The second and final day of the Art and Technology conference began with a panel on "Public Policy for the Digital Age," moderated by Armando Valdez, a telecommunications policy educator from Los Altos, and including Lynn Chadwick of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Andrew Blau of the Benton Foundation, Julian Low of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), and Sharon Sandeen, a Sacramento lawyer. Three thousand miles to the east, inside the Beltway in Washington, DC, topics such as these are meat and potatoes. But in California, one got the feeling that telecommunications policy was rather strange fruit. At the very least, judging from the comments and questions at the end of the session, arts advocates feel cut off from Washington in many respects. While they are painfully aware of the death watch over the NEA, and know full well the pitfalls of Newtonian politics, telecommunications policy--in particular the grave implications of the market-driven overhaul of the Communications Act of 1934--seemed strangely beyond the ken of most A&T conference attendees.

This is not to suggest, however, that the West Coast is uninterested in how Congress slices the telecommunications pie, for it is, if only because Californians know full well that much of that pie will probably be served up in the Golden State long before it reaches the vast interior of the country. Pacific Bell has already announced ambitious plans for a new high-speed network, and between the speculators of Silicon Valley and the visionaries of the Bay Area (not to mention the entertainment titans down south), the Information Superhighway, unlike Route 66 in years past, will probably start at the coast and move east.

"I am not a policy wonk," announced Julian Low, executive director of NAMAC, at the start of the morning panel, although it was clear from his ensuing comments that he could easily achieve wonk status if he so desired. More important, though, Low is a skeptic, a characteristic that should serve him well in the coming months. Low first became aware of the importance of the telecommunications policy issues, he explained, when it became clear, even from the hype piling up around the Information Superhighway, that the new system would have implications for the independent media community. That community, he pointed out, has been overwhelmed by the commercial sector, but the Info Highway--at least potentially--gives independents the chance to own not only the means of production, but the means of distribution as well, overcoming the commercial gatekeepers and effectively "democratizing media." Citing the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants who had come to California believing the streets would be paved with gold, however, Low was wary of all of the promises surrounding the Info Highway. Without effort--and that effort must include not only telecommunications policy that protects the interests of the nonprofit sector, but also cultural policy that offsets the attacks on CPB and NEA--Low thought the Info Highway had little chance of fulfilling its potential. For its part, Low continued, NAMAC will maintain its efforts to find ways for media organizations to increase earned income, and to participate in the larger policy discussions that will shape the world in which independents will operate. These independents will need to work with corporations to develop new applications for the Info Highway, Low believed, developing applications more innovative than simple "video on demand," which is unlikely to meet the needs of most media organizations. Equally important, Low concluded, will be media education, programs that train people not only to take advantage of the new technology, but also to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the media in order to "separate the wheat form the chaff."

If Low claimed innocence in the ways of Washington, Lynn Chadwick, director of Western Public Radio and president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, frankly admitted to being a "licensed policy wonk." She identified "community broadcasting" as the purview of stations--like those of the Pacifica Network--whose programming is controlled not by commercial interests but by boards of directors that are responsive to the community, and whose funding (at least the largest part thereof) comes from citizens of the community. Such stations find their home in that portion of the FM spectrum (88-92 MHz) reserved for noncommercial and educational programming by the FCC over 50 years ago. At that time, Chadwick noted, the FM band, still in its infancy, was underutilized; but in this day of scarce bandwidth and spectrum auctions, such frequency set-asides are much less likely. Chadwick reviewed more recent developments--the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, and the current controversy surrounding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--observing that the battle lines are often drawn over the issues of content (i.e., the charge of "liberal bias" in public broadcasting) and of budget. The latter, she suggested, may be a red herring. In light of the fact that the federal government currently spends more money on Radio Marti and Voice of America than on CPB, Chadwick believed that the real issue was not dollars but market power. The more than 300 public television and more than 400 public radio stations, covering 95 percent of the country, represent valuable seats at a crowded table, seats that regional telephone companies, long-distance carriers, and cable companies covet as potential entry points to the emerging digital delivery system. Because of these converging markets, moreover, the present distinctions between radio, television, and cable will become less important than the issue of "viewpoint" under the new system. For this reason Chadwick thought it was especially important for the independent media community to form alliances with others in the nonprofit public-interest community, in order to fight for public access to the Information Superhighway, and to maintain the "noncommercial viewpoint" on that new system. This coalition, if it hopes to be successful, will have to keep the pressure on Congress, urging it not only to maintain the federal stake in the CPB, but also to craft telecommunications legislation this year (as it rewrites the Communications Act of 1934) that will protect the interests of independent, noncommercial programmers.

