Director's Statement: 2001: A Digital Art Odyssey

I could not resist the temptation to refer to Stanley Kubrick's landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the title of my essay this year. But apart from the obvious connection, there is a more meaningful subtext. Although this film was first released more than thirty years ago, it explored issues of computing that were far ahead of its time. The computer that ran the spaceship, HAL, was programmed with artificial intelligence beyond the level of AI we have reached today. Although voice recognition, digital control of environmental systems, and other features now exist, we are still searching for a well-behaved version of a machine like HAL. Some day we will probably see it. The other reference worth mentioning in this context is the film's famous "star gate" sequence. Through the use of slit scan, solarization, and other techniques, Douglass Trumbull whetted the appetite of the movie-going public for unique visual effects, which still seems to be insatiable. However, what does all this have to do with digital art?

Webster defines the word "odyssey" as an extended wandering or journey. In last year's statement, I declared that 2000 represented a coming of age for digital art. My predictions were indeed true, and as the New York Digital Salon approaches it tenth anniversary, our mission is very close to being accomplished. Digital art is finally ending its long period of wandering and finding a home for itself in museums and galleries, as well as on the Internet. When it comes to recognition in traditional venues, the journey is almost over for an "orphan" art form that has taken a long time-like photography, or video art-to become accepted by the art establishment. Formed in 1993 as a reaction to the lack of a print exhibition at the international SIGGRAPH conference, the New York Digital Salon's original mission was to provide a venue for digital art as it manifested itself almost a decade ago. For the first several years of its existence, the Salon was one of the few venues digital artists had available to them. This year, there so far have been three major museum shows of digital art and countless gallery exhibitions. The Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art have all brought public exposure and awareness, as well as a certain form of legitimacy, to digital art.

The appetite for new visual experience, however, remains unfulfilled. This is part of the joy of the creative experience as it relates to human nature. With the passage of time, the new becomes the familiar and the desire for "newness" arises again. The evolution of art also follows this path, and it always has been the role of the artist to provide new visions. Part of the previous resistance to digital art has been related to technical aspects. Software was far less accessible and sophisticated than it is now. There were problems with output and archival issues. The early Internet was text-based and did not support graphics, video, and audio, which we now take for granted. Part of what drew artists to work with digital technologies was a certain "newness," for lack of a better word-a set of tools that allowed them to create images never seen before and offered new ways of defining the experience of art through interactive installations, Web-based work, computer animation, and virtual reality.

When I first became involved with digital art, it was arcane. I had to create a pack of punch cards using a program called "Art Speak," drop them off at the computing center and wait an hour and a half or more to get my image back. The image shown here (Fig. 1) was done in 1976 and represents the state of computer graphics at that time. To some extent, I was intrigued by the process and the idea that I could create drawings on the computer that could not possibly be done any other way. The other crucial aspect was the potential. I knew at that time that this...