New media powerhouse Eyebeam now a decade old

By Kelly Kingman

Except for her punky pink and red-streaked hair, you might mistake Amanda McDonald Crowley — designer-spectacled, stylish and articulate — for the executive director of a typical Chelsea gallery. But then, Eyebeam is not your conventional gallery. In the cavernous near-darkness of its exposed brick exhibition space, Crowley’s Australian cadence competes with a soundscape reminiscent of an arcade. She serenely describes each of the fourteen projects that make up “Source Code,” the first of three exhibits commemorating Eyebeam’s 10th anniversary on the frontier of the digital world. The work here represents artists, programmers, hackers, activists, youth — the kind of people Eyebeam welcomes into its creative laboratories, where innovators of all stripes come to come test their ideas.

A reverse-engineered Nintendo light gun game reincarnated as “I Shot Andy Warhol” by senior fellow Cory Arcangel, 29 years old, is a case in point. Participants take aim at an 8-bit graphic Andy Warhol while taking care to avoid the Pope, Colonel Sanders and Flavor Flav. “Including Cory was really important to us; he was our first teaching artist and his work has actually been influenced by the research groups he’s participated in here,” says Crowley. “A lot of the artists who are working in here really are emerging and it’s fantastic to watch their careers progress.”

Since 1998, Eyebeam has helped develop not only careers in the arts but the nascent artists who pursue them. Its Education Lab runs three programs for middle and high school students, including After-School Atelier, Girl’s Eye View, and Digital Day Camp (DDC), now in its ninth consecutive summer. “We treat them as little little mini-artists,” says Crowley of the teens who participate. “It was one of the things that lured me here.” She’s referring to her past positions producing new media festivals in Australia and Finland which she gave up to head Eyebeam’s programs, and turn future generations onto new media arts.

“DDC sparked an interest in technology for me,” says 2003 camper Malwina Andruczyk, now 22 years old. “I had already been really interested in art, but didn’t really experience the two things together very often until that summer.” While she was enrolled, the program focused on civil disobedience and forms of guerilla journalism, using blogs and cell phone cameras. Andruczyk is thrilled to be interning with the director of the camp. “I get to plan and help out with a program which was very important to me when I went through it.”

The Education Lab is just one of three at Eyebeam, all under one roof at 540 West 21st Street. The Education Lab faces the street with floor to ceiling windows, and on the other side is open to the Production Lab on the floor above. Just across the 5,000 square foot main exhibition space is the R&D Open Lab, a tangle of wires and circuit boards. All three operate on the philosophy of “open source, open content, open distribution.” The Education Lab gives New York City teens the opportunity to interact with experienced artists and programmers. The Production Lab works with the moving image and sound and software tools. The newest lab, R&D Open Lab, was established in 2001 to explore experimental technologies. Inside each each is a constantly changing cast of residents and fellows who pursue individual and collaborative projects such as the workshop Sustainable Scrapyard Challenge, which teaches participants how to create an electronic instrument out of recycled scraps and wire it to a hand-crank powered sound board. Mouna Andraos, a fellow this summer at the R&D Open Lab, leads the workshop. One of her personal projects is a necklace that continuously displays a measurement — in miles or kilometers — of how far the wearer is from an “anchor” location of their choice. “I’m playing around with the idea of whether this kind of digital information can replace some physical thing; is it just a number or can it create real connection?” says Andraos. “I think a lot of people are tired of getting our entertainment and pleasure and work and information and everything the same way through sitting and clicking and typing, through the same device. There are incredible things you can do with the keyboard and the screen, but for me, it’s exciting to break out of that box.”