Sharon Sandeen, an intellectual property lawyer from Sacramento, said lawyerly things (i.e., vague and vaguer) about copyright and multimedia, existing regulations and emerging technologies, international complications and costly litigation. These are complex matters, clearly, given the ease with which a wide range of content, once it is translated into strings of zeroes and ones, can be incorporated into one's own work. Nothing in Sandeen's presentation, however, suggested that we're any closer to solving the riddle of applying old laws to new tools, although events after the conference--a three-day, closed-door meeting in San Francisco of representatives from 11 industrialized nations to discuss copyright issues in cyberspace--indicate that perhaps some progress is being made. Optimists, in any case, are apt to claim that the same technology that created the problem in the first place will also bring forth a solution, in the form of new data-coding techniques that will provide more control over the transfer of electronic information. Pessimists, meanwhile, fear that the rich (including intellectual property lawyers, no doubt) will get richer, while the poor, who won'thave access to electronic information anyway, get left out of the equation entirely. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we first learn to digitize pre-existing material and incorporate it into our own work in the absence of the necessary rights and permissions.

Andrew Blau, who has the twin virtues of (a) knowing a lot about telecommunications policy and (b) *not* being a lawyer, wasted little time in getting to the heart of the matter: Washington has abandoned the politics of rational discourse in favor of the politics of symbolism. And in that noisy arena, artists, activists, and the noncommercial media may end up holding the short end of the symbol. The democratic-majority 103rd Congress was unable to pass telecommunications legislation with comparatively modest public-interest requirements, Blau pointed out, and that task will become much more difficult this year. The prevailing view in Congress now is that telecommunications is a business issue--with a business solution--and very little attention is being paid to any social or political ramifications. Senator Pressler (R-SD) is leading the charge, with little input from any Democrats on the Commerce Committee, and judging from the draft legislation that has been circulating, the dominant theme will be deregulation,letting market forces alone answer the questions of universal service and equitable access rather than crafting specific policies to attend to these matters. Among the proposed regulatory changes, for example, is an end to the traditional separation between telephone and cable companies, as well as a lifting of the restrictions of the Cable Television Act of 1992. The concept of universal service, Blau feared, will be reduced to "whatever the market bears"; whatever services the majority of Americans buy, in other words, will be offered to all, with no support or even acknowledgment of the need for access to noncommercial educational and cultural programming.

But if the Senate appears to be moving in lock-step toward a Republican-defined laissez-faire telecommunications policy, there's more hope for a little Democratic participation--including possible public-service provisions--in the House, according to Blau. Regardless, the basic telecommunications questions remains the same: Who will be enabled to provide programming on the new system? Who will have access to that programming? And to what extent will freedom of expression be honored on the new system? In connection with that last item, Blau cited legislation currently before Congress--Sen. Exon's (R-NB) Internet decency bill and Sen. Conrad's (D-ND) television violence proposal--noting the irony of a Congress that has vowed to get the government off our backs preparing now to put that same government squarely onto our eyes, ears, and mouths.

While the legislative arena looks grim, Blau cited other forums--the FCC's handling of the spectrum allocation for digital television, for example, or the state and local cable rate-setting and regulatory structure--as areas in which the nonprofit arts community should become more involved. Corporations such as AT&T, he pointed out ("Have you ever sent a fax from the beach?"), are already building our expectations as to the kinds of commercial services that the new digital platform will deliver. The arts community, in turn, should begin establishing its own expectations for the kind of culture that will be served by the new technology. And just as that new technology points away from the center and distributes power more widely than ever before, Blau concluded, so must our advocacy efforts be adjusted accordingly--not to the point of overlooking Washington entirely, but recognizing the self-imposed limits of a Congress that seems intent on returning power to the states, and acknowledging the essentially decentralized nature of telecommunications policy, where state public utility commissions and municipal governments will play an increasingly important role in the design and deployment of the Information Superhighway.

Armando Valdez, a telecommunications policy educator from Los Altos, summarized the preceding discussion, underscoring the importance to the arts of the transformation to an all-digital system, but reiterating the basic questions that remain unanswered: who will be able to contribute programming to the new system? Will corporations control the production and distribution of content, as the corporate mergers and converging technologies seem to suggest?

The questions and comments from the floor that followed were among the most animated of any session of the A&T conference, no doubt because the topic of discussion was inextricably linked to congressional affairs in Washington. Nor is it much of a leap from the frying pan of telecommunications policy into the fire of the culture wars, and there was no shortage of impassioned pleas on behalf of the beleaguered NEA. First to the barricades was veteran arts activist Joy Silverman ("individual artists and freedom of expression have been sacrificed in an effort to save the NEA"), followed by Museum of Contemporary Arts curator Julie Lazar ("the arts should be supported for their inherent value, not on the basis of some trumped-up economic rationale") and former National Association of Artists' Organizations board chairman and current Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities project associate Roberto Bedoya ("it's not about an economic bottom line, but about humanity"). So hot and heavy did it get that Barbara Pieper, the Republican director of the California Arts Council, felt compelled to express her regret over the "divisive language" that had been used to defend the NEA.

While some might question the relevance of this discussion to the topic at hand--art and technology, to which the endowment has rarely paid more than lip service--it was a fascinating discussion all the same (and one that would come up again before the conference ended). It's impossible to say, admittedly, whether the save-the-NEA oratory represented an act of solidarity or an exercise in nostalgia, but one certainly cannot question the sincerity of Silverman, Lazar, and Bedoya. Yet one wonders, too, whether their defense of a system that's becoming increasingly irrelevant to their interests (as the agency, willingly or not, relinquishes support of individual artists and disavows anything else that may prove to be a political liability) is not symptomatic of a larger problem on the part of the arts community, namely its inability to confront a future that demands drastic change.

