Curatorial S T A T E M E N T Kathleen Chmelewski Nan Goggin Joseph Squier Art as Signal: Parts of the Loop In February of 1993, ad319 was born from the simultaneous efforts of three artists trained in traditional mediums, all of whom were attempting to embrace new digital technologies. The idea of working as a collective seemed an effective way to pool our knowledge, and an efficient means of addressing the issues we face as contemporary artists and educators. One outgrowth of this collaborative approach has been Art as Signal: Inside the Loop, an international exhibition of electronic art we are in the process of curating for the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign. The impetus behind this exhibition has been our belief that we are now entering a "second generation" of computer art. This new generation is characterized by artwork that is more mature and authoritative than that which preceded it. Unhindered by indirect access, cost, or computer languages too dense for the lay-person, "second generation" computer artists are pushing beyond the limits of their predecessors. They are in- vesting their work with a range of content unrelated to the process of its' own creation. Much has changed since computer technology be- came available as a creative tool thirty years ago. Often the content of first generation computer art was characterized by a self-reflex- ive analysis of the process itself. Expensive equipment, obscure computer languages, and unfriendly interfaces all served to limit the user group to a technocratic few. But personal computers have re-configured the user group. New software, along with more affordable and more powerful hardware, have allowed the individual artist access to experi- ment with techniques and multi-media forms that in the past would have required outside support. Development in software design has engendered interfaces that are more friendly and transpar- ent. These combined features have created a tool that allows artists to get serious. The work in this exhibition is presented as exemplary of this evolution. One could compare the development of a vocab- ulary in the digital arts with the universal acquisition of language. First one learns the alphabet, then words, then sentences. Finally, one can utter poetry, or prose, or anything in between. The images that follow are significant for their poetic resonance, not for the fact that they were made with a computer. Rooms full of terror from a child's perspective, models of cyber-organic entities never before encountered that remark on the future of bio- technology, mediated narratives, modern myth- ology, and reconstruction of personal histories. These images set out to do what artists through the ages have always done, namely to give expres- sion and coherence to the human issues of the day. E X H I B I T I O N G A L L E R Y entrance