November 9, 2003, Sunday
ARTS AND LEISURE DESK
Digital Art's Year-Round Summer Camp
By ELIZABETH BARD (NYT) 1213 words
WALK into the Eyebeam gallery any given day and you
might think nothing much is going on. The raw brick space, a former parking
garage on West 21st Street, is cavernous without the Chelsea chic, more
workplace than showplace. The folding table by the door is manned by a few
well-dressed graduate students with laptops and cellphones. The atmosphere is
low-key almost to the vanishing point.
Low-key is certainly not how Eyebeam began. In the
fall of 2000, this small nonprofit organization for media arts introduced an
ambitious architectural competition to create a Museum of Art and Technology.
The winning design, a taffylike fold by the New York architects Diller &
Scofidio, was going to put digital art on the map and create a landmark in the
heart of Chelsea. But a fixed and enduring landmark is exactly what Eyebeam
didn't want to be.
''One of the things I'm anxious to create is an
organization that can move at the speed of culture,'' said John S. Johnson, the
founder and executive director of Eyebeam. To do this, he and his team have
turned old-school museum models upside down. The result is a hybrid somewhere
between lab, think tank and summer camp.
For Eyebeam, part of moving forward has been slowing
down. They recently sent Diller & Scofidio back to the drawing board. ''It
became clear to me after the competition,'' Mr. Johnson said, ''that we were
buying into becoming the 'museum of the 21st century,' which was exactly the
opposite of what artists needed -- and what culture needed.'' Rather than rush
to create an empty symbol, the goal is to build, literally, around the
organization's mission to make a home for artists, for the artistic process. A
new design, less flashy but equally tech-friendly, is to be introduced next
year, and construction should begin in 2007.
Right now daily activity at Eyebeam revolves around
the artist-in-residence program. Next year, eight artists will be given small
stipends and keys to the building for five months. Inside is a Candyland for
computer geeks -- all the latest technology and the production assistants to
help them use it. The premise is simple: give emerging talent unlimited access
to otherwise prohibitively expensive technology -- and let the games begin.
Mr. Johnson knows this model works; he has used it
before. In 1996, Mr. Johnson, an independent filmmaker and heir to the Johnson
& Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, founded the Filmmaker's Collaborative,
which provides postproduction and other services to independent filmmakers.
Putting artists together with new technologies runs in the family: in 1974, Mr.
Johnson's father, the sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr., founded the Johnson
Atelier, a fine-art foundry in Mercerville, N.J., where sculptors continue to
have access to materials and technical assistance. ''I grew up running around
my dad's atelier,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''I had a real affinity for the electric
atmosphere that comes out of passion and a causal environment. So many people
respond to that atmosphere of informed freedom.''
This is not just utopian fun and games. Eyebeam has
quietly become a clearinghouse for major exhibitions and prizes worldwide.
Golan Levin and Cory Arcangel, two recent residents who have worked with
sound-activated graphics and retro video games, have been selected for the 2004
Whitney Biennial. Carlos J. G—mez de Llarena and Yury Gitman's wireless road
race ''Node Runner'' recently picked up a Golden Nica, the highest honor at the
annual Prix Ars Electronica in Austria.
Contemporary-art museums like to think of themselves
as cultural fortune tellers, predicting the next ''big thing.'' Meanwhile
Eyebeam is busy getting its hands dirty supporting the trial-and-error process
involved in cultural shifts. Eyebeam's staff admits that most of its projects
do not yet have the same artistic maturity as work done in older mediums.
''Some people use this fact to disparage new-media art,'' said Jonah Peretti,
Eyebeam's director of research and development, ''but I think this is exactly
what makes it exciting. You need to be daring to be a new-media artist. You
need to experiment with tools you don't fully understand. And even though most
of the experiments fail, the field as a whole is advancing and changing faster
than any other kind of art production.''
Like the institution itself, the art coming out of
Eyebeam is hybrid, sometimes raw and more about process than product. Through
Dec. 13, Eyebeam is presenting ''Beta Launch '03,'' an exhibition showcasing
work by this year's residents. But what's in the gallery is hardly the whole
story. Projects often leave the space -- or even the state -- to make their
point. Mr. Gitman's ''Magicbike'' is a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot attached to a
mountain bike. The unit gives free Internet access wherever it is parked,
allowing impromptu connections for cultural events, emergency access or
underserved communities.
In ''1.1 Acre Flat Screen,'' Franziska Lamprecht and
Hajoe Moderegger (who call themselves eteam) bought a 1.1-acre plot of land in
Utah in an eBay real estate auction. They spent a year creating virtual schemes
for commerce and leisure on the land, which can be seen at
www.meineigenheim.org/lot/improve/, and even started a real artist-in-residence
program of their own. On Thursday at 8 p.m., they will auction the land again,
this time live at Eyebeam, to see if the plot has gained value -- as land or as
art.
The experience at Eyebeam is not always about looking
at radically new forms of art. When you first walk into ''Beta Launch'' you are
immediately drawn to a triptych of screens showing clips of war films:
''Platoon,'' ''The Deer Hunter,'' ''The Longest Day.'' The artist, Reynold
Reynolds, juxtaposes similar images from various films: the beaches of
Normandy, the damaged Vietnam vet, the shooting, the stalking, the waiting. The
format is hardly new -- the triptych is a staple of art history from
altarpieces to video art. What is new is the speed and fluidity with which the
images are gathered, edited and integrated -- an impossible task without
digital tools.
''What does this tell us about the state of our
culture?'' asked Eyebeam's curatorial chair, Benjamin Weil, who also serves as
a media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ''You have learned
to read three screens at once -- five years ago this was certainly not a given.
The most significant development here is not the art, but the fact that we have
learned to look at it.''
Despite star architects, hot artists and old money,
Mr. Johnson seems determined to keep Eyebeam slightly out of bounds. ''If we
are doing our job right we will always be viewed with skepticism by the
contemporary art world,'' he said. ''We want to challenge the idea of who an
artist is and what an artist does.''
And what happens when digital art is fully accepted?
Mr. Johnson smiled. ''We will probably move on to something else.''
CAPTIONS: Photos: A moment from Reynold Reynolds's film triptych
''Based on an Actual Event'' at the Eyebeam gallery. John S. Johnson, below,
Eyebeam's founder, wants an organization that can ''move at the speed of
culture.'' (Photo by Peter Ross)