Light show - multimedia and interactive art, various artists, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, New York

Art in America, Sept, 1996 by Eleanor Heartney

Has Marshall McLuhan been vindicated? Has the medium finally become the message? The art world's growing romance with interactive media, virtual reality and on-line art seems thus far to confirm his theory, suggesting that the new technology is largely a triumph of form over content. "Mediascape," an exhibition of multimedia and inter@ active art which inaugurates the downtown Guggenheim's new partnership with the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, does not challenge that assessment.

Weighted heavily toward the collection of ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, which will maintain a relationship with the Guggenheim after this exhibition, "Mediascape" displays surprisingly little curatorial direction. Instead it offers a partial account of recent developments in the field. In addition, several works from the early '70s, in each case played off against a more recent work by the same artist, are included to suggest the distance Us kind of art has traveled since its infancy. The various pieces and installations are presented in a manner that is uncritical and celebratory, with occasional tribute to the democratic potential of interactivity and multimedia. The work itself suggests some less sunny readings.

The razzle-dazzle opener to the exhibition is Nam June Paik's Megatron, a whole wall of video monitors programmed to display a kaleidoscopic jumble of video and animated images drawn from Western and Eastern pop culture, travelogues, sports events and Paws own art-world history. As he has in other recent video sculptures, Paik presents a vision of a borderless, one-world culture. To this end, images from the 1988 Seoul Olympics mingle with those of traditional Korean drummers, Joseph Beuys performances and provocatively naked modern-day odalisques. Periodically, all the monitors converge to present the image of some country's national flag before returning to visual chaos. Another recurring motif is the cartoon image of a bird or fish flowing across the wall of screens in a reminder that nature respects no human boundaries.

Megatron is a mesmerizing work, and viewers tend to stand riveted in front of it before turning to enter the exhibition proper. What they find inside is somewhat anticlimactic.

Interactive and computer-based work is concentrated in the main-floor galleries, while video installations are upstairs. Among the interactive works, the most engaging is Toshio Iwai's Piano - As Image Media (1995). Recalling Kandinsky's efforts to turn sound into images, this work employs a real grand piano to create electronic music. The viewer creates a score, by manipulating a trackball, which generates points of light that travel along an inclined scroll until they hit, the piano keys, whereupon they are translated into sound. The light points continue up a vertical screen where they are transformed into crystalline visual patterns.

Though the 'scores" are relatively random, especially in the hands of first-time users, they generate pleasing sounds, providing a gram experience for users and watchers. Gratification is less in the other interactive works. Bill Seaman's Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1994-95) is a "poem generator" which allows the viewer to juxtapose fragments of preprogrammed images and text. However, the results remain as meaningless as any purely random mode of selection might have been. Jeffrey Shaw's The Legible City (1988-91) allows a viewer on a stationary bicycle to move through an urban labyrinth whose streets are defined by towering block-lettered texts providing fictional monologues by such figures as Donald Trump, Noah Webster and Frank Lloyd Wright. The speed at which one pedals and the direction one turns the handlebars control the movement through the virtual streets. The problem here is that, given the sharp angle of presentation, the words that whiz by the cyclist are all but unreadable.

Another first-floor work, Im Bereich der West-Wind-Welt (1991) by Ingo Gunther, offers a reprise of the Cold War through computer-generated images corrected from the American and Soviet media. These are projected onto a pair of fluttering flags. This work is not interactive, but the jumble of shifting images is little different than that one might see in an interactive work like Seaman's. The programmed randomness of the computer and the arbitrary choices of the viewer who pushes buttons and clicks a mouse yield remarkably similar results.

Thus, the exhibition inadvertently raises some important questions about much interactive work. How "interactive" is it really, if human choice is just another means of achieving random juxtapositions? And why is randomness so highly valued@ Seaman's poem, Iwai's music, Gunther's history and even Paik's tableaux share a deliberate flight from constructed meaning, which is normally one of the goals of human creativity.

After the spectacle of the first floor (which includes a CD-ROM reading room and a virtual-reality gallery sponsored by the Italian utility company, ENEL), the electronic and video installations upstairs seem rather sedate. Many will be familiar to gallery-and museum-goers, and the artists form a conventional (but by no means comprehensive) roster.