Originally published online on Microsoft Internet Magazine, February 24, 1997.

Rare Birds in Cyberspace

Dominic Gates

Imagine a live television show broadcasting 24 hours a day from inside an aviary. The camera is concealed behind the eyes of a large vividly colored robot birdÑhalf macaw, half owl. Invisible to the viewing audience, this exotic "Macowl" sits unruffled among its nondescript cellmates, as if asserting its right to be there. Viewers watch as small gray birds flit by, and visitors to the aviary peer into the cage. Occasionally someone waves at the camera.

Don't expect top Nielsen ratings for this showÑbut then, it's not TV. Welcome to Rara Avis, a real-time multimedia broadcast from the Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas in Austin. Created by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac, this "Networked Telepresence Installation" is beamed directly onto the computer desktop via the Internet Multicast Backbone, or MBone.

Flesh-and-blood visitors to the real space in Austin can don a virtual reality headset and not only see what the Macowl sees, but control the movement of its head, and thus of the camera. Internet users with CU-SeeMe as well as looking through the Macowl's video eyes, will hear sounds in the gallery, and can even speak directly into the cage. For less technologically advanced viewers, a fresh still image from the live feed is posted on the Web every minute.

If Rara Avis were television, it would qualify as stupefyingly boring programming. But it has been created as a work of interactive art. "You are part of it; it is not something to entertain you," says Kac, reminding us that art long ago ceased to be easily digestible. As artists explore the boundaries of cyberspace and the meaning of the information revolution, the definition of "art" is becoming ever more elastic.

Meanwhile, back in the birdcage, a cacophony of voices converges from cyberspace. The birds scatter to the periphery of the cage. Out of sight.

Community, Democracy, and the Art World

In its short lifetime, the Internet has dramatically expanded access to the art world. One can visit the Louvre or the Guggenheim online. Did you miss the once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington? There's a Vermeer site where you can see all the paintings, along with commentary and biographical information. Commercial galleries have rushed to develop Web sites posting collections of enlargeable thumbnail images of the artists they represent. Other sites, such as Arts Wire, offer access to art news and information.

Even more exciting are the thriving artistic communities in cyberspace. Art on the Net is typical: a noncommercial collective that offers online exhibitions of the artists' work, as well as the chance to join online discussions with other artists. Webmaster and site founder Lile Elam, herself an artist, promises to "bootstrap artists onto the Web," providing expertise to the less technically savvy. It is not a gallery; the artists don't post prices on their work. Art on the Net is a "service for artists," says Elam, "a place where they share their own work and curate their own spaces." Such ommunities open a new world for artists who once worked alone and unnoticed in the wilderness. Interest generated by Rolf van Gelder's CAGE site, based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has led to six physical exhibitions of his work, including one in the United [Image]States and another in Sweden.

Admittedly the Web is brimming with self-proclaimed artists showing work that might never make it into a standard gallery. Beverly Reiser of the Ylem online gallery sees this democratic development as "a breath of fresh air" in a stuffy art world where "the ventilation mechanism broke down ages ago." In contrast, artist and curator Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, from Madrid, is suspicious of the alleged democracy of art in cyberspace. "Art has little to do with democracy," he thunders. "A lot of people calling themselves Web artists still think art consists of pretty pictures."

Lozano-Hemmer also has reservations about the use of technology for its novelty value. He recently curated an exhibition on the Leonardo Web site that featured a critique of "technological correctness," a tendency among some electronic artists to believe that using the very latest technology automatically makes their work creative. Technology is merely a tool to accomplish an end, says Lozano-Hemmer, and "art should be fundamentally a conceptual or expressive thing."

No real artist can disagree with that. And yet the conceptual and the technological can come together when art is made specifically for the WebÑwork that is conceived for and exists nowhere else but cyberspace. Examples include collaborative projects such as HypArt, ChainReaction, and HyGrid; or the carefully sequenced text fragments and images of Sonya Rapoport. These are sites that push technological boundaries, and perhaps for that reason have a paradoxically primitive quality.

But Is It Art?

Which brings us back to that aviary in Austin. Just what is the point of one's virtual presence in a big birdcage? According to Eduardo Kac, having the observer and the observed share the body of the Macowl provides an unprecedented way of seeing, a way in which cybertechnology calls into question our conception of identity.

In addition, the variety of different experiences available, dependent on the access technologiesÑfrom the elite (the MBone), to the commercial (CU-SeeMe), to the democratic (the Web)Ñhighlights discrepancies of access in cyberspace. If you aren't equipped to see all the high-tech bells and whistles, well, that's part of the pointÑthe hierarchies of cyberspace mirror those of society.

And there is another, more human, element in the work that becomes apparent when Kac speaks of his difficulty with the notion of "exoticism." Kac is a Brazilian artist resident in Kentucky, a rara avis perched in a largely Anglo art world. He expresses his desire to make those who visit the site look through the eyes of the exotic, and "to become that exotic object." Here perhaps is the kernelÑLozano-Hemmer's "conceptual or expressive thing"Ñan autobiographical core to the work.

Clearly there is more to Kac's birdcage than first meets the eye. Does that make it compelling? You can decide.

Dominic Gates is a writer for PreText, a multimedia content and design company in Seattle.

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