This "born digital video" is the first incarnation of The Digital Museum of Modern Art. The museum wasn't a physical building, composed of stone, steel and glass, it was a "virtual" building, a building built from zeros and ones. You couldn't feel it or touch it, but you could be fully immersed in it.
The museum was created on June 14, 2002, using POV-Ray. POV-Ray (a common acronym for the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer) is a cross-platform, ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. Given the technical limitations of the day, the video was incredibly small, a mere 200 x 150 format.
The museum includes the artwork of W. Logan Fry, in particular. his weavings of microchips, a video screen and a painting of Bill Gates wording Fry's own mantra: "All art can be reduced to a sequnce of binary bits, zeros and ones in endless succession," with the query: "True or False?"
About half way through, there is a clip from Sneakers (1992), a truly prescient movie with Robert Redford, Ben Kingsley, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, Dan Aykroyd, Donal Logue, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and James Earl Jones! Sneakers poses the threat we now all face from cybertheft, cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare; and the ascendency of little bits of information, zeros and ones. Sneakers was one of the most important films of the 20th century.
The Digital Museum of Modern Art's first virtual exhibition was hosted by The Beecher Center at The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, in the exhibition: "Digital Artists: Recent Works" from August 28, 2002, through 2002.
|