Open daily throughout the conference, the Cyber Cafe offers 25 state-of-the-art workstations (MAC and PC) for viewing artist-made web sites and CD-ROMs.

Art on CD-ROM

Because of its capacity to richly intermingle sound, text, still and moving images, the CD-ROM has become an important multimedia format for artists: Examples of Cyber Café work taking advantage of this include Zoe Beloff's award-wining Beyond, a playfully mysterious look at desire, the paranormal and the birth of mechanical reproduction; Tennessee Rice Dixon and Jim Gasperini's subtle and cyclical ScruTiny in the Great Round; M.R. Petit's disorienting visual funhouse,The Mutant Gene & Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow, and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's exploration of women's experience with technology, Small Appliances.

NYFA Computer Arts Fellows

Zoe Beloff
Beyond, CD-ROM.
Zoe Beloff's interactive CD-Rom Beyond resurrects the past with the aid of Quicktime VR and Video. Based on historical accounts of famous seances in which the dead were resuscitated, Beyond explores the realm of spirit photography through fragments of home movies from the 1920s to 1940s (and found at flea markets) as well as through early film footage from the Library of Congress Paper Print collection. The result "allows viewers to plunge into a new kind of mental geography in which they travel through time and space," encountering Beloff's virtual alter-ego who acts as a medium or interface between the living and the dead. Links that lead to one place today lead somewhere else tomorrow, and the viewer thus embarks on a panoramic journey as unpredictable as it is enigmatic.

Tennessee Rice Dixon/Jim Gasperini
ScruTiny in the Great Round, CD-ROM.
"We have been working together for three years, focusing on the nature and usefulness of interactive computer media in relaying stories. Our method is exploratory, assembling and connecting many levels of audio-visual-linguistic elements into mutable, surreal narratives. The inherent mutability of digital media allows the distillation of sound, animation, text and imagery into a single, versatile palette, enabling us to create multidimensional collages that take visual art into the realm of performance. Our current work-in- progress, For the Time Being, is structured around cycles of time. Each visit to this work differs according to the actual time of day and year as well as the viewer's path of navigation."

Perry Hoberman
The Sub-Division of the Electric Light, CD-ROM.
"My work dwells on both new and old technologies, and on our various, complicated relationships to them. I inject some skepticism, critical thought and humor into what is generally a fairly humorless and unquestioning celebration or demonization of high technology. I am currently preparing a show of new work that will be installed at Postmasters Gallery in a painfully authentic replica of a contemporary office interior. Modular cubicles will enclose decoy electronics, mutant rolodexes, and gluttonous robotic arms. Common office staples such as drop ceilings, file cabinets and artificial plants are reconfigured in forms that range from the pacifying to the ominous....Cathartic User Interface 1.0 was produced in 1995 in collaboration with the artist Nick Philip. CUI 1.0 is an interactive, multi-participant installation that allows users to work quickly and effectively through whatever conflicting emotions they harbor concerning the benevolent yet pernicious influences of computer technology on their lives."

SVA's Fifth Annual New York Digital Salon

Gary Day
The House of Thoughts, 1997, CD-ROM.
In The House of Thoughts the artist has created a work in which the viewer/participant constructs a spatial narrative. Comprised of found quotations concerning space and perception, the piece "writes" a new text each time the "reader" navigates the virtual rooms of the house. Because the pieces are hyper-linked, each visit will result in the writing of a new text based upon the path preference of the reader. - Kirsten Solberg

Jacqueline Goss
Apophysesia, 1997, CD-ROM.
Jacqueline Goss created Apophysesia, an interactive program presenting a humorous revised history of feminism, to encourage a dialogue between current feminist projects - particularly those concerning the body - and past concepts of feminism, as discussed in the suffragist and Equal Rights Amendment movements. Describing a fake congenital condition which causes women to grow antlers, the piece intersperses images from feminist history creating a faux medical information program. By clicking the nipple-shaped "Tender Button" the user can investigate contemporary feminist issues: pornography, technology's relationship with and impact on women, gender transgression and the politics of the gaze. "Antlers," explains Goss, combine "masculine and feminine" characteristics: "imposing, penetrating, protective, encircling and regenerative" and therefore represent a dissolution of differences between genders. - KS

