What I would like to evoke, about Image in general (the media-image, the technological image), is the perversity of the relationship between the image and its referent, the "supposed real"; it is the virtual and irreversible confusion of images and of the sphere of a reality, whose principle we can grasp less and less.

— JEAN BAUDRILLARD [1]

Is it live or Memorex? Is it a real or a virtual experience? As Jean Baudrillard noted more than a decade ago, the boundary between the real and the simulated, the simulacrum, is less and less distinct and is becoming more and more semipermeable, just like the mirror in Alice's looking-glass world. Artists have historically been at the forefront, blurring boundaries and crossing borders, penetrating the looking-glass, pushing the envelope with the R&D of their creative explorations utilizing new technologies, and in the process redefining the very notions of both art and artist. In our current postmodern Oz, a cyber-Toto as avatar yanks the curtain and reveals the wizard at the screen, confronting viewers with questions of authorship, physicality, identity, and space. In many of these cases, the art experience is no longer passive but requires some sort of (inter)active participation. Yet with all the hype and seduction accompanied by the dazzle of all the latest bells and whistles, many of these multimedia artists remind us that in spite of this technological revolution that we are living and breathing, a tool is after all just a tool. And the tools continue to change at hyperspeed. It's really the thought, the concept, that counts; here the journey is the destination where multimedia conveys the message. The artists presented in this chapter, and the multitude of those not included, reflect just how multi multimedia is.

When I looked up the word multimedia in my somewhat dated dictionary, I was sent off on a branching exercise, a book-flipping experience as analog precursor to the digital labyrinthine branching navigated on today's World Wide Web. First, the word is simply defined by a cross-reference: "n. same as MIXED MEDIA." So I moved on to the entry for mixed media, which in my dictionary is defined as follows: " 1. the simultaneous presentation of a series of effects in more than two media, as by combining acting, flashing colored lights, tape recordings, etc."[2] Sounds a bit retro, like a sound and light show from the 1960s. Today we've certainly come a long way from that dictionary definition of 1984. In fact, multimedia artists have been ahead of the curve of the original definition for quite some time, and the exponential technological advances that have occurred over the last thirty years have forever changed most of our definitions.

I have been following the intersection of (multi)media and contemporary art for the past twenty-plus years. My focus has been on the nonstatic (time-based) arts, following artists working in multiple disciplines, working cross-platform, creating new forms from hybrid combinations, defying the labels of definition, and inventing new languages. As a result, I have had the great privilege of knowing and working with many of the artists working in these multiple forms. My career has also been multi, or hybrid, in nature, and I have often thought of myself as a "Jill of all trades," wearing many different hats at different points in time, sometimes juggling more than one at a time. The hats have included video producer, writer, arts administrator, curator, performance artist, radio interviewer, publicist, fundraiser, video artist, collaborator/accomplice, and rabblerouser. At the root of all this work has been the role of communication, of expanding audiences, of helping more people become aware of certain ideas and issues that often aren't given adequate (if any) coverage in the mass media, which really could be perceived as monomedia. And this has often involved helping to present the independent, cutting-edge artist's voice and sensibility to a larger audience to expand the dialog beyond the cognoscenti.

First, let's rewind for a brief flashback by way of introduction to my own particular entry into multimedia. I graduated from a New England liberal arts college in 1975, where I received a B.A. in sociology and anthropology with a minor in art history and the added bonus of being certified to teach elementary school. (After all, what was a girl growing up in the fifties going to be when she grew up? My options, other than mother, seemed to be either teacher or nurse. And given that I was a doctor's daughter, I opted for the nonmedical route.) Ironically enough, my first job out of college was in multimedia as an audiovisual producer for an educational publishing company, producing filmstrips, one of the prehistoric, now basically defunct, forms of multimedia. I certainly remembered this primitive form from my own elementary school days, where frames were advanced manually by the teacher with the cue of an audio beep. By 1976, the technology had advanced enough so that the filmstrips we were producing could advance a bit more fluidly to the next frame with "inaudible beeps" propelling the filmstrip mechanically forward. Communicating something by freezing motion into static images that were then accompanied by sound soon seemed so archaic that I found my way to moving images and video.[3]

