Up until now, electronic artists have been attempting
to fit a round peg into a square hole.
The traditional gallery and museum venues
deny the very characteristics that make electronic art unique,
but the lack of viable alternatives
gave artists nowhere else to turn.
The emergence of electronic communities
will provide digital art a context
in which it can flourish and develop its own vocabulary.

So wrote Joseph Squier in his essay “Out of the Cave, Into the Web: Artist’s on the Internet” (in the Power and Control: “Imagin(in)g Technology” issue of the journal Exposure). Squire introduces the artist as educator and explores the future of technology and art in education. Techno-Seduction presents the works of forty artist members of the College Art Association. These artists were chosen from over three hundred applications submitted for the exhibition which is a joint project between the Cooper Union and the College Art Association. Robert Rindler, dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and I worked closely with the three distinguished jurors: Deborah Bright, David Deitcher, and Holly Block. The process was an invigorating and enlightening experience for all of us involved. While we appreciate the range and diversity of work being produced today in painting, photography, film, video, sculpture, installation art, and art produced online, we were delighted to see technical innovations and strong aesthetics in these proposals. For Techno-Seduction, particular attention was paid to how artists using new technologies addressed their personal experience, societal issues and formalist issues, in producing their art.

This exhibition welcomes the vision of forty artists who provide us with an opportunity to experience constructed and digitized images, hands-on access to transmitted visual images and text, and artists’ books. As we read, study, and consume these images we are, as in the case of the artists, seduced and intrigued by the art and the encoded messages. We continue to contemplate our role as audience, viewer, and consumer and to ask the questions: Who is the provocateur? Who the seduced?

The 1997 College Art Association conference theme is “The Future Role of the Artist in Society,” which is an appropriate topic in light of the works in this exhibition. Although there is no central theme in Techno-Seduction, the diverse range of work offers a paradigm on culture and identity, as we position the use of new technologies in art practices for the next century. Each of the guest essayists; Roy Ascott, Berta Sichel, and Deborah Haynes, have skillfully addressed the intersection of art and technology. As the essays make clear, each has been influenced and inspired by the work in Techno-Seduction. Each writer takes up particular themes in the exhibition to further elaborate on her or his own thinking.

The implications drawn from the artwork most often include the audience. The viewer is, it seems, as guest essayist Roy Ascott points out, “complicit.” We are all attracted--seduced--by images. What this means for our postindustrial and increasingly electronic culture is yet to be determined. Can we still experience art as an unmediated “juissance,” or pleasure? Or is visual pleasure more complicated, ltered through another, necessarily different channel? These are the questions that engage both the artist and the audience in Techno-Seduction.

What follows

is a brief description of the range of issues confronted by the artists included in the exhibition: Molly Blieden’s work explores the “culture of work,” addressing gender and cultural difference and how they encode new communication technologies. The Databank of the Everyday, by Natalie Bookchin, looks at how actual, everyday uses of computers link cultural understandings of time, truth, and reality. Harriet Casdin-Silver has spent over twenty-five years exploring the uses of holographic technology. Her current work uses holography in a piece that intersects science, art history, and the human body. Lisa Costello’s The Vesta Incubator comments on reproductive medical technology and the relationship among the women’s movement, work, and new cultural attitudes about pregnancy. E. G. Crichton uses oral history and personal biography, modeled after Freudian psychoanalytic practice, to relate stories on repression and desire. Beverly Fishman using laser copies and gestural brushstrokes, creates illusionistic shaped canvas paintings.

Carol Flax has worked for many years on issues of family and identity. Her work in Techno-Seduction explores her personal odessy in tracing her biological mother, focusing on information, technology, and access. Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker have created the fantastic Otherspace: Martian Typography, an imaginative study on the ways in which technology, communication, and representation cross historical and cultural boundaries to produce new forms. The “face of white femininity” is the starting point for Camilla Benolirao Griggers’ Alienations of the Mother Tongue, which questions how popular images culturally encode race and class privilege. Claudia Herbst’s new cd-rom Sensing Discrepancies, concerns the hierarchical basis of electronic technology and how this hierarchy parallels a cultural understanding of time, perception, and power. Tishan Hsu actually incorporates the human body in Fingerpainting, identifying the location of his own body within an array of media and technically derived images. Lap, by Jessica Irish, explores the role of information and media technology through her multi-layered installation.

