Alex Galloway: Your show "Through the Looking Glass"
(http://www.voyd.com/ttlg/) premiered in April at the Beachwood Center
in Ohio, and it continues today in an online form. Can you talk about
how this show was different from recent online exhibitions like Steve
Dietz's "Beyond Interface" or the ZKM's "Net_Condition"? In what way
were you refining or breaking from that exhibition model?

Patrick Lichty: Many of the exhibitions that I have seen in the recent
past seeking to represent the genre of technological art has either
tried to objectify net.art (ZKM), or create a virtual gallery (the
Walker's Art Entertainment Network, Gallery 9). Through the Looking
Glass as an exhibition, largely because of its audience and pedagogical
function, had to incorporate physical and virtual components.

There have been a number of attempts to integrate numerous electronic
genres within the "gallery" space in this era where the ephemerality of
the art object is being pushed even further than that of installation
and video art. However, in the case of Through the Looking Glass, this
kind of exhibit was the first of its kind in Ohio, and possibly one of
the first of its kind. It sought to show technological work in many
genres simultaneously as to surpass the preconceptions of the audience.
We even had neon and weaving (W. Logan Fry feels that weaving was one of
the first digital programming languages), in the context of technology.
The patron coming in looking for "computer art" (and we had a lot of
those) got shaken up a bit.

Lastly, although the Beachwood Center is technically a public
institution, let's be honest in saying that it's a very small one.
Through the Looking Glass is a critique of the arts in transition. I
would have never been able to have this show in a larger space as
quickly, as the logistical red tape would have kept it in committee. It
reflected the rapid change inherent in the current digital culture, as
well as the grass-roots nature of many of the technological arts. If I
could have put forth a little more money, I could have put together the
show in a storefront in Nevada. The rules in this time of transition are
still being laid out, and the excitement at this time is that someone
engaged with the arts community who has a bit of time and knows the
media channels can actually pull off an international art exhibition in
someplace like the Beachwood Center.

However, as the technological genres become more prominent, the larger
institutions will likely come to dominate this area of curation, and
shows with quality bodies of work like Through the Looking Glass has
will become less likely in smaller spaces. For now, it seems that the
playing field is still pretty flat.

AG: Can you describe one or two particular artworks in Through the
Looking Glass that resisted the physical exhibition space?

PL: Well, all of the virtual pieces did, because we had eternal problems
with the Internet connections, and I was one of two in the entire group
working on the show who was capable of dealing with those problems. That
was a critique in itself.

Jenny Marketou's SmellBytes, while a fine piece, couldn't get set up due
to more tech problems.

The more "resistant" pieces that did show were the CD-ROM pieces, like
Calin Man's "The Golden Virus" which was a story about a computer virus
that gave you three wishes. The style and delivery of the piece were
rather abstract (yet quite engaging), so the larger audience didn't know
what to make of it most of the time. The "resistance" per se seemed to
be a function of technology than content.

AG: You're an artist as well as a curator. What work are you producing
these days?

PL: That's a tough one to define, because it's tough to reduce my work
by genre. I considered Through the Looking Glass a work, in a way. I
work in a lot of genres, from robotics to net.art to video to generative
sound to text (which is what I consider my critical work).

So, here's the recent work, and what's coming. "Grasping at Bits–Art
and Intellectual Control in the Digital Age" was a textual
installation/hyperessay commissioned by the Walker for the Art
Entertainment Network show. The title is pretty self-explanatory, and it
dealt with my idea that we communicate on many concurrent levels of
narrative in this day and age, even in sound and image. Grasping at Bits
had at least 3-5 levels of structure in the piece at any one time, and
it left you to build own narrative through this amorphous structure. I
was really surprised that Ars gave it a Mention, though.

There will be some Ebay work very soon.

In October, I'll be doing a correspondence for Creative Time's Daily
Dispatch, which I'll be opening up to the Rhizome community. No one's
reflected on the net.art community's thoughts on the pandemic, and I
thought that this would be a good opportunity to speak about it.

Earlier this year, there was a piece that dealt with my experiences as a
visually impaired artist, entitled "The Way I See It," which was a
net.art reflection on my progressive loss of visual acuity. It was a
commission for an eyeglass company in the UK, but they still haven't
released it.

Graphics was my first medium, neon my second, and video my third. I
expect a Haymarket Riot video out by the end of the year. There are two
to go, one dealing with video game culture, and the other with corporate
hegemony.

Just finished part of the Site Unseen #100 with Rhizome and MTAA, where
I'm being forced to do something in realspace and represent it on the
computer. I think I'll go to the Circle K and get a block of Ice and
shoot time lapse photography.

There is my usual baby, the "Grid" installation which is an
architecturally-based generative audiovisual environment that seeks to
change the character of the environment through real-time sound and
imagery created by the movements of the particpants in the space where
it's located. Through the Looking Glass was the last time I showed it.
I'm talking with Greg Little about having a 3D-based installation
that'll merge two worlds and create a sonic terrain from that
intersection.

AG: In closing, since net.art is gaining greater attention, what are
your concerns for the future for technological art?

PL: I'm concerned about reductivism in the technological arts in light
of shows like the Whitney. In short, when people went to the Through the
Looking Glass show looking for technological art, they expected to see
computers. Now that net art is catching on, I want to make things that
don't just have hyperlinks or even fit on the WWW. Technological art
isn't just about computer art that sits on the web, only to be viewed on
a browser. That's three levels of specificity. There's a lot of
potential yet in the Web, but in many ways it's time to expand beyond it
into information devices and wireless, among other genres. I'll be
curating a show next year that foregrounds PDA, Pocket PC, and WAP art.
It's the job of artists to try to surpass the boundaries and
expectations that are inscribed upon them, and I'm not always
successful, but one has to try, right?