But it took another hybrid or bi experience, moving to the west coast in 1981, before I really began to synthesize and fuse my interest in contemporary art and media. I thought that California would be a two-year experiment and that I would soon dash back to the hub of the universe, a worldview illustrated by the Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover that places New York as the only place on the planet. Instead, I soon discovered there were other hubs; I stayed in San Francisco for fourteen years, where I became aware of a reversal or coastal shift of Manifest Destiny that tipped the axis between the coasts in the other direction. After all, Silicon Valley did precede Silicon Alley, even if New York still claims to be the content capital of the world. As Gertrude Stein noted, there is a there there, and the gold rush mentality of the new technology industry began there and has migrated eastward.

I first worked for the San Francisco Public Broadcasting System television station, working on many arts-related documentaries and championing the contemporary arts as a "fifth column" within the conservative programming philosophy there. While I was on a trip to New York, I learned of the upcoming New Year's Day 1984 broadcast work by Nam June Paik called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live simulcast featuring real-time intercontinental interactive performance works by multimedia artists from around the world. I returned to San Francisco and tried unsuccessfully to convince PBS executives to participate in broadcast history with the live satellite link-up; instead they decided to air reruns of Sesame Street to babysit the children of the previous evening's New Year's revelers and to run a taped version of Mr. Orwell later. Clearly, mass media, even via supposed enlightened public television, was not open enough or experimental enough for my taste, and so I soon defected to the art camp.

Before long, I found myself as the second director of the Capp Street Project, the unique site-specific artist-in-residence program begun by Ann Hatch in 1984 that graduated in 1998, merging with the California College of Arts and Crafts. During my tenure at Capp Street, from 1985 to 1987, my real education and work with multimedia artists began. For me, this experience was like going to art school, having the amazing opportunity to work with many of the country's leading contemporary multimedia artists, facilitating and being part of their behind-the-scenes process of creation. Maryanne Amacher, Mary Lucier, Liz Phillips, and Elizabeth Diller (of Diller + Scofidio) were all Capp Street artists from this time who could easily be contributors to this book (or in a sequel, as one recognizes the impossibility of being totally comprehensive in one volume). I would like to acknowledge some of the contributions of these artists (and others whose papers are not included in this book) to the multimedia realm.

Along with Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Beryl Korot, and Steina (all included in this book), Mary Lucier is from the "first wave" of women artists working in video, creating both single-channel tapes and video installations. Lucier became involved in video in the early 1970s, after nearly a decade of working in more traditional art forms such as sculpture and photography. Since 1973, she has concentrated primarily on video installation. Her early work, such as Dawn Bum (1976), was concerned with properties intrinsic to the medium itself. But she soon began to focus on pictorial qualities and became known for her form of pictorial narrative video installations, where she structures images using diverse editing strategies—slow motion, reversal, hyperspeed, and audio processing, sometimes in relation to a constructed environment. More recently Lucier completed work on a commemorative flood commission for the North Dakota Museum of Art entitled Floodsongs, which premiered in Grand Forks in the fall of 1998 and was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Through the lens of modern technology, much of her work addresses the paradoxical relationship between "progress" and its impact on the forces of nature. Artists like Lucier are attempting to awaken us to the roar of technology while there is still time. Her current work involves several new projects concerned with issues of technology, obsolescence, and false notions of utopia.[4]

Joan Logue (an early Capp Street resident, prior to my tenure there) is another artist from this early wave of women video artists who worked in both single-channel and video installation. With a background in painting and photography, Logue has been a video innovator since she first discovered the medium in the mid-1960s, when she extended her interest in portraiture through video's real-time imagery. She is perhaps best known for her 30 second spots on American-based contemporary artists, what she refers to as TV Commercials for Artists. She collaborates with her subjects to create thirty-second, single-channel "video portraits" and utilizes state-of-the-art techniques of the medium (when appropriate) to capture the essence of each person's artistic expression. She began working on the spots in 1979 and has collaborated with artists in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw. In fall 1998, she presented her video portraits as the kick-off for a new series— TV Dinner—at the Kitchen in New York and also exhibited a new video installation there, Self-Portrait 1973-83, where she deconstructed her long-and short-term memories and then reconstructed them in a new multiple video format, creating a multilayered portrait.[5]

