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      introduction

      (excerpts)

      I'm going to experiment on you this evening. Given that I'm a full time faculty member at San Francisco State in the Department of Cinema, I speak before groups a lot. And so I need to keep experimenting, or I find my mind going blank in the middle of things. And tonight, I'm going to subject you to my new strategy which is to speak from flow charts, as compared to nice, neat business looking word slides.

The three main topics of interest in all of my work
with media has been time, space and process.

      And for those of you that are teachers, process is a big deal. And something that we work a lot on with our students.

      Given that I've done interactive art works as well as being an early computer artist, process was also a big issue. So, I'm going to start out with some -- you know, sort of reading off some provocative bumper sticker topics for you for my talk. And even though you've already got the hook in your mouth, you're here, so I don't need to lure you in the door. But -- so one of them is,

        Now that everything is easy
        what do you need to know?

      All tool makers are extolling the ease of use of their tools, except that everything's also more complicated. It's not that you don't need to know anything, but you need to know different things than perhaps you used to.

Are we hanging around the entertainment economy
banquet hoping for crumbs as fine artists?

        Everything's almost perfect.
        Now be creative.

      Some of the tools that are being put out have an incredible perfection to them. A lusciousness unparalleled in previous tools. And they also seem to require almost nothing from the user.

        Get the avant garde out of the way.
        The culture is coming through.

      As we try to position ourselves as fine artists in this information culture, it's difficult to see really where -- what the role of the avant garde is frequently. This is very much a view from California. And it reflects the world I live in, in part, training young people for our digital media future.

      And I don't know if things seem to be changing every 20 minutes in terms of revolutionary technological leaps every 20 minutes, but it seems that way on the coast. Now that everything's converged, what's your direction? Former -- the universality of digital media has blurred the boundaries between formerly disparate media.

Film and video, for instance, are becoming
just input and output media. Carriers of data.

        License me,
        I'm an artist.

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