Gallery illuminates media arts’ interactive, high-tech vision

In a pitch-black studio, a 20-inch television is turned on, the
screen facing a white wall. The channels are constantly changing,
and the volume stays low. The noise serves as an indicator of
what’s on: “Spongebob Square Pants,” then CNN
Headline News, then a Lakers game; but all the patrons can see is
the projection of a random spectrum of colors.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Philomene
Whitton, a first-time visitor at the gallery, formally named telic.
“But it’s soothing, just like a painting of an endless
landscape.”

The landscape’s creators are Osman Khan and Daniel Sauter,
both graduate students in the UCLA Design | Media Arts department.
By continuously collapsing each image on the screen into thin lines
that are projected one immediately after another, the television
images are transcribed into a stream of colors.

For one night each month, telic displays a different digital art
project created by a student of Design | Media Arts Professor
Christian Moeller.

Owned and supervised by Moeller, telic opened last August in
Chinatown. As a relatively new medium, digital art looks to utilize
technology creatively, resulting in anything from a 12-foot display
of an interactive rice genome to a magnified projection of tiny ant
trails. Though still underground in Los Angeles, the medium is
defiantly cutting-edge.

“It’s interactive instead of passive like
traditional arts,” said Victoria Vesna, the department chair
of Design | Media Arts. “If traditional art is like
watching TV, then digital art is like playing video games.
It’s much more exciting and accessible when you can actually
be involved and submerged.”

Located on a small pedestrian walkway, Chung King Road in
Chinatown, telic owes its prominence to the trailblazing successes
of the Black Dragon Society, a gallery owned and curated by art
Professor Roger Herman. Though focusing on the traditional forms of
drawings and paintings, the Black Dragon was the first gallery on
the block to bring student work into the local art scene. And while
the idea of highlighting young, undeveloped talent in a
professional setting isn’t looked upon favorably by some art
enthusiasts, this innovative approach is part of why the Chinatown
scene still thrives.

“People see sometimes their work as amateurish,”
said Herman of student gallery exhibitions. “But at the same
time there’s a freshness and an unpretentiousness to it.
They’re not as calculated and they take risks.”

The Black Dragon Society has enjoyed unexpected success since
its opening in August 1998. At the time, Chung King Road was just a
hidden alley full of vacant storage rooms for rent. Yet with its
proximity to Silverlake, a familiar stomping ground for L.A.
hipster clientele, the block quickly bloomed into a popular
location for a variety of underground galleries.

“(Chung King Road) is maybe one of the most exciting
things in the L.A. art world in the past five or six years,”
said James Elaine, an assistant curator for the Hammer Museum who
came to Los Angeles from New York four years ago.

Herman’s approach to the Black Dragon was decidedly
hands-off. He would give his students the gallery key and let them
work independently on their own projects ““ there was no
intention of starting a movement that would soon be called a
mini-East Village.

“We didn’t even know we were hot and hip,”
said Herman. “We didn’t put out any press, but (the
gallery) was still covered in magazines like Spin, Rolling Stone
and W Magazine. We didn’t even have a phone line until two
years ago.”

This environment made Chung King Road a perfect place for a
medium that is as experimental as digital arts. In 2001, New
York-based digital media artist Miltos Manetas opened the
Electronic Orphanage in the current telic space, using it as place
for his artist friends to work.

The displayed works at the EO mostly took the form of
projections, and visitors could only view them from the outside
through tinted windows.

Manetas envisioned EO as a public place transformed into a
computer screen that turns on during the few days the gallery is
open. Artists would design and experiment with Web sites on the
computer and changed them spontaneously during the exhibition
hours. The resulting products could be an interactive game with
walking black squares or a dinosaur transformed into a building
with flashing lights.

Manetas moved the EO gallery to the Internet and handed the
space over to Christian Moeller, who established telic in 2002.
Moeller’s gallery opens for only one night a month, when a
new art piece from Moeller’s students is chosen and adapted
for each exhibition.

“There aren’t many places around Los Angeles for
media arts,” said Khan, who moved from New York to UCLA for
the media arts graduate program. “We need a place like this
to share our ideas with the public.”

But Moeller doesn’t just want provide a venue receptive to
the digital arts; he also shares Herman’s belief that
students should be a part of the local scene instead of housed
under the umbrella of academia.

“I wanted a space for my students to show their works as
young artists, not just art students,” said Moeller.

Telic’s idiosyncratic medium means acceptance even from
the underground will come more slowly. The precise direction and
potential of digital arts is still unclear, and the audience still
formless. Moeller, aware of telic’s outsider position, holds
gallery openings on the nights that all the other galleries on
Chung King Road open ““ and when the largest crowd
gathers.

“Christian (Moeller) sort of hangs on,” said Herman.
“Otherwise, no one would come.”

Herman credits Moeller’s approach for its savvy but sees
little meaning in the digital art works.

“There’s no content! It’s so overrated,”
he said. “It’s art that’s unchallenging. It has a
great aesthetic appeal but it’s for the mass consumer, for
shopping malls. It doesn’t have any depth.”

Harlan Lee, one of the three sponsors for telic, has a different
view. After his visit to UCLA with the invitation from Moeller, Lee
immediately decided to support the gallery.

“I was looking to build some projects in downtown and I
really enjoyed what I saw at UCLA,” said Lee. “(The art
works) took static objects to a whole new level with
technology.”

As a visitor, Whitton expressed appreciation for the aesthetic
appeal of digital media arts, but was similarly undecided on its
deeper implications.

“They mean nothing to me,” said Whitton.
“However, young people grew up with this culture, so maybe
they can accept it better.”

The general consensus is that younger generations are the major
market for digital arts, meaning Moeller’s decision to
highlight his students may be just the right move. According to
Vesna, when the works come from the ideas of young artists,
they’ll connect with a younger audience.

Vesna isn’t worried about the claims that digital art
works are shallow.

“The field of art is so broad and every artist sees things
differently,” she said. “There are good and bad art
pieces in both digital and traditional art forms; it’s all
relative.”

But that won’t stop others from questioning the
medium’s potential.

“I still think the most mystical thing is pencil and
paper,” said Elaine. “We tend to be intrigued by
digital stuff but really pencil and paper is just as cosmic, it has
just as much potential.”

“It’s funny because things used to move very slowly,
but over the decades I don’t know if we in society are
parallel to the pace of technological change,” he continued.
“I don’t know if art will keep pace, but it’ll be
interesting to see.”

In terms of traditional art and digital art one day being equals
in worth, Elaine will simply wait and see. But there are plenty of
signs of progression within the digital art field already. The
entire block of Chung King Road hosted the biennial L.A. Freewaves
two years ago ““ a festival filled with trendy digital art
videos projected all over the blank sides of the buildings. The
Hammer Museum is planning on installing a room like telic suitable
for this medium as a part of its reconstruction plan this year.
Although digital art is still far from a mature art form, even
established institutions are acknowledging the emerging field.

“Humans love to explore new materials, so we’ll
continue to do it,” said Elaine. “Schools are
supporting (digital media), so that tells you something. The
interest is there and the scholarship is being born. That’s a
barometer. Chinatown is a barometer too, so something is happening.
We’ll continue to push out, and we’ll find new ways to
express ourselves.”