Maryanne Amacher, another former Capp Street resident who is featured as one of Joan Logue's portraits, has been exploring musical language and environmental sound in terms of acoustical and architectural space for over thirty years. Like the worlds of science and science fiction, where she draws much inspiration, Amacher's work is focused on the future, on exploring situations of boundary and perception. She was an early pioneer in using audio telemetry (the wiring together of different sites, generally for concert purposes) and created several "long-distance music" works utilizing what she has referred to as the CITY-LINKS format, which occurred as early as 1976. This involved placing microphones at distant locations and transmitting the "live" sound to mixing facilities, either at her studio or at installation or performance sites. More recently, she has created several multimedia installations, including her own original form of "music theater," which she refers to as music for sound joined rooms and which uses the architecture of a site to stage the sound and evolve "stories" that are dramatized through the music and visuals. For these, she brings recorded material to a site, which she considers a script, and then proceeds to test the material on speakers placed at different locations throughout the space. The final sound is created in live performances, where Amacher modulates the original sources through a synthesizer and other technology. Unlike the conventional environment for musical presentations—a proscenium concert setting where the audience sits and listens—Amacher's form of music theater creates a living atmosphere that immediately engages the audience in a perceptually different manner; the work explores alternative listening strategies, unusual acoustic environments, expanded technologies, and new relationships with audiences. In 1997, Amacher received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Distinction for her artistic achievements in computer music for her work The Levi-Montalcini Variations.[6]

Amacher had been a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the 1970s, and through her connections with colleagues from that time I was able to join her in a field trip down to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center in Palo Alto for my first virtual-reality experience in 1985, donning a VR helmet and becoming immersed in a wire-frame environment. Of course, the applications here involved militaristic flight simulations. Not for ten more years, back in New York, would I immerse myself in an artistic virtual-reality experience like Char Davies's Osmose (in an exhibition entitled Code, presented at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York City). Prior to that experience, I had seen Patrice Caire's virtual-reality project—C.A.I.R.E. '94—(Cyberhead. . . Am I Really Existing?), an artwork presented at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that allowed viewers to enter into a reconstructed model of the artist's head in a fictionalized, five-minute vertiginous journey by looking through a stereoscopic viewing device. The work raised issues about the interconnectedness of the body and the human creations of technology and information processing.

Like Maryanne Amacher, many other artists, such as Pauline Oliveros, Frances Dyson, Pamela Z, and Cecile Le Prado, are also involved with creating unusual aesthetic experiences with sound and technology. During the time of this writing, I had the opportunity to experience Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band kick off a season-long decade celebration in a concert called Suspended Music presented at Columbia University. The evening included composer Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument Band, involving a one-of-a-kind musical instrument with strings nearly 100 feet long, stretching across the public space of the site, as well as the newest incarnation of the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), the computer-driven musical machine that is part of the ongoing sonic evolutions of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation.

Also occurring at the time of this writing, and from a very different multimedia perspective, is Beryl Korot's collaboration with composer Steve Reich, Hindenburg, "a documentary video opera," which was presented in its New York premiere as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Korot and Reich first collaborated in 1993 with The Cave, which coupled Korot's multichannel video imagery and Reich's rhythmic structures. Continuing here with her notion of palimpsest, Korot utilizes images, including historical footage of the iconic aircraft and taped interviews, creating a visual analog to the twentieth century's collective memory to explore the impact of new technology on twentieth-century society.

