Director's Statement: A Moment in Time

Anniversaries are a good time to pause and reflect on the past. Time has an uncanny way of putting things into perspective. What was once the present is now the past, the future has become the present, and yet there is still more of the future to come. The concept of Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time started with the desire to do something special to celebrate our tenth anniversary. The first New York Digital Salon exhibition was held at the New York Art Directors Club and was one the earliest exhibitions of digital art in New York. Over the past several years, the exhibition has evolved into an annual international survey of digital art. It has become more comprehensive, expanding to include prints, installations, Web sites, CD-ROMs, computer animation, digital video, essays on digital art and culture. Last year we added a digital audio and electronic music category. Each year we receive approximately 1,000 entries from all over the world. We choose several different jurors to give the exhibition a variety of curatorial perspectives, and to provide exposure for high-caliber international artists who use digital tools to create their work. The annual exhibitions generally consist of about 100 works from artists representing 15 to 20 countries. In the past we would open the exhibition in New York and then tour in Europe, starting at the Circulo des Bellas Artes in Madrid in January, and then continuing on to several other locations.

While we were pleased to see that the exhibition had matured, it was also this stability that prompted us to do something different this year. While the number of entries continued to grow, there was beginning to be a group of core artists whose work, regardless of the jury, ended up in the show every year. The primary idea behind the New York Digital Salon is to promote the art form and not the careers of a small group of artists. So to celebrate our tenth anniversary, we decided to do something unique.

Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time represents a significant departure from our normal format. The year 2001 saw major museum exhibitions of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. We were encouraged by the increase of public exposure that digital art was receiving. However, during our research, we also learned that digital art exhibitions in major museums were not being planned for the 2002/3 season. Also, the Whitney Museum exhibition concentrated on American artists while the Brooklyn Museum show focused on printmaking. The media also tended to treat digital art in these exhibitions as something new-an art form without a history. We knew from our ten years of exhibitions that this was not the case, and felt that the pioneers in this field, as well as important contemporary artists, also needed recognition.

And so our task began. What type of statement can we make with the tenth-anniversary exhibition that will be lasting and have a significant impact on art history? Our first thought was to do a retrospective exhibition by gathering the best work from the past ten years of the New York Digital Salon and making a large exhibition from it. While appealing at first, we were limiting ourselves to our archive and wanted to present a broader view of digital art with this exhibition. We also had done a Selected Works exhibition at the Corning Gallery in New York during the summer of 2001 that had a retrospective component to it. This exhibiton consisted of prints from the past several years, along with computer animation and a few interactive CD-ROMs.

Fig. 1.

Photo of New York Digital Salon's Selected Works Exhibition, Corning Gallery, New York, NY by Bruce Wands, 2001.

Since the New York Digital Salon has generally operated outside the established art community, we thought it would be interesting to invite curators from major museums and institutions to select the work for our...