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High in the oakland hills, above the Tarot readers, buskers and bead
sellers of Telegraph Avenue and the tree-covered Berkeley campus of the
University of California, Beverly Reiser works on her latest piece of art.
Her easel and palette are a powerful PC, a pen-shaped stylus and Painter,
a painting program from Fractal Design.

Reiser is creating stills for what will eventually be animated artwork
sold on a CD-ROM entitled The Voice Garden. Viewers will be able to wander
through the work’s ‘mythical spaces’ and she hopes they will muse over its
ideas in their own time. This is a way of experiencing a work of art that
CD-ROM is ideally placed to provide. But Reiser does not see CD-ROM as the
sole medium for interactive art, as an earlier work demonstrates.

Temple of the Goddesses, which she describes as a virtual visit to a
holy place, uses computer animated artwork in a live dance performance that
the audience can try out too. A video camera picks up the performer’s movements
and projects it onto a large screen in combination with a computer animation
that tells the story. At certain points, the story stops and the dancer
can choose by his or her movements where it progresses next – to the Ethereal
Forest or the Enchanted Isle. Art critics have complained that the performances
are far too much fun, but Reiser says, ‘We wanted anybody to be able to
enjoy this, even people who didn’t have a clue what a mouse is.’

Using the PC for multimedia art is ‘like getting an elephant to dance’
says Reiser, but she has overcome its clumsiness to produce images for The
Voice Garden that are reminiscent of the colour plates from children’s books
of the 1920s. Unlike static pictures of the past, her digital scenes depicting
goddesses and Zen gardens conjure up a world that can be explored by the
viewer. Reiser sees this type of immersive, interactive experience becoming
an important element of art in the future.

Reiser is president of Ylem, an organisation based in San Francisco
that represents artists who work with technology. Some Ylem members are
using sensory devices from the world of virtual reality, such as gloves
and body suits, to control computer generated lights, sounds and graphics
in live performances. One former ballet dancer is experi-menting with arti-ficial
intelligence with the aim of making several leg-like appendages – built
from dried vines, string and metal joints, and connected by infrared links
to the computer – behave like a flock of bizarre beasts.

Much of the technology is still ‘clunky’, Reiser says, and does not
provide her with the degree of control that she would like. And the new
technology calls for new ways of working that artists are having to learn
as they go. Creating an interactive work of art isn’t a process for a lone
painter and her or his muse – it’s a collaboration between visual artists,
musicians, computer programmers and, increasingly, performers. Reiser worked
with her son Hans, a computer programmer, as well as several performance
artists on the Temple of the Goddesses project.

Interactive and electronic art are not replacements for traditional
paintings and sculptures, Reiser insists. But these works do offer opportunities
to make art accessible to people who might be put off by traditional galleries
or exhibitions.