The staged and performative aspect of multimedia work is something that has an ongoing thread, beginning with the early work of Steina (who likens the early days of video to playing an instrument in an improvisational and spontaneous way) and of Joan Jonas (who cites an interest in links of high tech with the original gesture). Steina opened the 1997 New York State Council on the Arts Governor's Conference on Arts and Technology, performing Violin Power, "a piece about connections." Taking center stage, she played a violin that was connected to a MIDI interface that both transformed the sound of the instrument and allowed her playing to influence and activate the images on three large screens behind her, creating something akin to a virtual duet between image and live performer. Her staccato bow strokes affected the images and their movement; in essence, the violin was powering the visuals.

From one violin to another, the next generation of those working in multimedia performance art include artists like Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, where the work centers around the orchestration of music, image, and language in the forms of video and live performance. In the mid-1970s, Heyward stopped painting, began working in video and multimedia performance art, and soon was touring Europe and the United States. In 1978, she began working on a long-form music video album, which premiered at the Kitchen in 1981, a year before the arrival of MTV. She has continued to create multimedia performances, "visual musicals." Her Miracles in Reverse (1996) premiered in Potsdam, Germany, and had its American premiere at the Kitchen in New York City in 1997. An accomplished artist in her own right, she recently went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's graduate program iEAR (Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer), getting her Master of Fine Arts degree in electronic arts so she can have the "proper" credentials for teaching while continuing her own work.[7]

Laurie Anderson, on the other hand, is one of multimedia art's great crossover stories. Today her multimedia performance art—combining voice, performance, film, technology, sculpture, and other media—has become part of the culture and is often credited with having pioneered new artistic territories, laying the foundation for explorations of a younger generation of artists. She was one of the first artists to combine media in a transdisciplinary approach. In fall 1998, Artists Space in New York celebrated her historic influence by opening its twenty-fifth season with an exhibition presenting a selection of Anderson's work from the 1970s and 1980s and Whirlwind, a recent large-scale viewer-activated audio installation never before presented in the United States. For the opening reception, Anderson re-created As:If, her first public performance, which was presented at Artists Space as part of her first exhibition in 1974. At that initial time, she had performed on the violin with her feet in roller skates encased in blocks. For the reprise, she came out in iced blocks and then proceeded to play electric violin linked to a commercial digital sound manipulator that repeats, delays, speeds up, or slows down tonal input. The exhibition underscored the early roots of Anderson's working with technology and how it continues to evolve and transform in her current work of today.[8|

Pamela Z and Laetitia Sonami are two multimedia artists whose performative work involves technology combined with a very strong presence of the physical body. Sonami performs with a virtual-reality dataglove with multiple controllers and uses the movement of her hand and arm to control MIDI signals to various digital outputs. In essence, her movements become music.

Toni Dove, on the other hand, invites viewers to physically interact with her multimedia work; she is interested in an immersive experience that triggers feelings of engagement that can be used to intensify the narrative experience. Her work Artificial Changelings, an interactive movie installation that premiered at the 1998 Rotterdam Film Festival, is a romance thriller about shopping that follows the life of Arathusa, a kleptomaniac in nineteenth-century Paris during the rise of the department store, who is dreaming about Zilith, an encryption hacker with a mission from the future. The installation uses video motion sensing to track the location and movement of a viewer standing in front of a screen. Viewers can take turns either as participants or spectators. There are four "zones" to this narrative, and physical movement within each zone alters the video and sound in a variety of ways: it may generate speech, change the emotional tone of the sound environment, or move a character's body. The viewer can move back and forth between centuries in a cinematic landscape with no linear direction, can enter into a character's head, or can enter other sequences by means of various physical behaviors. The installation was recendy included in an exhibition titled Body Mechanique: Artistic Explorations of Digital Realms at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.[9]

