Strange Sounds and Sights

With shoulder-length red dreadlocks and an intense gaze, Jaron Lanier is a striking presence, even in the strange universe of performance art. But then he does nothing so routine as, say, recite sonnets while cartwheeling nude across a stage. Lanier is a virtual-reality performance artist. In his piece, The Sound of One Hand, which has played to packed theaters in Chicago, Toronto and Linz, Austria, he appears onstage framed by the image of a virtual world he enters when he dons special goggles and a DataGlove. His audience sees what he sees -- and what he does, which is bend and stretch like some contorted stork. His movements elicit eerie, tinkling notes from the computer-generated virtual instruments he is playing: a Cybersax, a CyberXylo and a Rhythm Gimbal.

Lanier is in familiar territory: he is widely considered to be the father of virtual reality. Though his name is not yet common fare on the cocktail-party circuit of the cultural elite, he is a star of an astoundingly energized new movement of musicians and visual artists who are defining and redefining their work through the use of cybertechnology. ``The computer is now an accepted tool," says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. ``In the art world, it is no longer an issue." From the fashionably bohemian precincts of lower Manhattan to London and Los Angeles, the cultural world abounds with computer-aided musicians, CD-ROM virtuosos, painters, photographers and digital artists who are building their own galleries in cyberspace -- all in addition to the digitally savvy filmmakers who have already transformed cinema. Lanier embodies a whole new genre of music that uses computers to create and disseminate its own distinctive sounds. Another practitioner on the rise is Italian astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi, 30, who has been described as a cross between Madonna and Carl Sagan. Terenzi has used audio telescopes to intercept radio waves from a galaxy 180 million light-years away, then fed them into a computer, applied a sound-synthesis program to convert her data into music and produced Music from the Galaxies. Result: part New Age, part Buck Rogers sound track, played on an oscilloscope. The Future Sound of London, one of Britain's trendiest club bands, performed ``live" last November at the Kitchen in New York City -- while physically remaining in its studio on Chapter Road in Dollis Hill, London. The group's banks of synthesizers and samplers, as well as its three-dimensional silicon graphics, were wired through the Internet to speakers and screens 5,000 miles away. The band members promise that within 18 months they will produce a 3-D film of themselves performing in a virtual environment. Piqued by the possibilities of a new medium, Old Guard rockers are seeking to reinvent themselves cyber-electronically. A foray into the techno-arts has not only revived but enhanced the career of once forgotten pop singer Thomas Dolby. Last year his Virtual String Quartet -- a 3-D imaging project in which people played computerized instruments in virtual space -- found its way to the SoHo Gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Other performers, such as Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren, are venturing into the rapidly growing territory of CD-ROM, which takes the present CD a step further by adding visuals. Dylan's newly released Highway 61 Interactive serves as an elaborate audiovisual historiography. Besides 10 Dylan songs and four videos, it features an electronic scrapbook that includes the singer's high school photos. CD-ROMs like Gabriel's Xplora and Rundgren's No World Order invite viewers/listeners to reassemble images and change tempo and mood, customizing tracks to their own tastes. One of Gabriel's upcoming projects, Eve, will allow users to remix sampled sounds while creating their own screen environment from images provided by four collaborating visual artists. While some in the arts might flinch at the notion of forfeiting control of their work, Gabriel champions the idea. ``The point is to put people inside the work of artists in such a way that they can explore it and eventually become artists themselves," he says. ``The CD-ROM is the first practical, tangible step along that road." Interactivity, he hopes, ``will destroy the elite divide between those who can create and those who can't." Such artistic egalitarianism is a guiding principle on the World Wide Web, which has become the Internet's showcase for visual imagery. Any artist can display his or her images -- whether paintings, photos, sketches or other forms -- to thousands of viewers at little cost beyond that of a modem and the requisite software to get on the Net. In essence, the Web offers a virtual mall of galleries, each featuring round-the-clock exhibitions, minus the jug wine. Hoping for recognition, some struggling artists scan in reproductions of their work, while others display more complex, computer-developed art. A host of budding Cezannes may yet emerge from the Web's galleries, but for now much of the work remains amateurish. ``I haven't been blown away by the online art I've seen," says Sarah Bayliss, the U.S. editor of World Art, a new quarterly focusing on emerging artists and electronic media. ``A lot of people online are very optimistic; they have an uncynical attitude. And that is what encourages really bad art. This `anyone can be an artist' mind-set is one of the most dangerous things we're seeing." Part of the problem, contend cyber-aesthetes, is that there are no established criteria for judging Net art. ``The real issue is how you find, develop and enforce standards in a brave new world," says the Whitney's Ross. ``Eventually more critics will begin to develop a vocabulary to say something meaningful about what they're seeing, and critical dialogue will help shape standards. But we're a generation away from that." The best Web art so far has been created by computers and designed specifically for them. These are works that would have no place in a traditional gallery or museum. Ross considers the work of conceptual artist Antonio Muntades a paragon of excellence in computer art. Muntades' File Room is an ongoing interactive dialogue on censorship featuring images, biographies and discussions of controversial artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Sprinkle. The Website CitySpace, co-developed by Los Angeles artist Coco Conn and the Ontario Science Center, features virtual metropolises in which visitors may add doors, freeways and parks. In this maze of infinite gallery space, where little is for sale yet, even the best artists must figure out how they will survive. Ross envisions a world where Websites are bestowed on worthy artists, who in turn charge visitation fees. In that scheme, an artist might receive a Website as he would a grant and then put himself in business. Since popular Websites are visited tens of thousand of times a day, he could conceivably make a pretty good living by charging just 25 cents a visit. Until the mechanics of such a system are worked out and an elite cadre of cyber-artists emerges, the most visible pieces of art will be the digitally reproduced museum masterpieces put online by patrons like Microsoft's Bill Gates. His newly formed company, Continuum Productions, is collecting the digital rights to many of the great works of art and creating electronic coffee-table books, available now on CD-ROMs and eventually on networks. Similarly, a mini-Louvre Website exists on the Net, allowing visitors to call up a grainy version of works such as Monet's Pont Neuf. Some in the real (as opposed to virtual) art world are concerned that on-screen viewing will deter actual museumgoing. Counters Markos Kounalakis of San Francisco's Visible Interactive Corp., which produces high-tech interactive museum tours: ``Most people understand the difference between viewing a masterpiece with the help of a modem and viewing the real thing at a museum." The experience that most people associate with computerized art is seeing a movie with elaborate, special effects displayed on the big screen. Many of today's most spectacular images are the result of artful digital technology developed at filmmaker George Lucas' studio, Industrial Light & Magic. ILM has revolutionized filmmaking with the kind of digital tricks seen in movies like Forrest Gump, Wolf and The Mask. By digitizing images and manipulating tiny pixels of information, veteran artist-programmers of the Lucas school can achieve almost any effect. ``Right now, the only limit is money," says Lucas. ``We can even create actors. It's just extremely expensive." The results, however, are impressive enough to draw millions of moviegoers worldwide -- and earn more than enough to pay for the work. As old hat as computer-created film effects may have become, they are indicative of the kind of polish and growth that may yet emerge from newer, more experimental digitized art forms. ``The predictions for change in the information environment are as profound as they were during the television revolution," says the Whitney's Ross. ``We all know we are walking into a dark and foggy room." It is not for the first time. In 1902, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and other now venerated American photographers formed a group devoted to convincing doubters that photography was a worthy form of artistic expression. That goal took decades to achieve.