Michael Century, a well-respected specialist in questions of art + technology, has written a report for the Rockefeller Foundation called Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. It provides a much-needed overview of the last several decades efforts at combining art + technology.

Steve Wilson has just finished a book called Information Arts, which provides an even more comprehensive look at such work. Both of these pieces should serve as invaluable tools for understanding just what art + technology collaborations have accomplished - and what they haven't.

.arts frontiers was the public debut of Ground Zero, a non-profit organization established to promote partnerships between artist and the technology industry in Silicon Valley and internationally. Ground Zero's partner in the event, New York-based The Kitchen, has been successfully promoting a similar agenda on the East Coast for the last two decades.

Ground Zero is premised on the following idea: the technology industry can benefit from artists' exploration of new uses for technology and their interest in creating innovative user experiences; and artists can benefit from access to such technology, the deep expertise of industry professionals and the possibility for financial support. To that end, .art frontiers brought together art practioners, industry executives and venture financiers for two days of discussion about how such partnerships might be encouraged, supported and promoted.

Why Go?

Arts Alliance finds itself a pioneer in this area, having founded Arts Alliance Laboratory precisely to address this issue of art + technology collaboration. We believe that innovation comes from many areas, and that artists working with technology are one particularly fruitful source for ideas about the future of computer mediated communication. I went to share our experiences over the first year of the lab, to talk to others who were pursuing similar alliances, and to encourage industry and financial people to devote some small share of their resources to encouraging more such work.

I felt that the conference revolved around one question, really: how to reconcile the industrialist/financier's understanding of ROI in terms of financial capital with the artist's understanding of ROI in terms of social or cultural capital? Both camps see their type of return as necessary for a healthy, functioning culture. Both find it difficult to craft an exchange mechanism between the t o types of ROI.

The Entrepeneur as Artist/Creative Force
The conference consisted of 10 different panels, out of which I was able to attend seven.This panel started talking about why entrepeneurs could be seen as artist, and then turned to a critique of why entrepeneurs seem to want to appropriate the term artist. Perhaps the best question of the conference was asked of this panel, when the current head of the Xerox PARC Aritst-in-Residence program asked the panelists how it was possible to convert this thirst for the artist's mantle into concrete funding for actual practicing artists. Dick Kramlich of New Enterprise Asociates (and video art collector) proved the most interesting panelist, even if the quietist, as he clearly demarcated the motivation for the artist - to express themselves with complete freedom - and the entrepenuer - to create a return on capital. Michael Schrage, who has written extensively on collaboration and innovation, proved to be the most controversial. He advocated the abolition of all public funding for the arts, in the belief that the private sector will step into the voide. He seemed to take great relish in delivering this opinion and others in a manner calculated to offend and insult not only his fellow panelists but also the audience. Good fun was had by all.

The Artist as Entrepeneur
The next panel "The Artist as Entrepeneur", reversed the question of the previous panel. Despite an impressive line-up of art + technology practioners (Michael Joaquin Grey, international-award winning artist and creator of Zoob Toys; Joel Slayton of San Jose State's CADRE program and founder of the C5 Theory as Product group; Lynn Hershman, video art pioneer; Michael Tolson, artist and founder of legendary digital media software maker Xaos; and Naut Human, performance artist), the panel proved quite mushy. Perhaps the most interesting topic discussed was Slayton's description of C5 as "business as art project", which was picked up later by the Etoy representative in a later panel. Perhaps the most interesting result is that the artists were much more reluctant to conflate creating art and entrepenuership than the panelists in the previous session.

What's Next? Innovative Models for art/research collaboration
I spoke on the panel entitled "What's Next? Innovative Models for art/research collaboration". My presentation is here. It seemed well-received with a number of questions relating to how I, as an artist, negotiate my practice with a venture capital fund.

Art as Research/Research as Art
Perhaps the best panel was "Art as Research/Research as Art", which featured another power line-up (Brenda Laurel, formerly of Interval Research, Steve Wilson, professor at San Francisco State University and head of one of the longest-running academic efforts to promote cross-displinary work in this area, Paul Kaiser and Michael Girard, whose explorations of dance led to Character Studio, and Sha Xin Wei, a computer scientist and cultural theorist.) Laurel spoke about how, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, science and art were both ways for conducting a dialogue with nature. She criticized the current state of the arts as being largely about a dialogue with other artists, and science as largely being a dialogue with machines, and urged both to return to promoting a dialogue with both the natural and cultural worlds. Xin Wei described the collective he helped found, called Sponge, as a model for using artifacts as a means of communicating across disciplinary divides and creating a common language.