Some multimedia artists have come to the multi part more through the channel of one particular medium. Beth B is one such example. Although probably better known for her films, B has also brought her filmmaking background into creating multimedia installations where some kind of moving image component is combined with other sculptural, sound, and created environments. The interplay between media is apparent, and B is adept at setting a dramatic stage to invoke her narratives, which often explore taboo but socially relevant topics. Out of Sight Out of Mind is one such multimedia installation revolving around the notions of madness, the media, and the power of propaganda. It was presented in New York in 1995 and then traveled to the American Center in Paris in 1996. It includes an elaborate sculptural construction—a re-creation of a "rotary machine," an 1820s device used in psychiatric hospitals to "cure madness." Visitors could strap themselves in, push a button, and spin at speeds of up to 100 revolutions per minute. Another section involved padded cells with a sound installation, a barrage of words and music comprised of a Who's Who of celebrities who committed suicide or were diagnosed as mad—Marilyn Monroe, Antonin Artaud, Kurt Cobain, Vincent van Gogh, and others. The final chamber of the installation consisted of a projected video (which can also stand alone as a single-channel piece) that included archival footage of acts of daring juxtaposed with media coverage of a juvenile homicide case, further questioning the institutional treatment of insanity.[10]

Fast forward to the more recent present. From March 1997 until November 2001, I was involved with artists working with multimedia and new technologies as the first director of Thundergulch, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's (LMCC) new media arts initiative that seeks to provide new forms of interaction between artists, audiences, and new technologies. This nonprofit art-tech initiative was first located in the financial district, across from the New York Stock Exchange, in an office in the New York Information Technology Center, one of New York's first "totally wired" buildings with high-speed connectivity and video teleconferencing, where many technological businesses such as Sun Microsystems and IBM have their headquarters (as well as start-up tech companies, many of them now defunct, after the fall-out of the dot-com frenzy five years later).

In the fall of 1998, Thundergulch moved into LMCC's offices at 5 World Trade Center, so for almost three years more, Thundergulch was headquartered at 5 World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, all of that changed. In addition to the devastating loss of lives, the offices and five years' worth of research and program files and materials were destroyed. Given a rather dramatic reason to morph, I concluded my tenure as Director of Thundergulch at LMCC at the end of November 2001.

Flash back to 1997: As a way to introduce artists working in some of these newer forms, Thundergulch began by presenting a series showcasing artists' multimedia work (video, CD-ROMS, and Web sites) on a fourteen-foot video wall located in the lobby of the New York Information Technology Center. Perhaps it was the video producer in me that recognized that this large video wall was hardly being used except for corporate advertising and as wallpaper cycling through the building's Web sites. I knew it would be an ideal large presentation format for artists' work, even if in a lobby of an office building.

So Thundergulch began infiltrating the business and the tech-industry culture, showcasing artists' work in the middle of the lobby during lunchtime, when people were flowing in and out of the building—a new form of public interactive art. Some people intentionally came to the presentations and sat in the provided chairs for the hour; others hovered on the edges, on their way in or out of the building, but stayed long enough to get a hit. Artists and/or curators/presenters were on hand in an informal salon-type presentation, navigating through their Web site or CD-ROM and available to address questions from the audience, questions that ranged from technological to aesthetic to conceptual. With all the hype of interactivity and the ubiquity of cyberspace, there seems to be a hunger for human interactivity in real time and real space, for physical linkages. The series subsequently migrated to other venues, and Thundergulch continued to provide a forum in both formal and informal ways, where when possible the artist was actually interacting with the audience in a dialog about the work. The presentations are meant to be introductions to these artists' works, where the viewer must then go engage with the work in a more direct manner (either at a performance, an exhibition, or the computer). In my tenure as director, Thundergulch showcased the work of over two hundred artists, and many of these have been women working in some of the newer directions of multimedia. Again, the list is too long to be all-inclusive, but a mention of some of these women artists demonstrates just how multi the concept of multimedia is.

Adrianne Wortzel's installations and theoretical writings explore the possibilities of new electronic media in relation to traditional art forms such as opera and the novel and the use of the Internet as a performance medium. Her production Globe Theater: Sayonara Diorama was a multiple-site electronic media performance that featured a repertory company of robots and actors and online participants, utilizing CU See Me.

