ALONG A BEAUTIFULLY DISINTEGRATING ROAD.

Byline: ANTHONY BUCHANAN

Doing the unexpected in unexpected environments has produced interesting and daring results in Cutting Edge, an exhibit of digital projection and video at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. The title may be a bit over the top, as it sets up expectations of advanced technology. While the show certainly doesn't boast radical, never-before-seen digital and video tricks, this is part of the charm of

the work.

The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 22, offers a wide range of installation, sound-based, and digital moving-image works from Santa Fe regulars Steina, Woody Vasulka, and David Stout and lesser-known artists such as Flame Schon and Robert Drummond. On Saturday, Aug. 15, many of the artists, including Susanna Carlisle and Frank Ragano, will be discussing their works and the history of the video-artists collective known as The Currents. Sydney Davis, an animation and sound artist, will be performing as well, and collage artist Helmut Lohr will discuss his Return of the Goddess series.

Most of these highly sophisticated works were created from inexpensive and accessible technologies. Isadora, for instance, is consumer software that can be mastered very quickly, with tools for creating worlds of abstraction and other visual beauties.

A good number of video pieces are shown in the space, with more software installations scheduled for the fall. It's fair to say that interactive media exhibitionism is moving out of the experimental workshops of its origin. In 1960s New York and San Francisco, video art came to maturity alongside expanding worlds of sonic

and performance experimentation. Nam June Paik began making pastiches with various pop images and wild music, pioneering many of the forms now common on MTV. The highly improvisational electronic-arts laboratory space known as The Kitchen, co-founded by Vasulka and Steina in New York in 1971, was just one place for artists to come and work with the new medium. But for the most part, video and electronic art was limited to a few spaces. These mediums have moved into the marketable realm faster than most probably realize, although Santa Fe may be a bit behind the times when it comes to offering such work to the art-buying public.

"I had two reasons for doing this," curator Sandy Zane said regarding the choice to put the works in her gallery. "The first is, I wanted to learn more about various technologies and the finished products. I also wanted to see how this would fit into a commercial gallery. It's not something that's done here very often, but in New York and Europe, it's quite frequent."

Most of the Cutting Edge works present highly manipulated images that pose the traditional questions about these mediums: What is it that makes a piece "video art" as opposed to film or another medium? But video art -- a term that, frankly, is about as specific as painting -- has a long history of pioneers, like Vasulka and Steina, who have made these questions the very source of their lifelong explorations with technology. Their interests, like those of the majority of the artists featured in the Zane Bennett show, were in producing images and sounds that could only be created through the manipulation of video signal or through pixelization like that which is possible using the Isadora package.

In this sense, many of these artists are carrying on the pioneering tradition. Three projectors, set up in a single room on the second floor of the gallery, show the moving images on the surrounding walls. After debates between the artists, the decision was made to set up benches in the center of the room, so as to immerse visitors in the experience. Steina's Skorpa emphasizes the digital pixelization of a man controlling

the real-time deterioration of his own image. Ragano's Experiments in Spin is a hilarious recording of the artist

spinning repeatedly in circles and staggering away in a daze. There are some real beauties, like Carlisle's Darkness Spoken and Schon's Road, both of which contrast representational imagery with manipulated abstractions.

In these pieces, a fascinating dialogue develops between images of the "real" world and the artists' transformation of them into something else through software.

Carlisle has used dancers as her subjects throughout her video-making career. In Darkness Spoken, an image of a nude dancer's back is layered over an abstracted form -- another dancer under a parachute -- interacting with space and the surrounding darkness. As in most of her work, the dancers reach such meditative states that a viewer can almost feel

the transcendence of self occurring. To emphasize this, Carlisle manipulates the image, removing it from the human frame of reference into a place of abstraction. The dancer under the parachute was transformed through Isadora into a gorgeously colored and pixelated beauty. The gritty-looking image, however, also suggests a Francis Bacon-esque image

of frighteningly disintegrating form.

For Carlisle, it is necessary to suggest these two contradictory

states of experience. The ephemerality of everything -- of the human form, of her own medium, of the ritual of dance, of

the very act of observing art -- might be said to be Carlisle's consistent theme. "Our life is a layer," she said, commenting on the many layers of dance imagery in Darkness Spoken.

"Our muscles, our cells, our bones are the whole panorama

of evolution, which includes the darkness." She finds the transformation into abstraction quite liberating; a dancer herself, Carlisle celebrates the abandonment of self and reference

through such rituals.

"The term abstract comes from a root that has to do with truth," she said. "There's a tying between abstraction and truth, because it pulls out the core, the essence, the seed, the germinating force of something. Dance is an example of something that's always changing." The artist describes her work process with Isadora in the same vein. "It comes from play and knowing when to layer. It's like a little kid playing with blocks or building a sand castle, knowing it's going to get washed away."

Like Carlisle, Schon delights in thwarting the viewer with

disorientation and sublime abstraction. Road begins with molecular imagery of strands and bubbling trails that evolve into images of a highway. However, the recognizable is soon abandoned again, leaving only sounds to suggest that what remains on the screen are still cars. But can they really be called cars, having been so radically altered through software? Via e-mail, Schon expressed her delight in this transformation. "You become aware of the soundtrack, which is sync sound, yet [it] only works as musical accompaniment when combined with the hypnotic effects of the image. You find yourself standing at the side of the road, and the sound is continuing, while the visuals of the cars become completely unrecognizable -- brilliant colors against deep black -- and you ask yourself, How did I get here?"

Like the pieces by Carlisle and many others in the show, Schon's work is about losing one's self, letting go of the image that was captured and settling into the image that is, "thus causing a split in perception: it is the road we all know, and yet it is gorgeously not roadlike. This is my intention, this psychedelic state, though I don't start out thinking this is what I'm going to do.

To get to the state of being able to play freely, I need to become very quiet."

details

Cutting Edge; through Aug. 22

Performance by artist Sydney Davis and talks with the artists;

3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 435 S. Gua