"Science and art are inevitably separated. Any attempt to 'bring the two together' should be looked at with suspicion."

--Billy Klüver, "Theater and Engineering--An Experiment: Notes by an Engineer" (1967)

"Science fiction writers know that a good gush of ray-gun-blasting melodrama will cover up a multitude of futuristic sins."

--Bruce Sterling, forward to Reality Check, (1996)

The conjunction of art and technology is not new. The cross disciplinary work of Leonardo da Vinci, and the mechanically engineered spectacles of Renaissance and Baroque culture1 are useful early examples of art and science functioning as arguably parallel branches of experimental inquiry. Art and technology did not philosophically diverge until the Industrial Revolution, when artists began to reject the values of an urbanized society increasingly at odds with individual authorship and the natural world. The resulting schism widened so significantly that when, a century later, Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, proposing the synthesis of art and machine to revitalize society, the gesture was nothing short of anarchistic.2

From that critical moment in 20th Century art emerged a rich tradition of art consciously appropriating technology, in which the six artists in Sub-Techs are the latest generation. In the 1920s and 30s, Bauhaus artists such as Moholy-Nagy, and Russian Constructivists Malevich and Rodchenko took up many of Futurism's radical ideas, using new technology to create interdisciplinary works in all artistic media. For these artists, technology was a means to reinvent the vocabulary of art, with a particular emphasis on using new techniques to disseminate their utopian agenda for social change throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, and to integrate art and daily life. While both the Russian avant-garde and German Bauhaus succumbed to political events, many of their proponents continued to germinate the union of art and technology. Moholy-Nagy himself founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, an institution dedicated to uniting "art, science and technology in a creative pattern."3

Over the next three decades other artists collectives and institutions promoting collaboration between artists and scientists would emerge, most notably the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the Zero Group founded in Düsseldorf by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded by Billy Klüver in New York. Pop Art, with its fetishization of machine-made cultural ephemera, would draw further attention to technology's role in shaping contemporary aesthetics during the 1960s. By the early 1970s the precedent for artists working specifically with digital technologies was well established, as evidenced by the appearance of landmark museum surveys on the topic such as "Software, Information, Technology" at the Jewish Museum in 1970, and "Art and Technology" at the Los Angeles County Museum the following year.4 However, these manifestations of art and technology were at the time largely overshadowed by (although at times brilliantly integrated with) minimalism and conceptual art, the major formal innovations of the late 1960s, which continued to dominate art practice throughout the following decade.

In the mid-1980s a noticeable new preoccupation with digital systems and technologies emerged, although the previous optimism toward these tools was replaced with openly critical and often distrustful regard. In addition to the vital and still continuing exploration of video as an artmaking tool, artists such as Steina & Woody Vasulka, Alan Rath, Jenny Holzer, Tatsuo Miyajima, Stelarc, Simon Penny, and many others would make groundbreaking works using specialized, cutting-edge digital hardware. Much of this new work delivered openly political content which self-reflexively condemned the mass media consciousness enabled by the same tools used to create the work. In 1984, Apple released the "Macintosh" personal computer, which the visual arts community rapidly embraced. In 1971, no college art department owned a computer,5 but by the mid-80s this was a standard item in art schools, with entire departments devoted to the new "media arts."

With institutional acceptance and increased access (although far from fulfilling the optimistic rhetoric of a virtual community free from class, gender or ethnic barriers), practitioners of digitally produced art championed an entirely new realm of aesthetic experience, making claims for "interactive," "nonlinear," "virtual," "hybrid," and "global" art forms. We can still only anticipate whether these neo-utopian promises will be realized in the context of art. Meanwhile, the ever accelerating pace of technological change puts artists in the unfortunate role of having to keep up with the hype, making it increasingly difficult to qualitatively place fine art practice within constantly shifting formal parameters. Artists of the 1990s already have made significant work in such areas as robotics, telecommunications, genetics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, nanotechnology, cybernetic body modification, and all have been fashionable and frequently-visited topics of high-profile exhibitions. As with technology-based work throughout the century, much of the resulting discourse over the past decade has hinged on one of two opposing ideological positions: 1) technology is to be celebrated as the utopian medium through which artists are empowered with unlimited new modes of expression, and 2) technology is to be feared for its boundless potential to undermine our privacy and freedom, and generally debase our sense of "the real."

Both models are dependent on a certain amount of gratuitous techno-spectacle to convey their relative positions. The former tends to do so unabashedly, while the latter tempers its hypervisual environment with a healthy dose of commentary, often in the form of heavy-handed imagery and textual content. Although neither position is without merit, neither addresses the formal and conceptual parameters of these new forms, and how they interface with established approaches to making art. This lack of formal examination is convenient when the work in question is grounded in little more than technical gimmickry, with traditional art practice at best superficially referenced, and all formal elements defaulting to the material components of the technology itself.

