<nettime> Artists and Industry, Unite!

[scot mcphee <scotm@cybernetics.com.au>]

A note from scot mcphee:

   Art offers its arse-end up for commerce. So what's new?

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 From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,39767,00.html

Artists and Industry, Unite!  
by Jason Spingarn-Koff  

2:00 a.m. Nov. 1, 2000 PST 

High-technology artwork is finally gaining acceptance in the art
world, but making it isn't getting any easier.  

That subject will be among those discussed at this week's ".art
frontiers" conference in Menlo Park, California. An impressive lineup
of artists, high-tech executives, and cultural heavyweights will
discuss past and future partnerships between art and industry.  

"We did a lot of focus groups to see what the needs of artists working
with new technology are," said Elise Bernhardt, executive director of
the New York art space The Kitchen, which is sponsoring the event.
"Everyone said, 'What we want is more access to the equipment, more
access to engineers, and more collaboration.'"  

The two-day conference, which begins Thursday, wraps up a series of
meetings The Kitchen held earlier this year in New York and at the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They are funded by the Ford
Foundation. 

The conference is being co-hosted by GroundZero, a new Silicon
Valley-based "art and technology network" that wants to serve as an
incubator for artistic projects.  

"We see that the tools are pretty sophisticated and artists are aware
of the tools," said Christina Yang, The Kitchen's director of media
arts programs. "We want to put artists and industry together to push
both of those fronts."  

At the Stanford Research Institute International in Menlo Park,
venture capitalists and executives will go head to head with leading
curators, collectors, and artists in a series of public panel
discussions.  

The panelists form a laundry list of who's who in the field, including
Adobe co-founder John Warnock; Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess; Xaos Tools
founder Michael Tolson; encryption expert Whitfield Diffie of Sun
Microsystems; digital art pioneers Michael Naimark and Paul Kaiser;
and author Stephen King.   
Topics range from "The Artist as Entrepreneur" to "The Entrepreneur as
Artist?" -- featuring venture capitalist and video art collector Dick
Kramlich, contemporary artist Jeff Koons, and Wired magazine
co-founder Jane Metcalfe.  

The "Subversion or Promotion?" panel will feature Internet artists who
exploit the language and look of dot-coms, such as online pranksters
RTMark and Etoy. The moderator will be Jon Ippolito, a curator at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York and one of the leading proponents of
online art.  

For proof that not all art and technology partnerships have happy
endings, participants will want to see the "Post Interval: What's
Next" panel. It explores the recent demise of Interval Research, Paul
Allen's celebrated art and technology think tank.  

For proof that technological art is still in the eye of the beholder,
Gerfried Stocker, director of Austria's Ars Electronica festival, will
discuss the "sperm racing" exhibit at this year's exhibition in Linz,
Austria. 

"I'm not sure I've ever attended a conference with such a strong mix
of art people and business people," said SFMOMA curator Benjamin Weil,
who will speak at Friday's "Redefining Reach" panel.  

"I hope that the crowd that attends this will have real discussions,"
said Weil, "not one of these boring panel discussions where people
half fall asleep and no questions get asked. The spirit of experiment
should guide over this event."  

The ".art frontiers" conference was planned to coincide with a second
local symposium on digital art, organizers said. At Stanford's
Attraction Distraction: Perceptual Conditions of Digital Art, on Nov.
4, Bill Viola and other art luminaries will discuss interactivity,
aesthetics, teaching technology and "the art of the screen saver."   

Related Wired Links:  

Blurring the Lines of Digital Art  
Oct. 23, 2000 

Die, Capitalist Desktop Pig  
Oct. 13, 2000 

Browsing for a Better Design  
Oct. 11, 2000 

Net Art With a Groove  
Sep. 27, 2000 

Putting the Art Back in Ars  
Sep. 9, 2000 

Controversy Rages at Arts Fest  
Sep. 4, 2000 

Finnish Touches on New Media Art  
Sep. 2, 2000 

Copyright  1994-2000 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved. 



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