Eric Chan and Heather Schatz, the artist duo who, with little irony, go by the quasi-corporate label ChanSchatz, periodically hit a keystroke or adjust the settings on their loom. A lot of the time they're on the phone. They have the purposeful and facilitating demeanor of good-cause politicians, but one senses, too, that they'd make expert VPs of marketing or high-profile architects. They are voraciously fluent with their knowledge. They smile well. It isn't hard to imagine that in today's Luddite-by-default art world ChanSchatz may be more deeply involved with -- and more thoroughly symptomatic of -- digital production than just about anybody. What sets ChanSchatz apart is their naturalization of what may be the defining, if relatively unsexy, truth of the nascent digital age: that the recent advances in technology are mainly advances in information processing, data distribution and storage, and networked communication. More kinds of data, from more places, move faster than ever before.

Jodi are punk-ass pranksters, tied in with seething on-line art communities like net.time and Rhizome. For some, their work constitutes a kind of quasi-Situationist political critique, a détournement of the functionalism ascribed to computer code. Artists from David to Courbet to Malevich to Halley have asked whether or not political realities are affected by the manipulation of the technology of graphical interfaces. For their part, Jodi don't seem to get past issues of legibility, a result perhaps of their total immersion in binary systems (on/off, clear/unclear, static/chaotic). Only when their hack jobs begin to operate more as a kind of infrastructural realignment -- a dose of Hans Haacke to go along with the Warhol -- will their politics become more than postures.

THE DIGITAL GESTALT is both seductive and repellent -- much like televisual mass culture was for the pop artists of the sixties, or cinema and photography was for the surrealists of the twenties. Jodi's discombobulation of the graphical interface carries with it an intensely fetishized (and therefore volatile) relationship to the culture of the screen. The same might be said for the Greek-born, New York-based artist Miltos Manetas, who for the past five years has painted large, flat, Alex Katz-like oil paintings of computers and what he calls "screen life." Manetas is a provocateur. He has a showboat ingenuity and talks in swaggering aphorisms. Intensely fascinated with the new world the computer has wrought, he has a plan for art in the digital age: real estate.

In collaboration with architect Andreas Angelidakis and curator Ginger Freeman, Manetas has set out to build the first totally virtual environment for showing contemporary art: a 3-D Web gallery interface in Active Worlds ("home to hundreds of thousands of users and millions of kilometers of virtual territory") called "Chelsea." Manetas's problem with the physical exhibition space is Wittgensteinian. The traditional white cube supposes itself to be a parallel to the world of things and images -- a kind of value-free petri dish. To get rid of such fallacies -- that art is somehow indexical to the world, but only if taken out of it -- Manetas's Chelsea project turns everything into pixels. The art and its display space merge in the world of the screen. And in a clever swipe to the sanctioned, and sacred, gallery system, Manetas has proposed to rent out space in his virtual Chelsea world (he's had a number of takers already). Plots of data turf, designed to look like the Rosens and Gladstones and Postmasters off Tenth Avenue, are slowly colonizing the Web.

MANETAS'S IRONIES and Jodi's antagonism seem foreign next to ChanSchatz, who are content to use the digital mode in more practical, instrumental ways. They've been at it for a long time, relatively speaking. Since the mid-eighties, they have been compiling a complex and evolutionary database of shapes, forms, patterns, and colors -- as if every movement of a highly specialized kaleidoscope were being catalogued constantly. Their "output" -- what was once called object, or image, or idea -- is strange and varied: the Iris prints, the textile production, the flowchart lineage of data conversing away in their hard drives. They've even moved into the world of physical things. Their recent show at Basilico Fine Art in New York was comprised of cabinet-like structures whose faces or fronts could be slid open to reveal the signature ChanSchatz forms inside: a kind of analogue info-processing machine.

ChanSchatz are an art practice as multitasking factory. They may be the quintessential "vertical" art operation. Their product is constantly subsumed by their production. This is largely facilitated by a crazy-quilt network of "partnerships" the couple has cultivated with corporate sponsors. With much proposal writing and soft talk, they've been able to get their desk chairs from Kartell, their fabric from National Nonwovens, their digital sewing machines and embroiderers from Brother and Epson. (It can't be overstated how much their studio looks like a new-media workshop dropped into a Nike plant.) They have over fifty such partnerships, and every nodal point, every combination of production materials, is noted. All interactions are significant and productive. When a specific ChanSchatz formal pattern, stored as a Tajima-format digital file, encounters an Alps printer, an Encad GA ink-set, or a Techno-Isel CNC Gantry mill, a new moment of convergence is enacted -- and recorded, rest assured. There is, though, something a bit terrifying about ChanSchatz's fluency with data: such an insistence on numbers reduces style and aesthetics to a kind of obvious and preprogrammed illusion. The artist becomes a machine. Notions precious to the history of art appreciation and analysis -- inspiration, alienation, taste, and value -- no longer apply.

 

Miltos Manetas Virtual Chelsea, detail 1999 Courtesy of Ginger Freeman.

The culture of art may be slow to assimilate such a pure take on technology as ChanSchatz's, or it may toss its reservations into a vitrine and display them as antiques in the new Digital Art Museum currently being built in Chelsea and due to open in 2000. The technology industries, on the other hand, are clamoring over themselves to assimilate "art." Witness Intel's sponsorship of the Whitney's American Century exhibition (Whitney director Max Anderson, along with his predecessor David Ross, now at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, are two of the biggest institutional advocates of digital art). Artists working with new technology are always at a crossroads. They wait. They suffer distorted expectations. They are pigeonholed. Yet culture has never been as saturated with tech talk as it is today. Will this change the fate of digital art? Will this affect the dimensions of what we call artistic production? It should, necessarily.

Bennett Simpson is senior editor of ArtByte, a contributing editor of Purple, and a frequent contributor to Purple, Art on Paper, Publishers Weekly, and CC: The Magazine of Bad Faith. He is co-curator of the exhibition The Production of Production at Apex Art, in New York, which runs from September 9 to October 9, 1999.