This is certainly not meant to condemn all such experimental work, but rather to highlight a common problem with the process of integrating art with the newest technologies (although one might argue that any art whose form and content is shaped by technologies which are themselves shaped mainly by commerce and the military is inherently problematic; but this is an oversimplification). It is this precise juncture, however, where the emerging artists in Sub-Techs differ: since they have no pretension about being at the forefront of technology, they do not attempt to "straddle the tricky position between front-line consumerism and cutting-edge artistic practice,"as one artist aptly described the dilemma.6

Here is a group of artists who, almost unavoidably, have become fluent in new technologies, but who employ them sparingly if at all, and often in unlikely combinations with more conservatively "clunky" sculptural media. Neither wowed by cyber gimmickry nor paralyzed with Neo-Luddite paranoia, these artists pick freely from a fertile assortment of high and low-tech tools. Their end goal is not merely to create new visual effects for their own sake, or, by contrast, to generate a didactic, medium-specific content--but rather to drive both methodologies toward a more idiosyncratic outcome. While digital technologies by their nature suggest a move toward the dematerialized, creating a simulated 3-D landscape out of an increasingly malleable 2-dimensional field, the artists on view at The LAB self-consciously ground their ideas in the concrete world of physical material, preferring the perversely handmade to the virtual. Post-digital sculpture is a kind of Arte Povera for the end of the millennium.

The artists in Sub-Techs use two main strategies for avoiding the increasingly canonized media art gestures of the 80s and 90s. The first is to appropriate and aestheticize the look of high-tech without need for access to the technology seemingly depicted. This tactic is best seen in Steven Hendee's meticulous cardboard and foamcore sculptures. Like the set of good science-fiction movie, Hendee's ultra-futuristic objects look convincingly functional, but, like their cinematic equivalent, are entirely decorative. An uncanny blend of faux high-tech design and low-tech materials, these crystalline, sometimes organic-looking structures communicate a collective sense of what the future looks like from a late 1990s vantage, similar to the way atomic diagrams and streamlined design motifs in the 1950s heralded the forthcoming space-age. Hendee's project is reminiscent of the primitive cargo cult societies that, seeing airplanes for the first time, fashioned replicas out of mud and twigs. When confronting his sculptures for the first time it is startling to observe the illusion of seamless, highly engineered structure and surface give way to low-budget masking tape construction on closer inspection.

That Hendee is able to seduce and stimulate our techo-fetishistic desires using little more than masking tape and Christmas tree lights is no small credit to his skill as a traditional sculptor, and certainly the works are more than successful on this level alone. Yet there is another, newly disclosed aspect to Hendee's project, which further complicates and enriches it's relationship to "real" science. In 1995 Hendee began a collaboration with Dr. Robert Phillips, president of Quantum Technologies, Inc., who contacted the artist with the idea of creating visual interpretations of existing mathematical data. These data configurations were produced by a new generation of computer created with Defense Department funding, with the purpose of calculating simulated global conflicts. Because of human error, this highly complex computer system malfunctioned, and as a result began to emit streams of spontaneous data. This data, although unintelligible by conventional means, is regarded by some in the scientific community as evidence of artificial intelligence.

Hendee has analyzed and transposed this rarefied mathematical material into coherent visual images he calls the "Q-Artifacts," which he has recently exhibited for the first time. The resulting sculptural forms, again fabricated out of cardboard and tape, are not unlike previous work; Hendee acknowledges that earlier works were influenced by forms derived from the Quantum data. So compelling is Hendee's ability to fabricate the illusion of technology with minimal means, when first confronting the "Q-Artifacts" it was my belief that the above described scenario was a science fiction narrative cunningly contrived by the artist, rather than the astonishing collision of art and science that it in fact represents.

Bill Feeney's kinetic constructions also manipulate our expectations, not in terms of scientific plausibility, but within the realm of 20th century art. Using simple motorized components, his works fall within a distinctly modernist tradition of experimental kinetic forms, beginning with the machine sculptures of the Constructivists in the early 1920s. Like the moving sculptures of that period, Feeney's art conveys a modernist spirit of truth to materials, or what Vladimir Tatlin called, in reference to his own motorized constructions, "real material in real space."7 There is no attempt to mask or obscure any moving parts, and all sense of utility is disregarded in deference to aesthetic impact. For the Constructivists, this dismissal of functionality served to embrace scientific rationalism, and to celebrate the artist's new control over technology. Historically, such optimism with regard to the machine was replaced by darker, more foreboding sentiments, as manifested in the self-destroying machines of Swiss artist Jean Tingley, and still later, the unambiguously apocalyptic machine spectacles of Survival Research Laboratories.

