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Vol. 24, No. 22 May 7, 1999

Conversation from the Computer Lab: Why Technology in the Arts Matters

The first ever Interactive Arts Festival, sponsored by Columbia's Computer Music Center, hit Manhattan last month. Sell-out crowds came to see and hear what art could be made with the highest of high-tech equipment.

The setting was some of the city's most innovative performance venues -- The Cunningham Dance Studio, The Kitchen and The Miller Theatre on the Columbia campus. And at the Computer Music Center's home in Prentis Hall -- the University's 125th Street annex that is rapidly becoming the East Coast epicenter of the burgeoning interactive/multimedia scene -- experts hosted a daylong demonstration of the cutting-edge technology used in the festival, much of it donated by Intel, Yamaha, IBM and Microsoft, among many others.

The festival's founders and principal organizers, Columbia music professors Brad Garton and Thanassis Rikakis, discussed with the Record the exploding interest in computer music and its applications.

Tell us about the level of interest. We hear the excitement for the festival was stronger than expected.

Garton: "In fact, down at the Kitchen on Friday night [April 9] we had a near riot out on the street. This is no joke, people were pounding on the doors, yelling at me to let them in, and I was down there trying to protect myself, going 'Oh! I'm just an academic'." Why were the performances held in different spaces around the city?

Rikakis: "There's been a concept about our music center that it's stuck in the glory days of the '60s and '70s when Columbia was the leader in contemporary music. We wanted people to know this is not the case, and that we are current with what's happening in New York; that's why we held festival events throughout the city." Who, other than a musician, is interested in computer music?

Rikakis: "The festival drew people from all over. We did this very consciously. We went out and got mailing lists for the dance world, for the medical world, for the music world, for the computer industry, etc. So we ended up with an extremely mixed crowd, which was exactly what we wanted because we were trying to say to them that there are applications for music in everything you guys are doing-and we can do it."

Does high-tech have a true role to play in the making of art?

Rikakis: "The New York Times review said that the festival was high technology, and that maybe the art was hidden or the art was restrained by that-well, I'm not even going to address the issue of 'what is art.' The point is that everybody said this is the high-end of technology; this is what's happening right now. And we did want to say that 'Yes, we're dealing with what's happening right now.' Everything that we were doing in the festival was so new and [therefore] had been tested so little that we weren't even sure how it was going to work.
"Our concern here is to be sure what we're doing matters. But if art is not going to include technology, if it's not going to include multi-media, then you're really not addressing the concerns of people today. For us to say that just to protect art we're not going to touch high technology, we're making a mistake; we're not making art that matters."

So what will come of these technological musical innovations?

Garton: "We see a vast potential area of application for this technology beyond the music domain. I think that what the visual arts were for research in the 1980s, with fractals and chaos theory, sound and music will be to research in the upcoming decade-and we want to be at the forefront of that.
"We can take the knowledge that we gain working with very high-end technology and apply that not only in these other areas, such as dance and medicine, but also in the pedagogical projects that we're trying to do in the music department, and give them that extra Columbia touch that you won't find elsewhere."

Rikakis: "About 25 percent of the works presented at the festival were created at Columbia, and the point everyone made was that they were extremely balanced between content and technology. We have some of the best musicians in the world in this department. If we can combine their knowledge of content with technology, then we are in a most unique position to talk about how technology can be art -- how technology can be applied in ways that really matter -- and how art can move into the next century and still be consequential. All the humanistic knowledge that's here [at Columbia] can be consequential -- that is the statement, and we're the best people to make that statement."

Garton: "We're talking to a lot of people throughout the university in Computer Science, Engineering, the medical center, and there's a nice consensus that this is a very exciting opportunity.
"Our priority for growth is building up a very strong technology foundation because that's most essential for going in the directions we want to go. But ultimately we want to go everywhere."