Denise Harris
Women + Technology, 1996, CD-ROM.
Women + Technology, an interactive program, explores the development of technologies from a feminist perspective. With three-dimensional imagery, video clips, hypertext and audio, the piece examines scientists and technology's trailblazers. Beginning from an altar to Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and programming pioneer, users can learn and interact in a number of different environments, including a three- dimensional uterus with information on birth technology such as cloning and a fertility tunnel which leads to a summary of nanotechnology. - KS

Craig Hickman
The Box in the Basement, 1997, CD-ROM.
The Box in the Basement is more than the self-documentation of the artist. It demonstrates the significance that the passage of time can give and take away from something - making the insignificant significant and vice versa. It also presents the viewer with a work that competes with the need for immediacy that today's technology brings. For a decade Hickman took nearly one picture for every waking hour of his life. The images seen here comprise an edited version of those photographs. It is only with recent developments in technology that the artist has found a medium which he feels properly translates his intentions. - KS

Soojeong Kim
Cosmontage, 1996, CD-ROM.
Cosmontage is an interactive program created to allow the user to discover her own individual artistic nuance and sensibility. This piece takes advantage of chaos theories, graphic algorithms and human emotion to provide a provocative digital voyage. The artist demonstrates that the character of the computer, although deterministic and calculating, may actually be more akin to natural phenomena and that future interaction with digital art may reach a level of spirituality. He sees the computer changing the expression of our unfulfilled dreams and our unconscious world. - KS

Jutta Kirchgeorg
The Information Age, 1997, CD-ROM and Internet Piece
In her interactive piece, The Information Age, the artist comments wittily on the problems and absurdities of digital communication devices and the ways we use them. Designed as an educational CD-ROM, the piece devolves into a technological disaster, slowly breaking up and sending the user more and more frequent messages on the screen. Interaction turns into reaction. Ultimately the user, although thinking he was controlling the machine, must cede control to the machine. Kirchgeorg sees this piece as speculating on the anticipation and reactions to so-called intelligent machines. - KS

Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Small Appliances, 1996, CD-ROM
"Technology is great when it is used to make your life easier. It is terrifying when it is used to try to take it over." Small Appliances is an interactive CD-ROM about the role of technology in women's lives. Themes of domesticity and the use of electricity focus on women's experience with technology. Approach an animated sink full of bubbles. By moving the bubble-shaped cursor around the screen, one hears voices. Phrases like "turning fifty," "every single day," and "full of plugs and wires" are heard. Clicking on the animation provides access to a story by one of the women. The image of the woman wobbles and distorts depending on the amplitude of her voice. Different channels present the woman speaking and others present the interior, subjective images that accompany her story. Viewers can add stories to the website version of this piece at www.lightfactory.org/smallappliances. - KS

M.R. Petit
The Mutant Gene & Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow, 1996, CD-ROM.
The artist, having experienced a childhood disrupted by mental illness, explores the definitions and conventions of the terms of "normalcy" in this interactive piece. She explores the categories and distinctions of being "crazy" and "not normal." She uses technologies to suggest alternate and augmented realities. Although originally a performance piece, the artist chose to adapt the Mutant Gene to a more intimate nonlinear format. In this abstract environment the viewer is struck by a labyrinthine maze of video, animation, music and sound. With no text or navigation instructions, the viewer learns there is no wrong way to go, nor an affirmatively defined reality. - KS

JooYoung Won
Ohaeng, 1997, CD-ROM
Fascinated by the spiritual mysticism of the I Ching, Won presents a delicately refined interface through which one can cast one's own I Ching to better understand the order of the universe. The Chinese theory of the I Ching comes from an attempt to understand the physical world. It is based on the understanding of cyclical nature of the earth's elements: wood produces fire; fire produces earth as dirt or ash; earth produces metal; on the cold surface of metal, water condenses; water grows trees, etc. These elegantly rendered figures interact as if by acted upon by external forces. The artist wants the viewer to see harmony in the forces of nature. - KS

Sharing CDs The Cyber Café will feature a designated workstation with a library of CD-ROMs provided by conference participants and others. Time can also be scheduled in the Artists' Exchange room for sharing your work with others.