Materials Received

confronting contemporary artists working in digital media. Cynthia Goodman, art historian and curator, curated her first exhibition of digital art for SIGGRAPH in 1982.This show led to the seminal and comprehensive 1988 show she created for the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York City and the publication of her book Digital Visions:Computersand Art (Abrams). Since that time, she has, among other things, co-directed an international technological art show in Korea and produced a CD-ROM of works in that show, called ZnfoART. Matthew Drutt is Assistant Curator for Research at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo (NewYork) and is the museum’s webmaster (Guggenheim.org).He has played a decisive role in the evolution of this museum as an important site for major recent exhibitions on art and technology. Steven Henry Madoff is the awardwinning Deputy Editor in charge of content at Road Runner, a new online service delivered by cable modem and created by the Excalibur Group, a Time Warner Company. He has long been an observer and critic of the cultural scene and the art world. He contributes pieces on culture and art to the New York Times.As executive editor of ARTNewsfrom 1987-1994 and a critic from 1981-1986, writing for TheNation, and various art magazines, he began examining the nature of digital and technological art. Below is a collection of impressions from the evening, including comments from the audience and panelists. One issue discussed by the panelists was preservation. Museums are actively wrestling with how to preserve digital work because the hardware it was created on must also be purchased and then maintained. It seems that art historians must act quickly to write about and document the current proliferation of self-published or small, independent , multimedia works so that there will be a record for the future. Matthew Drutt said that his museum, for example , has already made the decision not to publish CD-ROM catalogs of their exhibitions. Instead, artists’ CDROMs will be purchased by the museum and shown on its video wall and elsewhere at the museum. When the discussion turned to personal preferences, Cynthia Goodman confessed that, although the IBM show encompassed the breadth of all types of dipital art that either were created bv or used a microprocessor, her interest in recent years has focused on works that are interactive. Each panelist concurred that interactivity is an important aspect of what they personally gravitate toward when selecting work and mentioned wanting to “lose themselves in the work” and “lose their sense of time.” Many audience members wondered aloud about how much this preference has to do with the size and nature of the audience and questioned the validity and necessity of the artist taking this concern into the equation before creating new digital works. This consideration has traditionally been connected to the entertainment industry and conceptually is an anathema to most fine artists. Also, most artists are uncomfortable with the audience changing or having an impact on their aesthetic intentions . Steven Madoff even went so far as to say that it is essential in his area of interest, hypertext, that the author get lost and the audience create the new, temporal rendition of the work. The manipulation of the element of time is another quality he looks for when selecting work. Part of the panel’s rationale for emphasizing the importance of interactivity comes from the panelists’ perception of the loss of an audience for the visual arts in the United States. One of the panelists stated that most people’s knowledge of contemporary art ends with Renoir. Matthew Drutt described the SoHo Guggenheim’s soon-to-be-launched Artist -in-Residence Program, where artists’ works will be produced in the Guggenheim’s new digital studios on the most up-to-date equipment.When asked how the artists would be selected, he replied that they would be invited. This opened up an entirely new can of worms pertaining not only to satisfying the needs of the audience and corporate sponsor (only big name artists), but also to the melding of previous boundaries between producers’ and artists’ copyrights. The idea of the contemporary art museum as a...