Almost two years ago, Clarence Morgan, then chair of the Visual Artists Committee of the College Art Association, came to see me in my office at Cooper Union. He said that caa was interested in sponsoring major exhibitions of important work being realized by its members who were both professional educators and artists. He felt that the Cooper Union School of Art was the perfect place for an event celebrating studio practice that would take place in conjunction with the caa annual conference to be held in New York in the winter of 1997. I couldn’t have agreed more, so I set about the task of defining a theme for an exhibition to propose to caa for its endorsement and support.

I have curated many diverse exhibitions, including a recent Painting Faculty show at Cooper Union, where the work actually just hung against the gallery walls. It seemed to me that it was time for us to push beyond some traditional ideas about art and exhibition in support of the caa conference theme for studio art: “The Future Role of the Artist.”

Cooper Union, like many other schools of art, is engaged in a dialogue about the promise and challenge of proliferating instruments of technological wonder in the studio classroom. Technology is an enabler. The spirit must be in the meaning. Artistic content is in the exploration of the unknown, beyond what we are confident we are capable of doing. How will technology redefine art, education, community, intelligence, intimacy, and our lives?

Once accepted tools in certain art disciplines, such as graphic design and architecture, computers and related technologies are now becoming image-making tools integrated into all aspects of the visual arts, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. The proliferation of electronically mediated human interaction has profoundly altered the way in which we conceive of and identify ourselves.

Ironically, these enticing agents of communication are intrinsically objective, impersonal, and detached, yet stimulate artists to explore the most basic and intensely personal issues concerning transformation and emergence, identity, self, sensuality, gender, and sexuality.

As artists have embraced new technologies, they have attested to their seductiveness with increasing inventiveness and divergence in the use of new tools and materials. New questions are raised about the nature of the relationship between the artist and technology: who is the provocateur; who the seduced?

I recently met with a group of young female undergraduate studio art students at their request. Among the issues they wished to discuss with me was a growing sense of anger and frustration about being told by “middle-aged” straight white men that they were trying to seduce them with their work. Male students were seldom accused of the same intentions, they told me.

seduction, seduce:

to persuade to disobedience or disloyalty, to lead away,

to lead astray, to lure, to tempt, to attract, to charm, to entice.

seducer: male;

seductress: female.

How often art and science, together and separately, have seduced us throughout time. Each discipline must remain current, new, informed by history yet able to cut the path. Artists strive to embrace our culture. They grab a tool and explore, interpret, astonish, and educate, often motivated by their need to know and do something never known or done before.

Peter Cooper said in 1864:

“Feeling...as I always have, my own want of education... has led me, in deep sympathy for those whom I knew would be subject to the same wants and inconvenience that I had encountered... to provide an institution where a course of instruction would be open and free to all who felt a want of scientific knowledge, as applicable to any of the useful purposes of life. Having started in life with naked hands and an honest purpose, I persevered through long years of trial and effort to obtain the means to erect this building, which is now entirely devoted, with all its rents and revenue of every name and nature, to the advancement of science and art.”

I have begun a more focused and vigorous dialogue with many colleagues about these issues since coming to Cooper Union almost three years ago to be dean of the School of Art. Technology and art will each be reckoned with. I therefore could not resist the opportunity offered by caa to explore some of these ideas through an exhibition at a time when close to eight thousand international artists and art historians will be added to New York’s vital arts community for a week in February.

What is technology’s relationship to art making and what is its place in the curriculum? What is “portfolio”? What will

“exhibition” be? Where and how will the continuing dialogue take place? What is Techno-Seduction?

The College Art Association has been very generous. Rita Robillard offered her time and ideas from the beginning, and as the new chair of the Visual Artists Committee has helped to shepherd my proposal forward and lobbied for funding for the project. Once the proposal was accepted, the committee asked a caa Board member, Deborah Willis, curator of exhibitions, the Center for African-American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, and chairperson of the Society for Photographic Education, to co-curate the exhibition with me. We liked and respected each other immediately. I am indebted to her for the success of this collaborative effort. Deb Willis supported my development of the idea and context for every aspect of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue. We were seduced by each other’s enthusiasm for this project and worked long and hard at it.

