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In the past twenty years technologies originally designed to store and manipulate scientific data have entered the art arena. The ability to translate images, sounds, and text into storable electronic codes that can then be strategically recombined using personal computers is now common and normal in the lives of artists and museum professionals. After optimistic excitement in some quarters about the limitless potential of this development, and fear of imminent obsolescence of the “photographic aesthetic” in others, the digital tools have pretty much been absorbed, to one end or another. There was much howling in church during the digital baptism: many unexamined assumptions, unanswered futurist claims, and reactionary fears that this brave new environment might wreak havoc on both art production and curatorial practice all turned out to be somewhat interesting but generally wrong. Some artists and curators saw the explosion of technology as the dawn of an age of democratization for both art practice and art understanding. Others saw it as the final nightmare of the Victorian sleep that equated information with knowledge, and invented photography to prove it.

Curatorial practice has been altered slowly but importantly. The most interesting and perhaps useful change has been in the use of interactive interpretive programs, resulting in CDROMs and Web pages that visitors can use without a curator or guard leaning over their shoulder. The Getty, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Eastman House, the National Gallery in London, the Seattle Art Museum, have all experimented in this area. The California Museum of Photography at Riverside, with the expertise and imagination of the curator Ed Earle, has pioneered museum’s use of home pages on the Internet. Nobody expects the imagery on the monitor to replace the real thing on the wall--quite the contrary. Also, fears of imagery being pirated just make the lawyers smile: nothing will change in that arena. While initially many museums used this fear as an excuse to not make their collections available on line, this has pretty much blown over.

The possibility of scanning thousands of images--whole collections and archives--and the ability to access them quickly has exciting implications for curation and the study of the history of photography. But this development is two edged. On the positive side an exponentially greater number of images has become available to both researchers and the public. Until recently, only an elite few curators--the gate keepers-- had seen any more than a few images by the most important photographers, so the conclusions they drew from their knowledge could not be easily questioned. For example, who was the true innovator in the late 1920s, Imogen Cunningham or Edward Weston? Now true comparisons can be made on extended data, and not just by scholars with isolated agendas. On the negative side, the hard won context for photographs established by scholars and curators is in danger of becoming irrevocably separated from the image. For example, the scholarly context essential to the understanding of highly manipulated “ethnographic” photographs, like those of Edward S. Curtis, will dissolve when an on-line subscriber to a commercial archive sees an image, name and date and assumes they are looking at an historical document. This is an old museum problem that will simply be exacerbated by the new technologies. As a colleague put it succinctly recently, our problems have been automated.

Art practice has gone back to nearly normal after a period of adjustment during which a great deal of Baroque collage was produced simply because it was very easy to do so. Artists make pictures with whatever means available because they have a real need to do so not because the means exist. While they may find the unpredictable side effects of a new tool poetically useful, they seldom base their ideas on the tool. Jeff Wall, Martina Lopez, Paul Berger and Carol Flax have been using digital imaging since it became available, but their over-all agendas have not changed appreciably because if this. Over the past decade, interactive projects by Garry Hill, George Legrady, Lynn Hershman, Lewis Baltz and Pedro Meyer utilized the truly innovative possibilities of digital switching and storage. But they are still working on the same issues as they have for years.

Lynn Hershmann, Paranoid Mirror, 1995 (detail 1)	Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434
Lynn Hershmann, Paranoid Mirror, 1995 (detail 2)
	Ed Beardsley, Guttenberg, ND

In 1995 Lynn Hershman produced an interactive, computer driven video piece for the Seattle Art Museum called Paranoid Mirror. In this piece, the approach of a museum visitor activates a series of video segments shown through a two-way mirror reminiscent of the circular mirror in Van Eyck’s Giovani Arnolfini and his Bride. While much was made in the press of this being a radical departure for artists and the museum, the project continued her thinking as surely and regularly as the next move in a long game of chess. In her earlier works, she decried the tendency of new technologies to perpetuate old ills, particularly in the areas of gender and class bias. The colonizing, industrialized cultures in the 19th century invented photography to record, rationalize and justify their world view, including their love of pornography and their mistrust of women’s abilities. Hershman and others fear that we run the risk of passing on these social structures unexamined via new forms of photographic media and computerized information systems, especially as those systems are mostly controlled by men. Paranoid Mirror heads off this risk by reverse colonization. (As an aside, this piece was commissioned and is owned by the Seattle Art Museum. The piece is operated by a very old Mac computer and laser disc and drive. The operating platform and hardware are in effect obsolete. Museums that own this kind of art are faced with migrating the information and the physical production modes forward over time.)

Will digital reproduction and recombination expand or diminish our powers of perception and abilities to analyze what we see? For artists like Lynn Hershman, our present ability to perceive and reflect upon our world and lives is more important than the loss of some tenuous illusion of authenticity or primacy of the object. Hershman is more interested in our presence in the work, not the work’s sanctioned presence in the art world. In the 1990s concern over losing interest in or contact with the aura of the original has been replaced by an interest in which method of replication is more revealing of the social conditions that produced it. After post-modernist critics argued convincingly in the 1980s that equating replication with corruption is essentially a Romantic idea, artists have become connoisseurs of the copy. Our transactions with contemporary art--digital or otherwise--now depends on our acceptance of a new, wider landscape of artifice.