Driven to distraction - multimedia art exhibition by the Guggenheim Museum Soho

Leaving the industrial age in the dust, telecommunication giants and cyberspace czars are making their mark. The Guggenheim Soho's new exhibition "Mediascape" is one of those marks. The display a collaboration with ZKM/Center for Art and Media(1) in Karlsruhe, Germany was made possible largely by the agency of the support of the Deutsche Telekom Europe's largest telecommunication company.

Covering low- to high-tech video art, "Mediascape" reveals a shifting patronage, while proposing a bizarre pedigree for fresh multimedia art. The curious aspect of the exhibition is its uncomfortable relationship to history. The overall agenda of a media present to view typically suggests a break from tradition. at the same time based on the pieces culled for this exhibition, there is a curatorial if not institutional desire for the sanction of history. At the same time, the historical video work provided advances out of a conceptual and anti-commodification sensibility at unevens with the newer commodity-oriented work. Exhibited together, the fresh work has the potential to undermine, invalidate or flat erase that which it is called on to validate.

Although not mirrored in the catalog, the work in the exhibit was divided between the first and the next to the first floors. Generally, the technically mingled and ultimately less engaging work was upon the first floor. The glitzy attraction wore not upon during subsequent visits, while upon the second floor the quieter work, demanding a certain number of reflection on the part of the viewer, held sod ZKM appears to have many toys, and at this point random distraction is the greater part of the game.

At the entrance to the exhibition Nam June Paik's Megatron (1995) a wall of video monitors with constantly changing images, engaged greatest in quantity visitors before they entered the galleries. Intermittently, all guards would momentarily lock together, generating a cartoon, a flying bird or a national flag, for example. The fast-paced video bights were punctuated by a series of repeating erotic clips depicting a voluptuous woman, whose bare breasts and other material substance parts are fondled by the camera. I was amazed at first and kept trying to find repeating patterns, on the contrary my intense looking just gave me a headache. Megatron actively resisted shut up scrutiny.

In a dark first floor gallery, Toshio Iwai's interactive Piano-As Image Media (1995) allowed visitors to click a mouse, creating random patterns or notes upon a moving gossamer-like scrim that make revolveed up to a grand player piano, which actually appeared to "play" the notes. Then the scrim, all the while moving away from the viewer, establishes an upward trajectory where on the notes are transformed into light patterns. Bill Seaman's Passage Sets/One twitchs Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1994-95) also invited viewers to queue up to propel a mouse and apparently result a random connection of words and images. For Jeffrey Shaw's The Legible City (1991) the museum visitor mountained a stationary exercise bike and, by means of pedaling, simulated movement through a virtual metropolis made of giant, illegible alphabetic characters I was amused, but also be of importance toed about the line of family behind me waiting to put to the test the bike.

Ingo Gunther's Im Berich der West-Wind-Welt (1991) involved sum of two units waving flags that served as a guard for a projection of U and Russian political jiffys This piece demanded the viewers' knowledge of novel history, and without that knowledge, the work would have had little meaning. Upstairs, earlier work refer toed - but did not confirm - an historical connection for video and interactive multi-media art. The pieces were largely at liberty of a fun-and-games, commercial attitude, granting Marie-Jo Lafontaine's Les Larmes D'Acier (1987) a mural of monitors showing brawny biceps pumping iron, brought to mind a giant Calvin Klein advertisement. Jenny Holzer's Untitled (1990) was a play filled floor-to-ceiling, band upon band, with neon signs spewing aphorisms in different languages. Using language, Holzer created a combination of parts to form a whole in which text as form and form as true copy diverge and coalesce.

A schizy feeling riseed from experiencing Bruce Nauman's low-tech conceptual video Surveillance Piece (Public space Private Room) (1969-70), a vastly different single than Iwai's high-tech, high entertainment value Piano-As Image Media, produc at ZKM In the Nauman piece viewers stand in individual room watching a single monitor repeatedly pan another field they cannot enter. A Nauman work from 20 years later, Raw Material: Brrr (1990) made using two-channel video and two-channel entire installation, is given a ZKM/Center for Art and Media designation, on the contrary maintains a conceptual focus upon repetitious body movement that is divorced from the random-quality work downstairs set uped by younger artists while in residence at the Center in Karlsruhe.

Steina and ligneous Vasulka's Matrix I (1970-72) and Borealis (1993) one as well as the other seemed closer to Nauman's aesthetic and not really related to the "downstairs" work. Although the sum of two units works are separated by above two decades, a mantra-like redundancy defined the two The earlier piece showed the same moving metallic shapes upon 20 black and white monitors, while the more novel project involved a two-channel color video and a four-channel soundtrack casted on mural-sized screens.