The three distinguished panelists represented vastly different avenues of filtering and yet expressed surprisingly similar preferences regarding digital art. The evening discussion revealed several new (at least to this writer) perspectives on crucial issues confronting contemporary artists working in digital media.

Art historian and curator, CYNTHIA GOODMAN, curated her first exhibition of digital art for SIGGRAPH in 1982. This show lead to the seminal and comprehensive 1988 show she created for the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York City and publication of her book, *Digital Visions: Computers and Art* (Abrams). Since that time, she has, among other things, co-directed an international tech-art show in Korea and produced a CD-ROM of works in that show called InfoART.

Matthew Drutt is Assistant Curator for Research at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo and is the museum's webmaster (Guggenheim.org). He has played a decisive role in the evolution of this museum as an important site for major, recent exhibitions on art and technology.

Steven Henry Madoff--the award winning Deputy Editor in charge of content at Road Runner, a new online service delivered by cable modem and created by the Excalibur Group, a Time Warner Company. He has long been an observer and critic of the cultural scene and the art world. He contributes pieces on culture and art to the NY Times. As Executive Editor of ARTNews from 1987-1994 and a critic from 1981 to 1986, writing for the Nation, and various art magazines, etc., he began examining the nature of digital and technological art.

Below are a collection of impressions from the evening and comments from the audience and panelists.

Museums are actively wrestling with the issues of preservation of digital work because the hardware it was created on must also be purchased and then maintained. It seems that art historians must act quickly to write about and document the current proliferation of self-published or small independent multimedia works so that there will be a record for the future. Matthew Drutt said that his museum has already made the decision not to be involved in the publishing of CD-ROM catalogs of their exhibitions, but that artist CD-ROMs will be purchased by the museum, and shown on their video wall and elsewhere at the museum.

Cynthia Goodman confessed that although the IBM show encompassed the breadth of all types of digital art which were either created by or used a micro-processor, her interests in recent years have focused on works that are interactive. Each panelist concurred that interactivity is an important aspect of what they personally gravitate towards when selecting work and mentioned wanting to "lose themselves in the work," and "lose their sense of time." Many audience members wondered out loud about how much this preference has to do with the size and nature of the audience and questioned the validity and necessity of the artist taking this concern into the equation before creating new digital works. This consideration has traditionally been connected to the entertainment industry and conceptually an anathema to most *fine* artists. Also, most artists are uncomfortable with the audience changing or impacting their aesthetic intentions. Steven Madoff even went so far to say that it is essential in his area of interest, hyper text, that the *author* gets lost and the audience creates the new, temporal rendition of the work. The manipulation of the element of *time* is another quality he looks for when selecting work. Part of the rationale used to support the importance for interactivity from the panel comes from their perception of the loss of an audience for the visual arts in this country. One of the panelists stated that most people's knowledge of contemporary art ends with Renoir.... (I think the Expressionists, myself.)

Matthew Drutt mentioned the SoHo Guggenheim's soon-to-be-launched Artist-in-Residence Program where artist works will be produced in their new digital studios on the most up-to-date equipment. When asked how the artists would be selected, he replied that they would be invited. This opens an entirely new can of worms pertaining not only to satisfying the needs of the audience and corporate sponsor (only big name artists), but the melding of previous boundaries between producer and artist copyrights.

The idea of the contemporary art museum as a receptacle for collections of new digital art seems impractical to Drutt because of the additional hardware and maintenance costs involved with this type of work. He predicted that installation or 3-dimensional digital works will most likely be collected rather than projects that are more ephemeral. One of the audience members suggested that perhaps new multimedia works should be judged by the old paradigm of performance art or theater. The high production costs of the multi-disciplinary, technical team involved in creating much of today's multimedia pieces, combined with the inherent temporal quality of the end product... causes one to reflect and perhaps insist upon new criteria for judging this work.

There was little question in the mind of this writer that no matter how much money is thrown at *new digital work*, museums will not be the place for experimentation and risk-taking. The stakes are too high. It made me wonder who the new talent scouts will be? and where will the really *new* work be shown? It caused me to believe even more strongly, that artists who choose to work with digital technologies in the future would be best served to do a quid pro quo with a nearby hardware company. These people need the artist's imagination unencumbered by the constraints of technical knowledge in order to have an impetus to push the envelope of their hardware and software capabilities even farther. And, the artist needs access to the newest and constantly changing digital tools which are most usually out of their financial reach. Although, ironically, Matthew Drutt did mention that his criteria for selection of work for the museum is never based on technical wizardry and that his favorite work is often low tech.

If you care to comment on any of the issues in this Review or have more to offer from your recollection of this stimulating evening presentation, please email me. We will be posting the Review and your comments (plus email address) on the new ASCI website in our REVIEWS segment. By the way, I was very impressed with the eveness of the give-and-take and candidness of all three panelists.... especially considering the heatedness of the audience at times.