Art for when there's nothing on TV
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Those sleek flat screens popping up on people's walls may just look like fancy televisions. A new generation of artists and gallery owners wants you to think of them as something else: an empty picture frame.
Purveyors of a relatively new genre, so-called digital art, aim to fill that blank screen. The field includes software art, where the "art" is the computer code itself that directs the images and sounds on the screen; Internet-based collaborative works, where a group of far-flung collectors can view and play with a piece simultaneously; and DVD art that looks like more-conventional video art.
Much of the work is abstract; a piece called "Cells" by up-and-coming software artist Casey Reas looks like tiny organisms floating on the screen. In "Waiting Room," an interactive and collaborative work by artist Mark Napier, a toolbar displays various shapes, each accompanied by a corresponding sound. With a wireless mouse, owners can click on a shape, drag it into the image and help create a constantly morphing work, the collective result of everyone's input. "Waiting Room" is being sold in 50 "shares," priced at $1,000 apiece.
Digital works, the latest genre of new media art, usually are sold in limited edition DVDs. But this spring, Steven Sacks, the director of New York City's bit-forms gallery, plans to start selling lower-priced original works of software art at software ART space (www.softwareartspace.com). Prices will range from $100 for unlimited-edition works to $1,000 for numbered pieces. Buyers will get a sleekly packaged disc; limited editions will be signed by the artist.
While there are always risks to buying art, these works come with some unique problems. The collector with a Picasso on the wall doesn't need an IT department; digital-art collectors sometimes do. When Peter S. Hirshberg, a technology entrepreneur, bought several pieces of software art for his New York loft, it took some doing to get them all running on the same screen. "I had to have this real Unix geek come out and make it all work," Mr. Hirshberg says. "At one point I had the artist, the geek and the galleryist all here."
Other potential issues range from piracy -- it is much cheaper and simpler to copy software code or a DVD than a painting _ to DVD scratches. And because computer operating systems and hardware change every couple of years, there is no guarantee that you will be able to display your art a decade from now, or pass it down to your children.
First Published February 17, 2005 12:00 am
