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[The Digital Village]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  October 17, 1995
 
CONTACT:  Terry Gips
          Robert Blitz
          Kimberly Gladfelter
 
PHONE:    (301) 405-2763 EMAIL:    digvil at umail.umd.edu
 
 
"THE DIGITAL VILLAGE": UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND FUSES ART, TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION
 
COLLEGE PARK, MD -- A groundbreaking project involving pioneers of digital art,
scholars in diverse fields, and schoolchildren from the Baltimore-Washington
region, will be launched NOVEMBER 2ND, with the keynote lecture by DAVID GELERNTER
at 5 PM (ROOM 2203 ART-SOCIOLOGY BUILDING), followed by the artists' RECEPTION
which begins with a performance by the CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FORUM at 7:30 PM in the
ATRIUM OF THE ART-SOCIOLOGY BUILDING. A collaboration of the University's Art
Gallery, Computer Science Department, College of Arts and Humanities, and The
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, "The Digital Village" will field an
ambitious program for eight weeks, through December 22nd.  The exhibition features
seven internationally recognized artists:  Richard Bolton, Alan Dunning, Lynn
Hershman, MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom & Ed Hill), Christine Tamblyn, and Joan
Truckenbrod.
 
     Individuals and groups can participate in person and on-line with a
multiplicity of events, including a gallery-and-World Wide Web-based exhibition
of electronic art; an interactive exchange of ideas, information and images via
the Internet with schools and community organizations; electronic music and
multimedia performances; a SCHOLARLY SYMPOSIUM on NOVEMBER 3RD; and a series of
lectures, workshops, and demonstrations. "The Digital Village" provides
participants -- both those who are geographically near enough to visit The Art
Gallery and The Corcoran (which will feature an expanded presentation of Bolton's
work), and those who will "visit" on the information highway -- an opportunity to
become involved in extending, collaborating, and developing, a digital work of
art. Inherent in this kind of interactive exchange is a dynamic learning process
which can be integrated into many disciplines.
 
     "The Digital Village" explores -- and demonstrates -- the increasing
importance of computer and telecommunications technology in linking and enriching
the communication of ideas, creative thinking and education, and the production of
art. Art drives "The Digital Village", and not only because The Art Gallery at the
University of Maryland, College Park, and The Corcoran Gallery of Art-- two
leading Washington area cultural institutions -- have played key roles in the
inception and deployment of the project. The project utilizes "traditional" art
objects -- together with computer-generated screen images, "cyber" spaces, text
and sound -- to pose significant questions about the ways digital media are
reshaping the world on a grand scale. The project will demonstrate the dazzling
interactivity possible through the fusion of these new technologies, showing not
only that an artwork created in one place may be instantaneously transmitted to
thousands of sites/viewers, but, that individuals at these thousands of sites can
likewise interact directly and instantaneously with the work.
 
     The multidirectional communication possible through new technologies will
be shared extensively in the educational aspect of the project. "The Digital
Village" will utilize the featured artworks as a catalyst for a unifying
collaborative SCHOOL PROJECT, E-ME:  ELECTRONIC SELF-PORTRAITURE, in which
teachers will devise discipline-specific projects for large numbers of students
who would not normally have the opportunity to interact either with art or
technology of this caliber.  A special reception for e-me participants will be held
on Wednesday, November 29.
 
     Access to the World Wide Web site can be reached via the on-line address:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/ArtGal/.WWW/digvil/digital.htm
 
                              # # #
 "The Digital Village" artists are:
 
RICHARD BOLTON whose "Souvenir" consists of photographs, video recordings,
stories, and images related to various souvenir objects collected by the artist
during a recent artist-in-residence engagement in West Africa, in the city of
Abidjan, C te d'Ivoire. Souvenir confronts the provocative issue of what it means to
be a "tourist" -- especially a white, western artist-tourist -- in a previously-colonized area in Africa, in this "postcolonial" age.
 
ALAN DUNNING's "Lost Dimension: An Internet City" involves participants from around
the world in designing and constructing a virtual city, by entering detailed textual
descriptions into on-line computers at their homes, workplaces, or at The Art
Gallery site in College Park.
 
LYNN HERSHMAN is represented in "The Digital Village" exhibition by two works.
"Lorna", a pioneering interactive video disc artwork from 1979, allows viewers to
experience the life choices of an agoraphobic woman. The second work by Hershman,
"America's Finest", consists of a reproduction of an M-16 rifle in silver, attached
to a swiveling mount, and equipped with a video camera activated by its trigger. An
image of the user him/herself is merged with the targeted object into a moving
collage of documentary film clips of war scenes, and their chaotic and bloody
aftermaths. The viewer/user finds her/himself caught in the crosshairs of the gun's
sight, embedded in the atrocities of the history of war and gun-induced violence.
 
MANUAL's (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill) "Constructed Forest (This is the End -- Let's Go
On -- El Lissitsky)" skeptically explores the changing landscape -- a favorite
subject in American art -- and the role of technology, particularly the computer,
and the "new digital world order," as the most recent instruments of humankind's
mastery/domination of the earth's fragile ecology. Consisting of 10 large (24" x
40"), electronically constructed photographs "hung" in walls constructed from raw
two-by-four lumber, a digitally-edited video tape documenting logging and saw mill
processes, and an interactive CD-ROM containing an interactive dictionary, this
work explores parallels between the historical-materialist ideas of the Russian
Constructivist Art movement of the 1920s, and the destruction of forests in the
latter part of the 20th century.
 
CHRISTINE TAMBLYN's "She Loves It She Loves It Not: Women and Technology" (produced
with Marjorie Franklin and Paul Tompkins) seeks to encourage a more productive
relationship between women and technology. A female cyber-persona guides the viewer
through CD-ROM channels packed with text, sound, movie clips and images which
describe what the artist calls "privileged instances" of the relationship between
women and technology.
 
JOAN TRUCKENBROD's "everydayfamily" explores alternative family structures and
child rearing in the US. The installation simulates a "homey" bedroom, where a video
camera and computer are hidden within a nightstand and a mirror. The artist's
objectives are to "challenge viewers to examine the way they feel about families and
alternative family structures, and to stimulate awareness of the need for social,
economic and political support for both alternative family structures and child
rearing."