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(excerpts)Introduction
Barbara London: this evening we'll be talking about collaboration, and we know that for a long time artists collaborate with the tools they work with, with colleagues who are more knowledgeable about particular hardware. In my own professional lifetime I witnessed experiments in art and technology. They're a brain child of engineer Billy KlŸver, who paired artists and engineers together in the late '60s.I'll just say a little quote from Woody Vasulka, a video pioneer who recently wrote in the catalog that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put on.
"Computers in the 1990s promise a dynamic intimacy of machine human cooperation that so far continues to exceed the practical limits of consumer technology."
So what is the role of the art viewer, you who are sitting there, you who push the mouse, do it yourself, what's the role of us with -- as viewers, as users are we, navigators, active participant or are we the viewer/user, also collaborator with artist? I think tonight part of this will be discussed.
So the Internet is changing at break net speed. I guess Yahoo went for the big kill recently, but the web is very adaptive. It's considered a new medium, and I think that's what our program this evening is about, and it's entitled simply The Artist and the Internet.
Benjamin Weil is going to speak first. He's a writer, he's a producer, he's many things. He's a curator also. So he'll speak first, and then Julia Scher, who's known quite internationally for her work in video surveillance. She spoke here a couple of years ago. She commented on the fact that she went to the same coffee shop a little while ago. Some things don't change. She recently had a show at Andrea Rosen's gallery, "American Fibroids". She's teaching at the Massachussets College of Art. She teaches video and surveillance. So, Benjamin, do you want to take over?
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