organizers pulled off something of a coup by persuading Microsoft chairman William H. Gates to deliver the keynote address, on Thursday night at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

As for allowing the press in on the group’s normally private deliberations, Gaudieri says: “In the past AAMD has been reactive. We have reacted to issues about de-accessioning (selling artworks from museums’ collections) and to legislation in Congress. This is a great opportunity to be pro-active and to give the organization a new face.”

The conference offers enough bells, whistles and weighty discussions to intrigue technology enthusiasts and skeptics alike. Interactive displays will demonstrate laser discs, CD-ROMs and other digital products developed by eight museums. Scheduled to show their wares are the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, the Seattle Art Museum, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Panels will discuss legal and philosophical implications of information technology, current projects and plans for the future at various institutions. In addition, a dozen art museum luminaries will lecture on everything from copyright and licensing issues to “Portable Information Technology” and “Perils and Pleasures of the Virtual Museum.”

In her speech, “Close Encounters: Defensive Driving on the Digital Highway,” Marcia Tucker, director of New York’s New Museum, intends to raise broad questions about how advanced technology changes perceptions of history, economy, geography, communication, time, space, communities and individuals.

The talk is “in no way anti-technology,” Tucker says, but she plans to move beyond questions of how to get more terminals and interactive displays into museums. “I don’t think about technology in terms of upgrading, but how it fundamentally and deeply changes culture,” she says.

For Tucker, “It’s not a question of being for or against technology.” But many of her colleagues have serious reservations about the potential impact of the digital age on art museums.

“To a lot of directors, this is just video games--and a terrible compromise,” says conference chair Maxwell L. Anderson, who directs the Carlos Museum at Emory University. One of his primary concerns in planning the program was to “overcome general concern about compromising artistic standards and the ability of institutions to control the flow of information through technology,” he says.

The first speakers at the conference will address legal and ethical issues “to get the hard stuff out of way,” Anderson says. Meanwhile, interactive displays will show that “cutting-edge programs are not just being done by vendors but by the museums themselves.”

The conference “did not spring from the head of Zeus,” says AAMD president Evan M. Maurer, who directs the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The association first addressed technology in 1989, as part of a program on museum education. Furthermore, many museums have developed computer and video programs to enhance visitors’ understanding of the collections, he says.

The meeting may lead to networking and to the establishment of a standing committee on technology, AAMD officials say. But the most important long-range goal is to ensure that art museums chart their own course on the information highway.