Art-peforms-life-imitates-art is not a new interaction. Nor is it news that popular culture is ... popular. But before the advent of the Internet, the personal computer, and digital video, how likely is it that an unknown 40-year-old mother would have comparable viewership as the $20-million-per-flick Jim Carrey? The new variable is digital technology. Not as a subject but as an enabler--whether of the Truman Show, Sean's birth, or . . . what? As society increases its dosage of digital technology and all that it enables, what will be the effect on our lives, on our art?

One reaction is already certain. Some artists will utilize digital media the way others wield a paintbrush, look through a viewfinder, or arrange their bodies in fantastic sequences--or as John Baldessari said of video, "like a pencil." Piotr Szyhalski's commissioned project, "Ding an sich: The Canon Series," inaugurated Walker's online Gallery 9 with a distinctive vision that could not be accomplished in any other way. With a subsequent generous grant from the Jerome Foundation, we look forward to being able to commission four new projects to help define this emergent interaction of art and technology.

Piotr's project incorporates snippets--bytes--of audio from the Walker archives of earlier artists' projects--Martha Graham, John Cage, and Joseph Beuys, among others. This demonstrates the omniverous nature of digital media, which can break down almost anything else--pictures, sound, text--into ones and zeros and recombine them in new ways. But they are also, as Woody Allen might say, polymorphous. In Piotr's hands they are art. Differently recombined, they are an interactive library.

On June 30, the Walker launched the first phase of its ambitious Integrated Arts Information Access project with The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Now anyone, anywhere with access to the Internet, at anytime, can search thousands of nuggets of information about the Walker collection, archives, and library, including the ability to view images, watch videos, listen to audio programs, navigate 3D spaces, and try out interactive programs. Most importantly, however, each individual nugget--byte-sized, of course--hyperlinks to many more related ones, creating richly informational, self-guided tours of our interdisciplinary resources. And because MIA's resources are simultaneously searchable--a virtual joint collection-- what the visitor wants to see and know is the guiding principle, regardless of where the answers may lie. How or whether this capability--part of what digital technologies enable--will affects people's conception of what constitutes the museum remains to be seen.

Of course, one famous definition of useful information is a difference that makes a difference, and many visitors, especially in educational contexts are looking, in effect, for what the Walker staff knows as much as what the institution owns--synthesized points of view about the discrete bits of information. So we have created and put online over 80 educational modules, many of them designed to take advantage of the polymorphous capabilities of the computer. Each is also tied to the new Minnesota graduation standards, to make them as practical as possible. Teachers and students from kindegarten to high school can learn about color and line or navigate through a 3D model of Joep van Lieshout's newly commissioned sculpture, "The Good the Bad and the Ugly," or even curate their own exhibition.

In between the poles of artists who make work for the Internet and information that is delivered by the Internet, is perhaps the greatest challenge--using the omniverous, polymorphous characteristics of digital techologies to interact with the programming of visual arts, film/video, and performing arts to deliver authentic museum experiences online.

In the past year, we experimented with several different models, including game-like activites for kids related to Disney and the "Architecture of Reassurance," "virtual reality" presentations of the Andersen Windows Gallery and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and full-fleged Web sites for Diana Thater and Joseph Beuys, where we introduced the "hyperessay"--an innovative way to present a critical investigation of Beuys's art and life, which is designed to allow non-linear reading and link out at multiple points to related Internet resources.

Digital technologies enable--some might argue incite--the interpenetration of all sorts of boundaries--between private and public, life and art, biological and artificial, close and far, real and virtual. Artists will inevitably use digital media to sketch in the neutral zones of these boundaries, and the Walker is committed to enabling these efforts. We will also use these same omniverous and polymorphous capabilities to present a broad range of informational and educational resources that people want and can use, both in real life and in our increasingly real virtual lives.

Steve Dietz
Walker Art Center Annual Report
Fall 1998