A historic survey of interactive art seems as if it would reach back all the way to, oh, last October. And it would seem that such art would be forgotten as soon as the screens and speakers were unplugged.

But two exhibitions opening tomorrow in New York are out to prove that interactive art has not only lasting value, but a lengthy past. The exhibitions, under the banner "Digital Avant-Garde," were assembled by Ars Electronica, an electronic-art center and festival in Linz, Austria. This year Ars, as new-media artists call it, is celebrating 25 years of sometimes controversial existence.
Gerfried Stocker, managing director of the Ars Electronica Center, said the center's first American exhibitions would demonstrate "a sense of the relevance of digital art, that it's not just a fashionable thing that appeared for a few years during the new-economy hype."
Mr. Stocker worked with curators at Eyebeam, a media-art center in Chelsea, and the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens to organize the exhibitions, which run through July 18. At Eyebeam, 540 West 21st Street, "Prix Selections" will present eight artworks that have won awards in Ars's annual high-tech art competition. At the Moving Image museum, "Interactions/Art and Technology" will show a dozen projects created by artist-residency programs at Futurelab, Ars's research center.
Some works are nearly 15 years old, but Mr. Stocker said age had not diminished their impact. For instance "Legible City," a 1990 work by the Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw, allows a viewer pedaling a real bicycle to tour a virtual version of Manhattan projected on a large screen. Mr. Stocker said the work demonstrated that "we are inside the information landscape."
Although interactive art is the core of the Ars mission, Ars also has supported more commercial areas of high-tech creativity, including computer animation. This weekend the Moving Image museum, at 36-01 35th Avenue, at 36th Street, in Astoria, is to show three hourlong programs of short films that have won Ars prizes for computer animation. A schedule is available at www.aec.at/nyc.

Ars has awarded its top computer-animation prize to several Pixar films, including "Toy Story" and "Monsters Inc." Pete Docter, a writer who collected the prize for "Toy Story" in 1996, said that as he accepted the award, "it was almost like being a rock star."
Mr. Docter, an Oscar-nominated writer and director, may not need recognition from a small Austrian arts organization. But for the digital artists working at the field's margins, a paid Ars residency or the cash accompanying each prize can provide much-needed support.
Ars Electronica started in 1979 as an offshoot of an annual music festival in Linz devoted to the composer Anton Bruckner. A gritty steel town of 150,000 people on the Danube, Linz wanted to distinguish itself artistically from Vienna and Salzburg.
The weeklong festival attracts more than 30,000 people every September. In 1996 Ars opened its permanent home, a $17 million center containing a museum and the research center. Benjamin Weil, Eyebeam's artistic director, said that Ars provided "a certain level of critical thinking applied to the field, which is not necessarily readily available elsewhere."
Ars has occasionally courted controversy. Critics complain that it is more interested in technology than art and that annual festival themes such as "Next Sex" merely attract attention.
Armin Medosch, an artist and curator, said the festival has shown a "lack of judgment regarding its overall agenda by focusing on tech over art, on hype over content."
The New York exhibitions were not a prelude to Ars opening an American outpost, Mr. Stocker said. But he said that the exhibitions would not have been possible in the past, when galleries were less familiar with the technical demands of presenting interactive art. Their recent interest, he said, suggests digital art is gaining acceptance.

New York Times Online, 20.05.2004
Matt Mirapaul