The second biennial Boston Cyberarts Festival is a sprawling, hydra-headed creature that’ll be moving into locations throughout Boston, across New England, and on the Web (www.bostoncyberarts.org ) from April 21 to May 6. It’ll take the form of new music at places like Symphony Hall, Brandeis University, and the Somerville Theatre; electronic literature at the Boston Public Library; and experimental film and video at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and MIT’s List Visual Art Center. And it will make itself visible in art exhibitions at the DeCordova and Worcester Art Museums, Howard Yezerski Gallery on Newbury Street, Gallery fx in the South End, and many other venues. This is a home-town monster, and an inviting, engaging one.

The idea of using computer technology as an integral part of creative works, whether they be musical compositions or virtual sculpture or hypertext fiction, has been irresistible to artists and scientists for at least the past decade, and the Boston/Cambridge/Route 128 area sits squarely at the heart of the action. George Fifield, second-time festival director (and media-arts curator at the DeCordova Museum), believes that the intersection of emerging art and new technology found in Boston is rivaled only by a similar confluence in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he has been championing their interplay at local laboratories for the new from MIT to Mass College of Art. Although we may be inured to “new technology” in mundane applications like the ever-interactive ATM machine, on-line tax returns, and PlayStations, technology in the hands of artists can still be a new and thrilling enterprise.

Fifield, genial and palpably non-cyber before a roaring fire in his large Victorian home in Jamaica Plain, stresses that the festival has been organized to celebrate artists using new technology in all media — not only the visual arts but also music, film, performance, and media that cross and extend these boundaries. As we explore the festival’s extensive exhibition catalogue on CD-ROM, peering at the screen of Fifield’s orange iMac, I realize that after many years of wrestling with new techniques, the art in cyberart is finding its own footing, giving viewers and participants opportunities not only for the ‘oooh-aah’ of the unexpected but for the entire array of experiences we derive from art, including beauty, ruminations on the nature of nature and experience, and insight into our place in the universe. Below you’ll find some of the highlights, where there’s more than new technique involved, and where the term cyberart is incidental to what’s good art.

When is a wall not a wall? And what is a wall, anyway? Artist Denise Marika takes on the relationship between representation and reality at the Worcester Art Museum, where she will create the first projected (rather than painted) image for the acclaimed “Wall at WAM,” an ongoing art program incorporating the 67-foot terra cotta wall in the museum’s Renaissance Court. Marika plans to project a video image of herself, nude, as she slowly constructs a wall in clay. Her video “wall” coincides with the wall on which it is projected, juxtaposing the present and the past, the fleeting and the permanent.

Digital-3D imagery can draw us into fictive worlds where we “experience” driving or shooting or otherwise interacting with environments that exist only before our eyes. New technology can also create techno-landscapes that we exist within and affect with our own movements. Cyberart Central @ the Boston Architectural Center, which serves as the festival’s headquarters, offers three passports to virtual worlds. “Augmented Realities” is an exhibition of multimedia interactive installations curated by Fifield and Mary Ann Kearns (director of 911 Gallery, one of the first on-line art galleries) “V-Art” is a virtual cyber fairgrounds in which participants can “stroll” through the sites and buildings of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2001. And “Text Rain,” by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv, is a whimsical installation in which participants play with falling letters that do not really exist. Standing or moving in front of a large projection screen, you can watch a mirrored video projection of yourself while text, like rain or snow, appears to land on your head and arms. A new twist on the village green is imagined at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. A collaborative work by storytellers and researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory, “Flights of Fantasy” is inspired by the comings and goings in urban parks. Visitors are invited to create their own narratives using a large game board located in the museum (or a remote interface on the Web), or to send and receive story fragments as they move through a forest of birdcages in a landscape of sound.

Cyberart takes on popular culture and modern mythology at MIT’s List Visual Art Center, in a group of exhibitions utilizing digital technology. Isaac Julien’s film “The Long Road to Mazatlan” is an expansive, three-screen telling of a modern cowboy tale. Paul Pfeiffer’s “The Long Count (I Shook Up the World)” features footage of Muhammad Ali’s most famous matches from which the boxer himself has been painstakingly removed in an investigation of racial identity. And Johan Grimonprez’s “Inflight” is a video lounge installation where visitors may read a takeoff on the airline magazines found on commercial flights — yes, motion-sickness bags will be provided. At the Goethe Institute, architects Bernd Hoge and Olivier Auber will present an interactive installation based on The Nibelungenlied, the most famous literary work of the German Middle Ages; participants can immerse themselves in this rich myth about treasure at the bottom of the Rhine, as well as in a multitude of historical and artistic interpretations of it.

San Francisco–based sculptor Alan Rath was trained as an engineer at MIT, and he has been creating art that veers between the human and the humanoid since the earliest days of digital video sculpture. Rath writes his own programs and builds piece-specific software for his charming creations, which can be seen at Howard Yezerski Gallery and at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.

On April 25, the Boston Public Library will host “The Boston T1 Party,” an evening of nonlinear literature, with award-winning authors reading from on-line projected work. As the festival’s Web site describes it: “Shelley Jackson’s monster will “show off her stitches, asking the audience which thread to follow. The Unknown will let the audience yell out when they want to switch scenes. [And] Kurt Heintz will connect distant poets with two-way televideocameras.” Sounds good to us.

Boston is a hotbed of innovation in electronic music. At Massachusetts College of Art, Kid 606 will mix deconstructed dance music, noise, samples, and pop-culture-referencing humor; Paul Flaherty’s trio will play free jazz; and Dogg and Pony will put on a show. The Somerville Theatre will have the bebop-influenced Sensor Bass of Curtis Bahn, and Teresa Marrin Nakra’s “Conductor’s Jacket.” At the Institute of Contemporary Art a varied all-star line-up of electronic musicians includes Richard Lerman performing “Changing States” for homemade microphones and jeweler’s propane torches. At Symphony Hall, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Immersion Music will present a multimedia concert that includes a rare performance of George Antheil’s “Ballet mécanique” and world premieres by Eric Chasalow and John Oswald. And at Brandeis’s Slosberg Recital Hall, BEAMS (Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio) presents a marathon concert that’ll be preceded by a day-long series of talks and performances at Brandeis organized by BEAMS director and chair of the Brandeis music department Eric Chasalow.

Try to catch George Fifield on April 27, from 3 to 5 p.m., at the Goethe Institute, where he’ll moderate a panel discussion on “The Future of Interactivity in Museums.” Artist Jennifer Hall, founder of Do While Studio, an art and technology center in Boston, and first recipient of the DeCordova Museum’s prestigious Rappaport Prize for Art and Technology, will speak at Harvard’s Longfellow Hall on April 25, from 2 to 4 p.m. In Providence, Brown University will host the Cyberarts-related Digital Arts and Culture Conference from April 26 through 28. And in Brookline, you can watch everything from “The Not Still Art Festival” to “.ORG” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Or if this all seems too much to take in, just park yourself in front of your computer and follow some of the wonderful Web-site links that are set out with articulate, informative commentary by Remo Campopiano on the festival’s CD-ROM or on its home page (click on links). Campopiano’s recommendations constitute an insider’s history to the development of Web art, and his narrative is so friendly, you’ll get a lot out of the text even if you don’t download any of the sites.

The Boston Cyber Fest’s Web address is www.bostoncyberarts.org.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001