Third International Symposium on Electronic Art McKenzie Wark Computers are usually thought of as a technical matter, best left to the boffins. The Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) dispelled that illusion. Held in Sydney last week, TISEA brought together more than 300 artists, scholars, musicians and performers from around the world. Its theme was 'cultural diversity in the global village'. Keynote speaker Myron Krueger is one of the pioneers of what is now called Virtual Reality (VR). Kreuger has always preferred the term 'artificial reality'. He argues that "people have always built artificial realities for themselves just as the beehive and the clamshell shut out the world artificially." He is less interested in using technology to create faithful reproductions of the 'real world' than in creating cultural conventions and symbols which allow people to manipulate artificial worlds. Most the VR community seem totally ignorant of the way reality is socially constructed rather than simply 'there'. As the Australian born artist Simon Penny said, "when you hear people seriously asking questions like what the 'bandwidth' of reality is, you know they've missed the point." The point of bringing together artists, academics and technologists at TISEA was so that they can shed their ignorance and learn from the other. Krueger started working on computers at Dartmouth College in the 60s where, uniquely, computing was taught within the liberal arts curriculum. He decided early on that the interface between people and machines was a more important issue than the hardware itself. He also thought that artists were the sort of people who would understand the problems of designing a complex and subtle interface - not engineers. The big electronics companies are belatedly starting to see the sense in this. It is not accidental that Apple, Sony and Silicon Graphics were among the corporate sponsors of TISEA. These are companies which developed revolutionary cultural technologies like the Macintosh, the Walkman and the Indigo and Magenta graphic workstations. They know that without the invention of new cultural applications for technology, electronics will become a declining market. It doesn't matter how nifty the engineering is if people can't extend and enhance their cultural experience with them. As with previous cultural technologies like the photograph and the phonograph, it is artists who will pioneer the new cultural forms. In doing so they will also change our notions of art. Both the general public and a powerful group within the arts still see it in terms of a 19th century romantic notion of the individual alone in their studio, crafting unique works by hand and eye. This kind of artistic work will always have a place, but cultural technologies also create new ways of working and thinking. The arts community has a long way to go to shake of restrictive notions about what art is, and events like TISEA can help by pushing back the boundaries. The Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Film Commission are to be congratulated for supporting TISEA. Without the involvement of the public arts funding bodies, Australia will be forever behind in the cultural development and commercial opportunities opening up in this field. The new generation of artwork will not be about unique and precious objects, it will be about interactive environments and innovative forms of information. Art will be about relations between people and places or people and ideas. It will about processes, not products. The interactive work of the Vivid group from Canada and Brisbane's Tim Gruchy show the way. Their work is as likely to be at a dance party as a museum - the venues and the audiences for art are changing along with the technology. The last generation of cultural technologies, particularly cinema, radio and television tended to homogenise cultural production. They created mass markets for standardised cultural products. The new cultural technologies will have to respond much more to cultural diversity to compete with what are now very efficient mass entertainment and education technologies. At the TISEA symposium, Anna Couey said that out of her experience setting up the Art Wire computer network, she discovered that native Americans took to using e-mail but never participated in public electronic bulletin boards. They simply don't share middle America's idea of the public sphere. The Adelaide based group VNS Matrix demonstrated the concept of a video game for women. Nintendo's Gameboy has been criticised for its masculine assumptions and its lack of appeal for women users. In the design for their 'Gamegirl', the female player has to infiltrate 'Big Daddy Mainframe' - quite a different scenario from the usual shoot 'em up games. The answer to the limitations of new commercial applications of media technology is to design better alternatives. Resistance, I'm afraid, is futile. As Australian technology artists Stelarc said, "the role of the artist can be to propose creative possibilities rather than to agonise over the dangers." Digital technology potentially allows the cheap and efficient distribution of much more differentiated and personalised forms of information and entertainment. It also allows people to interact with information environments rather than being a passive spectator. Developing these potentials requires experimental collaboration between artists, academics, corporations, engineers and the public. It is the avant garde of culture. In a sense, the new interactive media are already with us in a crude form. Just as the early cinema looks like child's play compared to the sophisticated art it has become, so too the Nintendo game heralds a new and complex art form. Developing it cannot be left to the technicians. The kind of people who think DOS is the way to make an interface between people and machines obviously know nothing about people. As the computer industry merge with publishing, broadcasting and consumer electronics, all of their old and separate cultural conventions are set to change. The public, the legislators, the creative artists and the universities can either react against these developments or try to have a positive influence. TISEA showed that the latter is the way to go.