In Feeney's case however, any ideological position toward the relative merits of mechanized society is uniquely inscrutable, allowing for a deadpan absurdity to resonate through his work. This quality is all the more manifest when considering his artwork in terms of our expectations for interactivity, as seen in his installation entitled Sinister Seven. This piece consists of seven disembodied vacuum cleaner motors stripped of all mechanical linkage which might betray a standard function. They are hung in mid-air at predetermined heights via the same cords with which they are supplied electricity. When activated by the viewer, either by motion sensor, or, in the case of the LAB installation, by foot switch, the motors turn on, making noise, sparks, and gradually spinning in place. Each motor is equipped with a small, hand-colored light bulb, which also duly lights up, adding to the spectacle.

"Sinister" mainly by virtue of its cryptic purpose, Feeney's installation can be read as a parody of a certain mode of "interactive" installation which, besides multi-screenvideo, has become almost iconic for "media art" over last two decades, especially the type we have come to expect from the alternative space circuit. Playing on our expectations for non-static art to "do" or "show" us something once we activate it, Feeney's sculpture confounds us by performing only the most basic functions of turning on and off, providing no didactic clues, and ultimately forcing us to consider it solely in terms of traditional sculptural criteria. Which is precisely where Sinister Seven and Feeney's other works succeed; although made from often unwieldy and sometimes inelegant found objects, their overall composition is as carefully balanced as a Calder mobile, and indeed, his works have much of the same performative playfulness. Feeney's inflating and deflating ventilator constructions likewise satisfy Calder's quest for a sculptural sense of "virtual volume," albeit in a characteristically droll way.

While Feeney's recontextulized industrial artifacts invite art-historical interpretation, Austrian artist Gebhard Sengmüller's objects come with their own revisionist history. In an ingenious act of sub-technical engineering, Sengmüller has created Vinyl VideoTM, a technique for storing video signals onto conventional analog "LP" recordings, which can then be played back on a combination turntable/video monitor. From a technical viewpoint, Vinyl VideoTM is no small accomplishment, requiring development of a "black box" with computer software to manage data compression between diamond needle and cathode-ray tube. Though still improving through ongoing technical refinements, the resulting images are significantly degraded due to inherent bandwidth limitations. Lacking sound and color, and running at only 8 frames per second -- as opposed to the 30 frames per second common for standard video -- any film content rendered via Sengmüller's retrograde medium resembles some of the earliest manifestations of moving picture history.

Sengmüller forces us to consider our place in the continuum of technological progress by showing us an alternative direction in which that progress might have gone, or as the artist calls it, "a fake archeology of media." The artist points out that although electronic transmission of moving images has been possible since the late 1920s, convenient storage and retrieval of these images was not possible until the development of the video tape in 1958, and it was not until the early 1980s that video recording technology became widely available for home use. With Vinyl VideoTM Sengmüller posits a home movie technology beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, and, leaving little to the imagination, even reconstructs integrated turntable and television home entertainment systems suited to the stylistic mass-market needs of each past decade. While media art tends to traffic in conjectural visions of the future, Sengmüller's work cultivates a fictitious technological past. In doing so his works uniquely transcend technical obsolescence.

Like Sengmüller, other artists in Sub-Techs create works which are less concerned with a given source material or subject matter, than with drawing attention to the various ways that subject matter can be electronically manipulated. One way this is accomplished is through the seemingly regressive process of rematerializing previously digitized images with relatively basic sculptural materials and techniques, a strategy employed by Rachel Stevens.

In a recent installation, Stevens created a meditation on art's objectification in the digital age, and upped the discursive ante by referencing conceptual art 's preoccupation with dematerialized forms. She first appropriated a textbook icon of conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, and refabricated its physical components. A chair, a photograph of the chair, and the dictionary definition of "chair," (these last two consisting of "flat" art objects of known dimensions) were all three cast in cheap, low-grade plastic, thereby heightening their physicality, while neutralizing their respective functions as furniture and pictures of furniture. The artist then deftly added a fourth element: the image of the chair digitized and printed out in alphanumerical code, illustrating a literal dematerialization of the idea of a chair, presumably unanticipated by Kosuth's more philosophical reductive maneuverings of 1965.

In her work for Sub-Techs, Stevens takes two-dimensional, bit-mapped images and recreates them with physical objects on a one-to-one, pixel to object ratio. In Kodak 1976, Stevens uses conventional home computer scanning techniques to isolate and digitize a detail of her own hair, using a snapshot from her youth as source material. The grayscale image is then enlarged and reconstituted on a near monumental scale, using brown and white sugar cubes as surrogates for light and dark pixels. The simultaneous sense of digital insubstantiality, and the immediate physical presence of an unusually large accumulation of tactile material is richly paradoxical. The notion of sugar as a highly processed and somewhat unhealthy substance also informs an apt subtext regarding the politics of digital image processing. Further, Steven's task of manually assembling images pixel by pixel is smartly counterintuitive to preconceptions of both conventional self-expression, and digital tools as inherently labor-saving.