During the past 20 years, artist/musician Christopher Janney has developed and produced interactive sound sculptures as installations in public spaces. Janney selects mundane places, such as a stairway, in an attempt to transform and heighten everyday experiences. Michael Joo’s Double Approach (Slingshot) critiques cultural obsessions with sports and beauty as a basis for self-identity.

Roshini Kempadoo, of the United Kingdom, creates work that reflects upon how mass culture can work against and within particular assumptions of race and community. Vacation Incorporated by Gary Keown grows out of his interest in machines, particularly the interactivity exchanged between the artwork and the audience. As his artist’s statement reflects, Gregory Lam-Niemeyer probes a dystopic narrative about technology and modern life.

Living between New York and the Netherlands, artist Mark Madel creates participatory electronic sculptures that expresses post-industrial society. Mark Maltais has created “Chat Room” bringing the viewer into the fantasy world of a gay male.

Steven Marc’s project, Soul Searching, combines family photographs, drawings, and computer-generated imagery to create digital montages. Jenny Marketou’s The Electric Eve also examines personal stories; however, Marketou sets up a border between the physical and the virtual body, encouraging and enabling viewers to create their own fantasies.

Using digitally manipulated photographs, Melinda Montgomery plays off the “factual” reality of photography to distort or change the meaning via computer technology, ultimately producing a “science fiction.” Mary Ann Nilsson uses her own body to consider sensuality and transformation through digital imaging output and engenders a discussion on what it means to be “other,” specifically a lesbian, in the 1990s. Lorie Novak’s collaborative web site has a database of over 1,000 collected photographs, stories and memories.

Anukam Edward Opara and Do-Ho Suh created a collaborative installation piece that inventively draws upon cultural, racial, and physical differences. Also working collaboratively, artist Pepón Osorio developed the video for his installation En la barbería no se llora (No crying allowed in the barber shop) with the Latino community in Hartford, Connecticut, pulling together material that offers a serious look at masculinity and machismo.

Susan Otto’s work is grounded in an ongoing investigation and unconscious internalization of gender/race/class stereotypes and their impact on hierarchies of power within American culture. For nine years Mary Patten has explored different strategies to “make art politically,” and currently mines her own experience as a lesbian from which to explore everyday issues. Kathleen Ruiz’s work is concerned with the unseen, interior structures of the natural and intellectual world in creating new types of forms. “...Some People Get Obsessed” is an artist’s book by Duane Slick intended for a Native American audience. The book grew out of his complex experiences as an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Also using the form of the artist’s book, Clarissa Sligh’s Hiroshima Hopes and Dreams tells the story of loss, remembrance, and culture.

Renée Stout thoughtfully addresses the uses of media and technology in our society and the dichotomy between access and control. Inspired by the lives of a dozen legendary women, Christine Tamblyn’s Mistaken Identities, a cd-rom, demonstrates some of the ways that cyberspace and digital media influence ideas about history. Ira Tattelman pays homage to the gay male bathhouse scene of the 1970s to “investigate the structures of individual activities, collective encounters, vistas and displacements.” Nell Tenhaaf’s Apparatus for Self-Organization questions whether it is possible to intuitively understand, through representation, how the self is shaped in relation to one’s biological substrate. Kati Toivanen also addresses the body, but through an embracement of the body--as a curiosity, as a nightmarish vision, and through physical recollections and fantasies--all of which inform the perception of the artist’s self.

Annette Weintraub incorporates photographic fragments from industrial landscapes and artifacts of the urban environment as a means of “remanufacturing” the built environment. The ongoing project, Electronic Chronicles by Adrianne Wortzel is a series of clustered fictive episodes of imaginary worlds using the artist as the protagonist. Janet Zweig’s work is influenced by artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computer programming. Her piece for Techno-Seduction explores the computer as a thinking device.