ArtSake

George Fifield is the founder and director of Boston Cyberarts, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which produces the Boston Cyberarts Festival. The 2009 festival takes place April 24 – May 10 at dozens of locations across Greater Boston.

We asked George to offer some insight as to how the region came to be known as a nexus of art and technology.

The Boston Cyberarts Festival came about as I began to understand the incredible history of art and technology that had occurred in the Greater Boston area. At this time in the mid 90s, I was writing a column for Art New England, and in my search for ideas, I slowly came across this history. Of course, this made perfect sense as Boston has always been a center for technology. Boston is where the future is beta-tested.

But the convergence of this technology with art came about in the 1960s. One program was the WGBH New Television Workshop, officially founded in 1972. Though video artists were mostly working in New York, the first television presentation of this work was a WGBH show called The Medium is the Medium in 1969, which presented six video artists to a national audience.

Subsequently, WGBH started an artist-in-residence program allowing video artists in the television studio to use the equipment for the very first time. The first artist in residence was Nam June Paik, who while here invented the Paik Abe synthesizer, the first machine that controlled the distortion of the existing video signal. This synthesizer was distributed around the world. This led to the New Television Workshop, through which hundreds of well known and aspiring artists came to make work.

The first-ever video art exhibit in a museum, Vision & Television, occurred at the Rose Museum in Waltham in 1970.

M.I.T. has germinated many programs of technological art, including the Architecture Machine Group, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), the Visual Language Workshop and the Media Laboratory. CAVS, established in 1967, was especially famous for the number of important artists who worked and visited there. Boston area art schools are well known for the excellence of their art and technology courses.

Boston companies that specifically advanced the technology of art were numerous, like Avid and Z-Corp. Some followed a tradition of working directly with artists to develop their technologies, following the close relationship between Dr. Edwin Land and Ansel Adams in developing the Polaroid camera.

But while digital art works were being presented and exhibited by a select number of Boston area organizations, there had not been a major event highlighting the art and the artists combined with a public education effort. So the Boston Cyberarts Festival was created in 1999 to recognize and celebrate this long tradition of innovation in the arts and focus attention on local artists in this important field.

Today, this region is known worldwide as having one of the highest concentrations of digital artists, including key innovators. Its academic institutions have built up excellent departments in digital art, new media and electronic music. The digital media industry, especially computer game development, has grown and added an important component to the creative economy sector.

The Festival can take no credit for the concentration of digital artists who live here the area is a great place to be an artist, with ample exhibition and performance opportunities and many jobs, including teaching for support. But I do believe the Festival can take some credit that the world knows about us.

Images, top to bottom: Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, “Paik/Abe Synthesizer,”" 1969 and still from “Nam June Paik: Edited for Television,” 1975

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On the Keepers of Tradition blog, Massachusetts state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg has distilled some of the techniques she learned at a recent meeting of folklorists on how best to preserve digital multimedia. Archiving work (as well as preserving and providing access to those archives) is the bread and butter of folklorists, but since so many artists are now either working in digital media or documenting their work that way, any artist might be interested to hear some of the best practices Maggie took away from the meeting. Here are a few tips on preserving your digital media:

Multiple copies of files in varying formats keeps material safe. For example, store a recent field recording or photo shoot in several places: on a server, on two external hard drives, and on a CD.

Don’t write on a CD! The top surface of the CD is susceptible to damage, not just the bottom. If you must, write with a water-based, permanent pen on the inner plastic circle of the CD. Avoid “sharpies” as they might interfere with the top (lacquer) layer of the CD.

Store CDs in regular sized jewel cases, not fiberglass or paper sleeves. Store them vertically, not horizontally. Buy CDs in jewel cases, not in spindles.

Migrate, migrate, migrate. Dale Hecker of Harvard University Libraries reminds us that “Digital materials are surprisingly fragile. They depend for their continued viability upon technologies that undergo rapid and continual change.” This is true for analog as well as digital materials. Afterall, who can use a floppy disc anymore, let alone play a wax cylinder or a 78 recording? If your archive is full of DAT (digital audio tape) recordings, as ours is, make sure you copy them onto the latest technology and back them up on a server. Scan slides and create TIF files as your preservation master files. Then create “use” files for editing, printing, and emailing.

