Back to the Future with "BitStreams" - Whitney Museum of American Art

Art in America, Sept, 2001 by Barbara Pollack

A pair of Whitney exhibitions recently introduced viewers to today's digital art, but also raised questions about the museum's grasp of electronic possibilities.

If you're interested in the origins of digital art, go over to the Smithsonian's Museum of American History and take a look at Steve Jobs's first prototype for a desktop computer. His working model, encased in a funky shell made of oak, not plastic, is perhaps the first and best example of computer-as-art-object. More than its functional capabilities (which by today's standards seem pitiful), it conveys a time when personal computing was, like macrame and tie-dyed T-shirts, both brand new and homemade. It is an antecedent vision of the future--free of IPOs, dotcoms and antitrust investigations--filled with the potential of the information age, the promise that every American could be his or her own Albert Einstein or, for that matter, his or her own Peter Max.

By and large, this utopian spirit proved true--or so it seemed at "BitStreams," the irony-free digital extravaganza on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York last spring. "BitStreams" was not the first nor was it the only museum-scale exhibition of digital art: the Guggenheim organized a virtual reality show back in 1993, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened "010101: Art in Technological Times" just weeks before the Whitney show. But "BitStreams" will claim its place in art history as a pioneer effort to validate the wide range of art forms now categorized as new media. Organized by contemporary-art curator Lawrence Rinder with assistance from associate curator Debra Singer, "BitStreams" featured the work of 23 artists who rely in one way or another on digital technology. In addition to these visual components, 25 works of sound art were installed in a listening corridor designed by the postmodern architecture firm LOT/EK. A companion exhibition, "Data Dynamics," featuring five Internet art projects selected by new-media curator Christiane Paul, was on view in the ground-floor project space. Combined, the exhibitions offered viewers a primer on digital art that raised more questions about curatorial choices than about the works on display.

When it comes to technology, the art world has often missed the fact that the general public is exposed to a very high level of digital wizardry on a daily basis. John Klima's ecosystm (2000), the exhibition's weakest link, is a case in point. An interactive video game, ecosystm allows viewers to manipulate flocks of surrealistic creatures flying over the earth's surface. The game ostensibly incorporates information on global market conditions, such as monetary volatility. (The project was sponsored by Zurich Capital Market, which fed data about real-time market events into the art work's database every day.) Despite the initial thrill of seeing a computer animation projected on a wall, the ultimate wide-screen video presentation, only those completely unfamiliar with Nintendo 64 or Sony PlayStation could be dazzled by Klima's graphics. The thrill, if any, comes from finding a video game--gee whiz!!!--in an art museum.

A work such as ecosystm conveys a mixed message about why artists engage technological tools. Is it a pioneer spirit that leads some to abandon paintbrushes for mouse pads, darkrooms for Photoshop? Or is it merely appropriation of the latest fad? The curators of "BitStreams" would like to argue that digital technology creates a paradigmatic shift tantamount to the invention of photography. "This is a watershed moment," announced Rinder in press material, "one which will bring new, previously unimagined, forms of artistic expression, as well as new possibilities for more established forms." Despite such sweeping statements, "BitStreams" failed to prove its point. Instead, the exhibition merely demonstrated that artists, like everyone else, use computers. Once curators cede the intellectual high ground on this issue, exhibitions of digital art become indistinguishable from the range of products regularly on view at Circuit City. The problem then is how to get digital art into the traditional museum exhibition format without allowing the parameters of the institution to redefine the medium. Additionally, the Whitney is saddled with its long-standing priority of focusing solely on the contributions of American artists, a particularly artificial boundary given the borderless realm of digital art.

Digital art has myriad complexities that make it all the more difficult to define a new esthetic. Numeric code, by its very nature, infiltrates and appropriates analog information. Digital technology, for the most part created in the commercial realm for commercial applications, resists creative attempts to reformat its purpose and style. In contrast to photography, which introduced basically one tool, the camera, "new media art" encompasses many tools, such as software, Web design, digital cameras, video recorders and LED. It is a messy category that turns formalism on its ear by simulating art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, and by subverting the once sacred distinctions between these categories. In this slippery arena, a paradigm shift becomes impossible to pinpoint (which is why many other institutions, including New York's MOMA and Dia, resist setting up ghettoized new-media departments).