Our gratitude and respect are extended to three colleagues whom we invited to review the work submitted in response to the call for entries that went out to the caa membership. They are Holly Block, curator and executive director of Art in General, an alternative nonprofit exhibition space in New York’s SoHo; Deborah Bright, artist, photographer, writer, and associate professor of photography and art history at Rhode Island School of Design; and David Deitcher, critic, historian, and instructor of contemporary art issues at the Cooper Union. They looked tirelessly at work submitted in various formats by more than 300 artists and informed the decisions Deborah Willis and I had to make about the artists to be included in the exhibition.

Deborah Willis also helped me edit this catalogue. We asked three scholars to reflect on the theme of the exhibition and write a statement for our catalogue. They are Berta M. Sichel, an art writer and independent curator interested in the relationships among art, technology, and science, and instructor at the New School for Social Research; Roy Ascott, director of the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at Gwent College of Wales; and Deborah J. Haynes, a visual artist and director of Women’s Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Each has contributed a compelling essay.

I designed the exhibition in consultation with Deborah Willis and was assisted by Brian Wallace, an independent curator and graduate student at the Bard College Graduate Center for Curatorial Studies, who proved to exceed my expectations of an intern/assistant. He rapidly became a partner in many of the curatorial decisions.

Shirley Solomon, our intern from the graduate program in visual arts administration at New York University; Melissa Rachleff, a fellow at the Center for African-American History and Culture; and Patrick Grenier, my occasional alter ego and associate in the School of Art office, all worked diligently on every detail. Camilla Brooks in Resources and Patrick Keeffe from Public Affairs were there for the project every step of the way. Cooper’s own home-grown technical staff--Lawrence Mirsky, author, curator, and assistant director of the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the School of Art; Waldo Tejada, photographer and director of the School of Art Computer Studio; Mike Essl, our artist-in-residence in the Center for Design and Typography; Dan Porvin, the Mr. Wizard of Video and Animation; and Danny Goodwin, resident photographer and full-time technical resource in both computer and chemistry aspects of image making--deserve major credit for their interest, support, knowledge, and commitment to the project.

Mindy Lang took the lead on every aspect of the design of the catalogue as director of Cooper’s Center for Design & Typography. Virginia Wageman diligently copyedited this publication from her new home in Hawaii. Sylvia Franzoso and Anita LoVacco from my office kept us all in line and James Connors supported every one of my thoughts, words and deeds.

One of our essayists, Berta Sichel, was also invited to curate a resource room for visitors to the exhibition. Information about the artists in the exhibition, Internet access to other artists working in technology, books, periodicals, cd-roms, and bibliographic data were all compiled by Professor Sichel for this project.

The College Art Association will hold a full day of panel discussions in Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall during the 1997 conference on February 13th, and several other gallery talks, workshops, and presentations are planned for the duration of the exhibition. Techno-Seduction celebrates the extent to which artists are using technology and will provide students and colleagues from many disciplines within teaching and art communities, the technology industry, and the interested public with a forum in which to share ideas and images.

The exhibition includes two- and three-dimensional work, as well as site-specific installations by forty artists from the U.S. and Europe. All of them are working in a variety of traditional and new material, including digital, print, and photographic imagery, interactive software and databases, Xerography, animation, sound, and video. In many works, image and surface alterations, projections, manipulations, filtering, distortions, and layering, as well as the incorporation of viewer responses, explode ideas of space and time and confront the viewer with ideas of authorship, physicality, self, and place.

The Cooper Union School of Art holds an honored position as one of the leading art colleges in the country. As the only school that provides a full scholarship to every one of its two hundred and fifty matriculating students, it is truly a private college with a public mission. Grounded in the philosophy that creative development thrives in an interdisciplinary environment, its distinguished faculty of artists and scholars seeks to encourage every student toward extensive exploration in all the fundamental visual arts disciplines, as well as other resources and contemporary technologies.

Founded in 1911, the College Art Association promotes excellence in scholarship and teaching in the history and criticism of the visual arts and in creativity and technical skills in the teaching and practices of art. caa includes among its members those who by vocation or avocation are concerned about and/or committed to the practice of art, teaching, and research of and about the visual arts and humanities. Over 11,000 artists, art historians, scholars, curators, collectors, educators, art publishers, and other visual arts professionals are individual members. Another 2,000 university art and art history departments, museums, libraries, and professional and commercial organizations hold institutional memberships.

These two organizations, both dedicated to diversity, advancement, and debate, have come together on the eve of a changing millennium to expand and converge the ideas manifested within our seduction by technology.