Several hundred digital art mavens descended upon the San Francisco Art
Institute last Wednesday evening to celebrate "Telematic Connections:
The Virtual Embrace," a travelling exhibition that explores artists' use
of the global communications network.

The show, which was curated by Steve Dietz of the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, features 40 works by 25 artists, including Ken Goldberg,
Eduardo Kac, Lynn Hershman, Victoria Vesna, and the Bureau of Inverse
Technology. About half the works are world premiers, said Dietz, and
many of the others are "classics" which are rarely seen.

The cerebral title, derived from the work of artist and theorist Roy
Ascott, hints at the careful research and theory that Dietz has woven
into the show.

"Through these various media," Dietz writes in the exhibition program,
"the exhibition presents the ways in which artists use technology and
the Internet to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global
consciousness and the dystopian consequences of our collective embrace,
willing or not, of computer mediated human communications."

On one wall of the concrete, bunker-like gallery is a beautifully
constructed time-line of telecommunications and networked art,
stretching back all the way to the 1920s. And in an unusual twist,
gallery visitors can add their own events and commentary to the list.

The artworks are divided into four "zones": "Tele-Real," "Datasphere,"
"Tube Telematics," and "Victorian Internet."

But for better or for worse, the opening reception was so popular that
many visitors had a difficult time seeing the full scope of the show.

Outside the gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Benjamin
Weil was seen trapped in a swarm of cocktail-wielding art patrons.

"It seems like an interesting show," he said to me, "but I can't look at
it. It's too crowded!"

When I caught up with him later on in the evening, however, he had
trouble containing his excitement. "Have you seen 'Mori'?" he asked,
referring to the collaboration between Ken Goldberg and Randall Packer.
"It's scary!" he said. "Totally amazing."

Visitors enter "Mori" (1999) by ascending a pitch-black spiral ramp,
guided only by a thin stripe of white light running along the wall. At
the top of the spiral is a small chamber, filled with the sound of a
deep, loud rumbling. It's the sound of an impending earthquake, derived
from real-time data of the Hayward Fault's movements – the tectonic
time bomb which could one day level the San Francisco Bay Area. One has
the sense of standing just above an angry sea of rock and lava.

Downstairs, in another darkened room, lies Eduardo Kac's "Teleporting an
Unknown State" (1996/1998). A pot of earth sits on a pedestal. Inside
the earth is a single seed, which receives light in a rather dystopian
fashion: not from the sun, but from a video projector suspended above.
Visitors send light via the Internet to enable the seed to
photosynthesize and grow. The work picks up on Ken Goldberg's 1995
"Telegarden" (also included in the show via the Website) – a garden in
Austria that grows or dies based on the actions of Internet users, who
can plant seeds and water plants via a robot arm.

At a lecture and panel discussion after the reception, Goldberg said his
role as an artist is partly to place "a warning out there against
optimism… For me (Mori) is a response to optimism or vanity about
technology."

He said many visitors to "Mori" ask him, "Is it live?" – whether the
rumbling comes from the actual movements of the fault-line. He said
he's more interested in the question: "How do you know, and does it
matter?"

One of the artworks premiering at the exhibition is "Bang Bang," by the
Bureau of Inverse Technology. The piece pulls video from cameras
positioned in areas of political conflict around the world. Noises, such
as explosions, trigger the cameras to record a few seconds of video. The
video is then compiled from the Internet and projected into the
exhibition space.

After the panel discussion, someone in the audience commented, "This
kind of show is a first clue that the Earth is developing a nervous
system."

Author Jon Ascott, ever the futurist, replied from the panel: "A massive
change is taking place. Maybe not a global brain, but new kinds of
thinking and later new kinds of bodies." A few minutes later he
continued: "Cyberspace is a rehearsal for nanotechnology. When the
pixels become molecules… then the museum will really have to rethink
what it is."

Gazing around at the auditorium, however, one couldn't ignore the
feeling that this exhibition had gotten something right. What brought
out so many people? No doubt the location played a part – the art
school launched an undergraduate degree in digital media six months ago,
and is said to have 50 Macintosh G4s with views of the bay.

But the buzz also suggested that the public is starting to catch on to
digital art – perhaps in anticipation of SFMOMA's upcoming major show
"010101: Art in Technological Times." Another factor is Ground Zero, a
"cultural incubator" which launched last fall in Silicon Valley and
sponsored the reception.

"We're interested in the magical intersection of art and technology,"
said Ground Zero director Beau Takahara. "We thought it was very
important to sponsor this, get people out, get the word out, and build a
community around this."

Jane Metcalfe, the founder of Wired Magazine and a board member of
Ground Zero, was also at the opening. "I think this particular exhibit
deals with human connections," she said, "and therefore might be of
particular interest to a non-technical public. So I'll be very
interested to see what the result of this show is, and whether people
respond to it or not."

+ + +

"Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace," was organized by
Independent Curators International (ICI), and will travel to the
following cities:

San Francisco Art Institute
February 7 - March 24, 2001

Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
May 5 - June 30, 2001

Austin Museum of Art
July 20 - September 18, 2001

Atlanta College of Art
October 11 - November 25, 2001