The incongruity between the physically material and digitally ephemeral is further heightened in Kodak 1972, in which a photographic detail of a smile, again digitally extracted from snapshot self-portraiture, is rendered in lumber. As with the work in sugar, the integrity of the material itself is not altered, only rearranged to accommodate a low-resolution, bitmapped image. Stevens takes a pallet-sized quantity of pine 2x2s and restacks them so the discolored ends--already marked at the lumber yard for inventory purposes--form a representation of the artist's smile, with each 2x2 replacing each of the 901 pixels that compose the image. What was originally a transient, emotionally generated moment in the artist's life over 25 years ago is first captured on film, then further transposed through digital means, and finally objectified in an implausibly massive, 3-dimensional state. Visible from only a single vantage, this subtle smile confounds our reading of a form that otherwise seems to fit best within the vocabulary of minimal sculpture.

Just as early modernists Duchamp and Picabia used paint and canvas to create machine images as symbols of the modern age, artists of the Sub-Tech generation like Rachel Stevens and Erin Thurlow deploy obviously computer-manipulated images as signifiers for the digital age. Unwilling to altogether surrender familiar media to technology based forms, they nonetheless make potent reference to technology's key role in the changing cultural landscape.

In his ongoing series My Generation, Thurlow presents digitized images that are formally ambiguous in terms of their relationship to both portraiture and figurative sculpture. Like Stevens, Thurlow has taken snapshots and digitized them for easy scale manipulation. Instead of isolating physical attributes, he presents the body in its entirety, on an full-size, human scale. Printed by color ink-jet, tiled together, and mounted on foamcore board -- a classic sub-technical material due to its light weight, low cost and malleability -- each figure is provided with a simple base to allow for a free-standing, "sculptural" presentation. The contrast between the seamless, illusory ideal of digitally manipulated imagery, and the physical reality of these somewhat awkwardly fabricated, hand-cut forms is no accident. Like other artists in Sub-Techs, Thurlow shuns high-tech seduction, choosing unglamorous materials and techniques as a means to generate discourse on the digital realm.

Within each figure, various features are rendered with varying degrees of image resolution, creating a digitally blurred look reminiscent of "identity protection" in "real life" crime television. Their identity uncertain, what remains recognizable about Thurlow's subjects are their consistently young age (early-to-mid twenties) and their vaguely hip (art student/grunge) dress and demeanor. Like the photographic portraits of August Sander, who attempted to make a systematic survey of the German people of his era, representing physiognomic types rather than individuals, Thurlow's figurative sculptures are a collective portrait of his peers. In both title and appearance, they deliver a double-edged pun, referencing both "Generation X" style, and the pervasive transition from mechanical to digital reproduction, in which image fidelity remains constant regardless of how many generations exist between copy and original.

The works created by Thurlow for Sub-Techs are also site-specific. In an earlier manifestation of My Generation, Thurlow placed his figures in an informal cafe environment within a larger, institutional art context, using as photographic subjects the people who normally frequented that space. In his current installation, the artist has created a new stable of figures, using as subjects LAB gallery staff members and resident hipsters from the gallery's increasingly gentrified Mission district neighborhood.

Of all the work in the Sub-Techs exhibition, Toshi Onuki's art, on first examination, least betrays its unique fusion of both digital and sculptural craft.

Onuki has developed a consistent if unorthodox artmaking strategy wherein he takes a diffuse ideological premise and uses it as a conceptual springboard toward a specific sculptural abstraction. For example, in previous works his interest in issues of class and the monetary system have lead him to fabricate very large, coin-shaped forms that he painstakingly fashions from basic architectural materials. That the connection between social concern and finished object is relatively opaque to the viewer is of little concern to the artist, who is interested mainly in the process by which relatively random content can direct decisions resulting in aesthetic forms.

In his new work for The LAB, Onuki begins with the concept of nationalism being at odds with global unity. Using the five interlocking rings of the Olympic Games as a symbol of international unity, he first creates a virtual, 3-dimensional representation of this form using sophisticated CAD software. Then, in a literal interpretation of "exposing the fallacy of global unity," he fragments the interlocking hoops, using the computer to incise and expose the structural points at which the arcs intersect. The resulting forms are precise and relatively inaccessible without digital computation and rendering. They are also far more in the manner of late modernist sculptural formalism than one would ever expect from a work derived from a combination of indirect political content and digital manipulation. This irony is not lost on the artist, who goes on to fabricate the five forms entirely by hand using traditional wood-working tools and techniques.

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