Helen Thorington has been involved with Internet performance events since initiating the Adrift project for the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival. Adrift was a collaboration with other artists; each artist worked from different geographical locations and with different computer environments (text, sound, and Virtual Reality Modeling Language or three-dimensional graphics). Adrift is archived on the Turbulence Web site. As director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Thorington initiated the Turbulence art site, which commissions artists to create new work, especially for the Web medium. Permanent works shown there include Diane Bertolo's FT2K (Frontier Town 2000), Annette Weintraub's Pedestrian, and Marianne Petit's The Grimm Tale.[11]

Melanie Printup Hope's work is an exploration of her Native American identity and ancestry. She conveys her personal experiences of cultural and spiritual growth through drawing, traditional beadwork, sculpture, computer-generated images, animation, digitized sound, video, and installation. The Prayer for Thanksgiving was presented in many of these multiple forms—as a CD-ROM that was incorporated into a sculptural installation that also had a Web component.[12]

Tennessee Rice Dixon and Zoe Beloff, both recipients of the New York Foundation for the Arts first-ever computer arts fellowships in 1997, are two other artists working in CD-ROM, as well as other digital forms. Dixon's Scru Tiny in the Great Round, an internationally award-winning CD-ROM cocreated with Jim Gasperini, is analogous to an animated picture book, where pages come to life in animation and sound as the viewer moves over the imagery and through the story with a changing cursor. Various sequences and narratives are initiated by moving the cursor and clicking on "active" spots. Beloff's CD-ROM, Beyond, operates in a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry exploring the paradoxes of technology, desire, and the paranormal. Beyond won first prize in Apple's 1998 QuickTime VR competition (best multimedia, best of show). More recently Beloff completed another QuickTime movie serial— Where, Where, There, There, Where—with the Wooster Group.[13]

Kristin Lucas, a younger-generation artist, comes to multimedia from a video background. She sets up virtual interactions with mediated devices, such as automated tellers, public-access television, computer games, and the World Wide Web. She was commissioned to create a work for ISEA 1998 (presented in Manchester, England) and also a Web site, Between a Rock and a Hard Drive, for the Dia Center for the Arts. Two of her installations were presented for several months in the Thundergulch offices. Ground Control is an audio-video installation that comments on sexual metaphors inherent in the language of machine maintenance manuals. Installation is a sound installation where patterns on a wall are derivative of constellations, and the sounds are constellated from the barrage of audio information overload—fax tones, modem hook-ups, phones ringing.[14]

Because I had the luxury and opportunity to witness so many of these artists presenting their work, I began to realize that it might be important for others to have this experience, and so I began interviewing the artists after their presentations @ the wall, to create an archive, an oral history of the range of thinking about the nexus of art and technology at the moment it was occurring. At the time I wrote this paper, the archive was "under construction" to become a dynamic part of the Thundergulch Web site so that the presentations could have both a local and global presence and impact. However, as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, all this material was lost.

"Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" When I was interviewed for the position at Thundergulch, one of the questions I was asked was, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I explained that I was unable to answer such questions, that my life didn't work like that, and that when I thought I could predict where things might lead, often the very opposite could occur. (Who could have ever projected to the events of September 11th and its impact on so many lives?) I am not a psychic or prognosticator. There is no crystal ball here. And there is no monolithic art, no monolithic technology, but rather a plethora, almost an overload, a multi of everything. It does seem that we are in the infancy of some new art forms that are taking their very first baby steps. And as with baby steps, things can be a bit wobbly in the beginning. There is a need for trial and error, for falling down and getting up again, for patience and faith. Much of the new multimedia work seems to be in this early "baby steps" phase, an improvisational, jamming phase not dissimilar from the early days of video art, where artists are experimenting as they create new art forms and new languages with new tools, which are in a constant, exponential rate of change. The language and the tools are not yet fully developed. The tadpole has not yet turned into the frog that turns into the prince who is kissed by the princess. Besides, the tadpole is really a baby chameleon. And like the chameleon, art and the tools for creating it—which technology has become an integral part of—will keep changing colors. In the future, we won't just be reading a book such as this. We'll be viewing some multimedia presentation of artists' work that will be almost as good as "being there" in some yet unknown form. Ars longa, vita brevis.