Digital Passage: The Rhizomatic Frontiers of the ZKM

Now filling the cavernous space of a renovated, turn-of-the-century munitions factory, the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, www.zkm.de), has quickly established itself as Europe's premier digital design and exhibition space. Launched in 1989 as the European center of new media research and production, the ZKM moved into its permanent home, in October, 1997, as a nationally sanctioned site for the production and exhibition of digital and electronic arts. The ZKM houses an extensive media library, a media theatre, the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics, as well as two expansive exhibition spaces, the Media Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art. These various institutes and spaces collaborate to bring together artists, performers, designers, programmers, scientists, and media specialists for the development of new interactive art projects. The ZKM has produced a wide array of complex, interactive installations by international artists-in-residence, an exciting series of artistic CD-Roms and critical commentaries, an innovative series of intermedia acoustic performances, and cutting-edge exhibitions that combine the most recent developments in digital art with historical corollaries from the collection of the Museum for Contemporary Art.

The artistic core of the ZKM are its two institutes for visual media and acoustics that offer international guest artists the opportunity to work alongside technical specialists to produce new artworks embedded in the innovative hardware and software tools designed in ZKM laboratories. The Institute for Visual Media, directed by the pioneering digital artist Jeffrey Shaw, has championed the development of interactive and virtual reality artworks. Its studios include the latest gear in digital video, virtual reality, computer graphics, and telecommunication with which visiting artists can create interactive artworks to be exhibited in the vast public spaces and on-line venues sponsored by the ZKM. Visitors have access to a digital video production studio as well as various other tech delights, from DVD development to a spectacular six-degree of freedom hydraulic simulation platform (used for flight training) to enhance experimentation with motion simulation.

This institution's bold commitment to combining creation with the subsequent exhibition of digital and interactive installation art positions it uniquely in the European arts scene. Visitors to the ZKM Media Museum are provided with the unique opportunity to traverse the history of interactive installations. Installed throughout the space are pivotal examples of interactive artworks that have redefined artistic notions of space, corporeality, sound, touch, and memory. A vivid sense of the rapid development of interactive technology is provided by the juxtaposition, for example, of two legendary installations, Lorna (1979-84), by the innovative performance and video artist Lynn Hershman, and The Legible City (1988-91), by Jeffrey Shaw. Recognized as the founding work of autonomous interactive media art, Lorna presents the case history of a woman whose world has shrunk to the size of a TV set. Through manipulation of a remote control, visitors to Lorna's environment can activate a video disc to share in her behavior that derives from 4¹ /₂ years of isolation with her TV. The distinctive interactive feature of the installation is its presentation of three different endings to Lorna's story depending on the visitor's choice of navigation through her lonely soap opera.

In contrast to Hershman's presentation of the technologically gendered subject, Shaw provides his visitors with the opportunity to mount a bicycle which takes them on a ride through the public vistas of Karlsruhe, Amsterdam, or New York. The visitor's pedaling triggers the simulation of movement on a screen through a stunning virtual space of architectonic letters whose paths reveal sublimated histories of the city. Here movement is linked to the interactivity of reading and historical memory in a way that provides a model for the visitor's passage through the Media Museum itself.

Throughout this unusually high-tech exhibition space, visitors find themselves confronted with...