The innate and often sensational agility of the computer, its acrobatics, can overwhelm the critical meanings required by art of significance. Such meanings can be forged by understanding the inherent dynamics of a new medium, and this has been difficult to achieve with a technology that so vigorously and playfully enables artists to imitate older visual vocabularies. Up until now, most artists using the computer had not penetrated to its essence as an artistic process, had not been able to understand it in terms of a modernist impulse to discover within every different medium a unique and unparalleled path to meaning.

Very recently, in only the past few years, there has begun to appear a handful of artists worldwide whose work suggests the emergence of a new understanding of digital/computer technology. Much is different about this new work. It doesn't seek out the clean white-walled spaces typical of contemporary galleries. It doesn't want a lot of natural light, or much light at all. It is unashamedly non-elitist, embracing a wide audience and offering access at various levels of sophistication. Its nearest influence is video and installation, but it is also performance and sculpture, and theater and video-game and carnival. Its interactivity is an element the contemporary art world may not be ready for, uncomfortable with an intellectual inferiority it attaches to the notion of "entertainment." This work is multi-layered and multi-leveled, complex and simple, three and four-dimensional. In short it is new and challenging, strange and unimagined. We are poised on the threshold of this new art, in which viewer and object are bound interactively together, like a strand of DNA, partners in the making of meaning.

Digital Mediations looks at seven of these artists: Jim Campbell from San Francisco; Lynn Hershman from San Francisco; Laurent Mignonneau from France, Sara Roberts, recently transplanted to Southern California, Bill Seaman from Australia, Christa Sommerer from Austria, and Jennifer Steinkamp from Los Angeles. After simmering as an idea for a few years, the present exhibition culminates months of planning. I would like to thank the Pasadena Art Alliance, whose grants to this and other exhibitions have made the Williamson Gallery programs possible. My appreciation goes to Sony Entertainment Systems for the gift of a sophisticated and indispensable VPH-1272Q data projector, and to the Ford Motor Company Design Center for their loan of the muscular and equally necessary Silicon Graphics Indigo II Extreme computer. Erkki Huhtamo, my globe-hopping Finnish co-curator, was our key to identifying an international list of artists, and it has been a pleasure working with him. Tim Butte, Art Center's Director of Corporate Relations, and Laurence Dreiband, Fine Art Department Chair, each encouraged my decision to do the project this summer, and both have been valuable advisors. Art Center alumnus Thessy Mehrain helped get the project moving from New York, doing research via the Internet. Julian Goldwhite, the Williamson Gallery's Associate Curator and Clarence Major, another Art Center grad, managed the complicated technicalities of the exhibition's installation. The the gallery's entry graphics presented new challenges creatively solved, as always, by Art Center's Design Director, Rebeca Mendez. Finally, I wish to thank the artists exploring this new frontier for their vision and their art: skillfully wielding algorithms, looking for RAM in all the right places, they are creating a new visual language for the 90's.