While Eyebeam definitely “celebrates the hack,” as its website states, the research groups that are constantly in progress go beyond culture jamming. “A lot of the work here is process-based, it’s work in progress.” says Crowley. “We’re quite happy to show we’re not a neat gallery environment but a place where people are making work and there’s a lot of activity going on.” The software project Carnivore, for instance, offers a glimpse inside the ethos of Eyebeam’s artists, who are contractually bound to release their work to the public. The open source software was inspired by software the FBI used to perform electronic wiretaps. Designed by the artist collective Radical Software Group (RSG), Carnivore monitors the types of data transferred on a network. This information is then delivered to any number of clients. In Source Code, three other Eyebeam artists use this raw data to feed their own works. In the case of “PoliceState,” by current R&D Open Lab fellow Jonah Brucker-Cohen, mini police cars are propelled into motion whenever Carnivore detects words commonly monitored for homeland security purposes. In this loop, the toy police cars become puppets of their own surveillance. “I think the structure of Eyebeam is really important for the future of media arts and art in general,” said Cohen in an email. “As a place where artists can work and learn from each other’s practice and be supported through a shared funding model is something that is pretty rare in the U.S.”

Eyebeam began in 1997 when filmmaker John Johnson realized he was more inspired by artists working with new technologies than those in his own field. “In the mid-nineties I felt that artists I knew who were working with technology were asking much more interesting questions than the filmmakers I knew,” recalls Johnson. “Then I realized that in terms of physical space and offering resources, there was nothing there for people interested in art and technology.” The idea of opening up and dispersing Eyebeam’s projects to the public began with Johnson. “I think I’ve always been interested in areas of culture that are let down by the market,” he says. “In here we’re not trying to commodify art and it’s just a bit of relief for people.”

Of course the system can also be hacked for financial purposes. Steve Lambert, a senior fellow at the R&D Open Lab, developed his “Co-op Bar” while at Eyebeam in 2002. A free standing structure in the center of the exhibition space is equipped with an assortment of bottles of spirits, each labeled with the name of an “investor.” The idea is that art-gallery goers can spend the same amount of money on drinks as they would elsewhere, but that the profits go to artist grants. “A friend of mine and I were talking over drinks about how you make money for arts organizations. We decided if you’re gonna make money, it’s gonna have to incorporate booze,” he laughs. “Make your own bar, really cheap, really easy — this is all made of recycled materials — and then you have your own independent funding source. You don’t have to go out and look for grants, you’re making your own grants.” For would-be barkeeps, Lambert has provided a “Franchise Manual” with schematic drawings and specifications, down to the open source typeface he uses.

Eyebeam alumni also help less tech-savvy artists who pose new and interesting problems for the artist/researchers to solve.

Artist Nina Katchadourian, for instance, sought help to create “The Recovery Channel,” which plays found video on 38 different channels simultaneously so a viewer can flip through the footage from a leather armchair positioned in front of the monitor. “I had this idea that one of the key components would be that you’re channel surfing,” she says. “Doing that was a level of technical stuff I had no idea how to do, so I approached Eyebeam with the idea. They worked out a really interesting, elegant solution to the problem. The piece would not exist had they not designed this interface.”

This kind of collaboration is what Eyebeam is all about. “Most residencies for artists emphasize solitude and privacy — they give you a private studio, try to minimize distraction and interruption,” says Lambert, who is currently developing AddArt, a web browser plug-in that will replace ads with contemporary artworks. “Eyebeam provides a collaborative workspace — we work in a group studio, encouraging shared knowledge and the exchange of ideas.” He credits Eyebeam with playing a key role in his artistic process. “Because of all this, during my fellowship at Eyebeam I have been able to make work here I couldn’t before and wouldn’t were I to be hidden away in some studio in the middle of the wilderness.”

Future Eyebeam artists, says Crowley, will focus more on content than just new technologies. High on the list are investigations of public space and environmental issues, which are the focus of the next two exhibitions this year. And Crowley and Johnson are both happy to have centralized operations from Dumbo and Soho to their Chelsea space, which underwent extensive renovations in 2005. “It’s fun to be here in Chelsea,” says Johnson. “We recognize we’re a counterpoint or a foil to the conventional galleries here, but we get a lot of out of it and we think they do too.”

Crowley concurs. “It was important to us to have big glass windows onto the street so you can look right into the Education Lab,” she says. “We’re not like other Chelsea galleries in that we’re not just presenting work. People come in here expecting another white-walled gallery and often get a nice surprise.”