October 30, 2003
UW center for digital artists makes history
“You are a dangerous young man.”
Those words, spoken, according to Shawn Brixey, in a thick British accent, abruptly ended a meeting 15 years ago between him and the president of a well-respected museum and art school. The president had been considering commissioning Brixey to create a novel installation. But about two-thirds of the way through their discussion, the campus leader had heard enough. He pounded his fist on the table while shouting the “dangerous” accusation. Brixey, now a UW associate professor, was quickly ushered out of the room.
Times have changed for experimental media artists, or as Brixey calls them, “meta-disciplinarians.” Once considered too controversial and difficult, these scholars who employ innovative science to create groundbreaking art are increasingly finding a place on campus, especially here at the UW, where the Board of Regents recently approved a doctoral program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media.
That move, according to Brixey, the associate director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, could prove monumental.
“I don’t think the administration and the regents realize the history they’ve made,” he said from the center’s temporary home in the basement of Thomson Hall. A permanent suite of offices for the center, also known as DXARTS, is under construction at Raitt Hall. “They’ve allowed us to migrate out of our traditions in studio art, computer music, etc. and let us create our own tradition. They’ve set us apart, not made us any better, but they’ve also not made us any different. They’ve offered us an equal playing field. They’ve given us a place to pursue our scholarship at the level of academic intensity and with the type of critical analysis that we require.”
And that combination is unique, according to the director of DXARTS, Richard Karpen. Typically, Karpen said, digital artists’ terminal degree is the master of fine arts. A doctorate in art-making, he said, is viewed with suspicion. But this doctoral program, Karpen argues, is anything but suspicious. To him, it simply makes sense.
“I put this equation to my colleagues in the arts,” he said. “In physics, for example, a student will spend maybe five or six years after their bachelor’s degree working on a Ph.D. before they become a professor. They may even spend one or two years on a post-doc. They may spend as many as eight years after their bachelor’s degree before they’re finished with their formal education and their mentoring process.
“In the fine arts it’s two years. So I just say, what’s wrong with this equation? Either art takes a lot shorter time to master than other disciplines — and as an artist I reject that idea because I know how difficult it is — or we’re just not training our artists as well as we could be.”
Karpen is familiar with his detractors. Many are artists who argue that expression shouldn’t be over-taught and therefore there’s little point in having a doctoral degree. Artists don’t do real research so much as express themselves, the argument goes. But Brixey and Karpen argue just the opposite.
“An artist can do research because art is not just expressing oneself,” Brixey said. “Art is expressing oneself based on knowledge.”
And if the artist’s contribution to society is of similar value to that of the scientist, which the duo believes it is, then, they argue, the educational process needs to be equally rigorous.
There are other doctoral programs in digital arts, according to Karpen. Even more are on the way. But none of the existing programs is quite like the one at the UW. DXARTS is the only effort to formally bring together artists and scientists — the center includes faculty from music, art, architecture, computer science, electrical engineering, physics and more — in one autonomous degree-granting arts program. The program will have provisional status pending review by the Graduate School in the 2006-07 academic year.
Karpen and Brixey have confidence that DXARTS will grow and blossom and become a fixture on campus. In fact, they expect it to be a national model for similar programs. And as a national model, they know they’ll have to have talented and innovative students populate the program.
“The idea is that our students will be creating art and technology that hasn’t been created or experienced before and hopefully they’ll be doing that at the same level that scientists and any other scholar produces new knowledge,” Karpen said.
Brixey’s work serves as a good example of what people can expect from DXARTS. He has a bachelor’s of fine arts from the Kansas City Art Institute and a master’s of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied at the Media Laboratory.
That dual background is apparent in much of his artwork. For example, he’s currently working on a piece that uses the phenomenon of sonoluminescence — the emission of light via sound waves in a liquid. Sonoluminescence has been a scientific mystery for almost 70 years. No one can explain exactly how the process works.
Brixey’s artwork will produce the phenomenon in a unique way — via e-mail traffic that is converted from text to speech through a synthesizer. The resulting soundwaves of spoken word will create the tiny star-like light source that no one can explain. In effect, Brixey’s piece will use e-mail to create a tiny star within a glass cylinder. So what’s the point? Where’s the art? That’s a good question, according to the artist.
“What’s important to understand is that when most digital artists talk about their work, they’re referring to screen-based simulations,” he said. The difference between those pieces of art and this one is “these are real events. These are real things that are measurable. They’re not a picture of the thing we’re talking about. They’re the thing itself.
“So artists, by and large, for the last few millennia, have only had tools that allow us to make objects or images that represent the interpretation of our imagination. But it’s not the thing itself.”
Not until now, anyway. Brixey received a prestigious 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for this new work, which he expects to finish sometime in late 2004. It will also be viewable on the Web from the DXARTS Web site, www.washington.edu/dxarts/.
The artwork, Eon, will be one of the first pieces produced by someone in the new DXARTS. But Karpen and Brixey are quick to point out that it’s only a beginning. They talk with enthusiasm about the several queries they get every day in regard to the new doctoral program. The queries come from other “meta-disciplinarians” like Brixey and Karpen.
“Some of them already have graduate degrees in engineering and most also have substantial arts backgrounds,” Karpen said. “They want to come to our program.”
And when these experimental media artists start signing up for doctoral classes next fall, Brixey expects it might feel a little like a homecoming. He used to run into such students while directing the Digital Media Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Once you got them in class and started talking to them you’d realize they were seven-year BA students because they took two years in dance, three years in rhetoric, one year in business, a year in computer science, etc. It’s not because they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s just the compartmentalization of the university is defined in such a way that you have to specialize versus being this meta-disciplinary poet, scholar, engineer hybrid that is starting to be seen on many campuses.”
But, now, thanks in part to the UW, that’s starting to change.
It’s been a long journey toward this academic independence, but maybe Brixey should have seen it coming several years ago. It was almost one year exactly after his brush with the surly art school president that the phone rang and the administrator was professing a dramatic change of heart. The man was calling back wondering if Brixey would do the museum installation after all.
“He was on the phone saying, ‘The world has seen dramatic changes in the last year. We’d love to invite you back to do a piece.’ I guess this kind of work can be polarizing until you genuinely understand it, then it’s thumbs-up all the way.”