Metadata matters. It is important to include information about the information that has been collected. Describe the context, content, format, and authorship of the material. Who conducted the interview, where, and when? Is this interview part of a project or collection? What kind of camera, microphone, or sound recorder was used? What software? Is the material restricted in any way?

Read the full post.

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For culture junkies like us, trying to answer the question So, whats going on tonight? can incite a mad scramble across several different websites and one or two free newspapers. Luckily, our friends at ArtsBoston are unveiling their new site, and its a must-bookmark for art lovers. ArtsBoston.org compiles just about every event in the Boston area – music, theater, dance, film, museum and gallery exhibits, opera. If you have a performance or an exhibition coming up, make sure its listed. If youve seen something recently and want to share your opinion, you can write a review.

Were particularly psyched about the extensive visual arts listings, which even come with image galleries. But most of all, were relieved that the answer to that pesky question is finally all in one place.

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I recently met David Bookbinder (Photography Fellow ’07). The following is an account, in his own words, of how he became a photographer.

To the Edge, Back, and Beyond: A Wounded Healer’s Journey

I am a person with a big heart and a deep need to be connected who grew up insulated both from others and from myself. The arc of my life has been to reclaim my birthright of connection and compassion, which have manifested themselves mainly in my work as a psychotherapist and in my photography.

My entry onto the path both to psychotherapy and to the photography I do now began with a near-fatal medical error in Albany, New York, in 1993, where I was a graduate student in a PhD program in English Literature. That event, which included a near-death experience, divided my life into two parts: who I had been, and who I am becoming. To paraphrase the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, the way back from the brink has been “a long, strange trip.” On it, I have discovered what I was put on the planet to do.

During the long recovery from my brush with death, I took long walks on Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, MA, to distract myself from pain. In 2001, I bought a digital camera and began taking pictures of the light at the end of the day, and of the flowers I saw on my way to the beach. Eventually I began to manipulate these images on my computer, at first just trying to improve them, but soon realizing that once they were on my hard drive, I could do anything I wanted with them. From this process was born the first of my flower mandalas. Working with these images was as therapeutic and centering as the walks themselves, at once a meditation and a means of communing with forces larger and more powerful than myself. Listening to what the flower mandalas were telling me led me out of a dark place and indirectly, to my decision to become a psychotherapist.

The original flower moved me enough to photograph it. The mandala-making process distilled the initial feeling into something more precise and more deeply felt. Looking at the mandalas I’d made brought that enhanced feeling back into me, purified and amplified.

With each iteration of the creating/receiving cycle, a previously inaccessible facet of my divided self became more revealed, and little by little I became more whole. This strengthening of my soul has enabled me to open my heart to what I now realize is my greatest gift, to be a healer.

Two years after my brush with death, I was in a support group for people who had survived near-death. I was still finding my way back into this world, and although I knew I had returned from the brink with something of great potential value, I was also profoundly disoriented, split between the me I was and the me I was yet to be. One of the group members, addressing my confusion, made a wide half-circle gesture with his arm and said, “David, I think you’re one of those people who has to take the long way ’round.” He paused, his arm fully outstretched. “But when you get there,” he continued, closing his hand into a fist and pulling it to his chest, “it’ll be important.”

What I do now, more than a decade later, does seem important. As a psychotherapist, I see the light in people and help bring it into the world. I know I am saving lives, sometimes literally. As an artist and writer, I know I am positively affecting people I may never meet. Through these gifts, I hope to pass on the boons I have garnered from my journey, boons that, had I not taken that long, strange trip, I would never have been able to exercise.

Recently, a good friend and fellow traveler, Larry “Doc” Pruyne, completed a short film about my recovery from near-death and my work as artist and therapist. The film, “healing image,” is also the prototype for a series of films Larry is working on that that deal with art, artists, and the artistic process.

View “healing image.”

Photo Credit: All images by David Bookbinder

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On the CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner shares audio from a recent “Lunchbox Lab” that was organized by a number of Boston-area film organizations. The discussion centered on film/video distribution on the internet for independent filmmakers. Scott recorded the conversation and is streaming it on his site. To quote Scott:

It’s not a wonderfully-produced podcast, but it may be useful to folks thinking through the digital distribution landscape. We talked about iTunes, EZTakes, Amazon/CreateSpace, the re:frame project, new business models and new formats filmmakers should be exploring, and lots more. It’s about an hour-long.

