To attribute this sort of theological and anthropomorphic status to the computer was impossible. Computers have no agency. They can neither save nor corrupt. I talked briefly about the issue of social anxiety surrounding the role of computers in almost every aspect of our lives and that there just had to be a way to distinguish between art and industry, creativity and power, that the concerns about technology were well grounded, but retreat or outright rejection wasn't the best course. Perhaps it would be fair to say a bit about the sense of anxiety that was revealed.
Painting is about guts.
It was obvious that the issues of computers in the arts continues to have deeply troubling consequences. The panel reminded me, glaringly, that our assumptions about technology and art were not so pervasive, even while technologies were cascading over our attention. Still, after decades of work, the field of electronic art, is largely unhistoricized. And while a full history of media art remains unwritten, a small number of attempts have emerged considering the World Wide Web as an extension of the gallery or museum, attempts that highlight the overall problems of curatorship, design, and cyberart. C onsidering all the hype surrounding the network, a system less than ubiquitous and still enveloped in developing protocols that make stability dubious, a discussion of art comes with some very real problems.