The MP3 is here. I’m the first person to start jabbering.

The speakers, who include Susi Walsh of the Center for Independent Documentary; David Tams of the website Kino-Eye.com; Jim Flynn of EZTakes and iArthouse; Chris Renzi of Netfilm; Denise DiIanni of WGBH; Sean Fitzroy; Lyda Kuth of The LEF Foundation; Bonnie Waltch of Filmmakers Collaborative; and Cynthia Close of Documentary Educational Resources, touch on Google Ads, paid downloads, streaming content, the creation of additional or malleable content for specific audiences, and numerous other topics in this interesting conversation.

The Boston area is a particularly appropriate place for the discussion, because, as one speaker (I think it’s Scott) puts it, there are thriving film and technology communities, and “it’s interesting when you get the two of those things together.”

(Incidentally, in the non-virtual world, Scott Kirsner has a free talk tonight (7 PM, Wednesday) on his book Inventing the Movies at the Museum of Science Boston. Check it our to hear more about the technological history of film.)

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Exhortations
I thought I’d start with a couple of posts exhorting art action (or action art). The always resourceful Practicing Writing blog drew attention to this intriguing call to nominate your favorite blog posts (by you or other people) to appear in the publication The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3.

NaPlWriMo challenges playwrights to write a play – a completely new script (no cheatery revisions of old drafts, playwrights!) – in the month of November, and to share the experience using its online forums.

Examiners
We work with really top-notch reviewers for our Artist Fellowships Program, so it should be no surprise when they do good things. Still, the good things are surprisingly copious this week. Company One has begun rehearsing for its upcoming production of Voyeurs de Venus by Lydia Diamond (who reviewed for our Playwriting Artist Fellowships), and between rehearsal calls, pratfalls, and fourth walls, they’re blogging about it.

We yell “super great job!” to Rigoberto Gonzalez (also a past Poetry reviewer for us), just named the next resident poet at Frost Place in New Hampshire.

If you’re going to do an email interview, author Tayari Jones (past reviewer for Fiction/Creative Nonfiction) wants you to do it right and has some ideas to that effect.

Go see Kevin Prufer at the Blacksmith House in Harvard Square next Mon, Oct 27. Why? He’s reviewed for our Poetry Artist Fellowships. But more importantly, he’s a much-admired poet. Those prone to martial arts analogies might say that if his poetry were a ninja, it would be nigh impossible to elude its creeping death. Luckily, his poetry is poetry, and neither I nor anyone I know is so prone. He reads with Jill McDonough, a poet who, like Kevin, has received an NEA fellowship for her troubles.

Excitements
The week is filled with online art happenings to make a Bay Stater glow with pride. First, at a site whose name Im assuming is a mash up of the words “books” and “LUT” (acronym for “lookup table” in computer science lingo I guess?), Massachusetts publisher Gavin Grant (Small Beer Press) interviews Massachusetts young adult author MT Anderson (The Octavian Nothing books).

Greg Cook discusses Boston graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies, and his poster project to influence the upcoming presidential election.

CinemaTech shares video from the “Tech @ the Movies” panel in Cambridge about our state’s role in the technological development of the film industry.

At the Mass Humanities Public Humanist blog, Mass Center for the Book director Sharon Shaloo combats ambivalence toward Massachusetts literary landmarks. Heres a quote:

Our commonwealth, indeed our country, was founded on enlightened principles that recognized the vital importance of activity beyond the quotidian. We seem, however, over the course of time and under the burdens of tight budgets to have devolved into a utilitarianism that may have us worry about diffusing a “knowledge”–the use-value of which can be measured easily– but that leads us to a systemic wariness about activity in service of achieving those other ideals–of wisdom and of virtue–which are, to use the coin of our achievement realm, “less testable.”

Well said. And with that…
Exeunt

Image: Mary OMalley, UNTITLED #4 (2005), ink on paper, 19 in x 25 1/2 in. Mary is exhibiting in Overflow at Laconia Gallery through November 22.

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