The second panel of the second day of the A&T conference, entitled "Creating New Products," featured Georgia Bergman of Warner Brothers Records, Harold Hedelman of San Francisco's Center for Electronic Art, and moderator David Rosen of Praxis Media in San Francisco. Rosen began by acknowledging not only the good news of technology--the gains in both creative options and powers of distribution--but also the potential losses, especially as we discard earlier digital formats in favor of new, more efficient (but incompatible) formats. He cited Jeff Rothernberg's article in the January 1995 Scientific American, "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents," which has some rather startling things to say about both the physical life expectancy and the "time-until-obsolescence" of various digital media. ("The contents of most digital media," Rothenberg warns, "evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. They often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats....") Alluding to other kinds of losses as well, the occasional loss of texture and resonance, of warmth and individuality, as the arts enter the digital marketplace, Rosen spoke of another fundamental transition with implications as profound as the shift from analog to digital: the increasing privatization of public space. Citing the tension that traditionally exists between public space and the marketplace (a tension that is at the heart of much of the "reform" in Washington these days), Rosen observed that the arts have traditionally found a home in the public space. As that space shrinks, both in terms of the number and the types of arts organizations it can sustain, and in relation to the emergence of a market-driven digital delivery system, the arts community will have to find new ways to market works of art, Rosen warned. That theme--the move from public space to marketplace--ran through the other panelists' presentations as well.

First to address this issue, from the perspective of the graphics designer, was Harold Hedelman, director of the Center for Electronic Art. He demonstrated the Online Design World-Wide Web site, typical of the expansion from print to Internet, in this case involving a monthly magazine that was already at the forefront of bringing technology to bear on the design process. Students at the Center for Electronic Art, Hedelman explained, have an opportunity to work on projects that the center undertakes for such clients as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the California Academy of Sciences, an opportunity to practice "user-centered design" that encompasses analyzing audience expectations and understanding both the skill level and the context in which the user will encounter the work. The goal, Hedelman added, is to teach artists to become involved in the *process* of making products, putting their aesthetic sensibility and skills to use in a more commercial context than they may have been accustomed to.

Georgia Bergman is no stranger to the commercial context, certainly. A vice president of something called "Creative Enterprises" at Warner Brothers Records, Bergman described her company as "the Queen Mary on the digital ocean: we can deliver tonnage, but we can't turn on a dime"--a reference to the conglomerate's inability to gauge the direction of the new communication technologies. If some lessons have been learned ("MTV is a marketing medium, not a new art form") and other areas of the new technology are being explored (the use of American Online and the World-Wide Web, for example, as a way to showcase Warner's pop stars), such comparatively new platforms as CD-ROM are simply too unstable for a company the size of Warner Brothers to embrace fully at

Meanwhile, back in the academy (in this case the California College of Arts and Crafts), David Bolt, CCAC's vice president for educational technology, reported his decision to integrate new media into existing departments rather than setting up a separate program. The goal, Bolt explained, was to integrate art and technology within the arts education curriculum, so that those with a more formal art background will learn something about new technology, rather than leaving that part of the curriculum to those who may lack grounding in traditional forms. The new means of expression will have to overcome, in any case, the constraints of older forms that invariably impinge on new technology, according to Bolt. Just as early photography emulated portrait painting, and early film merely captured stage works, much high-tech art adds little more than a digital veneer to traditional forms, as we await the development of new languages and new structures that are true to the new media themselves. Ultimately, Bolt added, it remains the artists' role to reflect on the world them, and to bring their vision, ethics, and morality to bear on the subject at hand. In this light, Bolt believed, the new technology is impoverished, for most high-tech products reinforce the very things we need to change in society, the violence and hierarchical power structures, for example, that most computer games celebrate. Here again, artists could play a major role, according to Bolt, helping to develop "meaningful products" rather than those calculated merely to please investors and seduce consumers.

Speaking of seduction, Bolt was followed on the panel by Stuart Cudlitz, creative director for Colossal Pictures' new Media Division, whose past credits include the development and production of something called "Moxy" for Ted Turner's Cartoon Network, as well as segments for MTV's "Liquid Television" and optical/digital supervision for Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula Cudlitz, who obviously has plenty of work to keep him busy, suggested that this was not the time for talking to one another, but rather the time to do the work at hand. He contrasted such "steady-state technologies" as poetry and theater, whose basic forms have changed comparatively little over the centuries, to the "developing technology" of video, which is still evolving, and to the "emerging technologies" of computer graphics and multimedia, the ultimate directions of which are still very much to be determined. Regardless of the particular technology involved, Cudlitz added, "art is what artists do--they make things of their particular time--" and that is the basic premise of all art that must not be lost amidst all the clamor over new technological breakthroughs.

Wrapping up this session was Brenda Laurel, who waxed philosophical--as only Brenda Laurel can--about such matters as the "schism between technology and nature." Best known as the editor of a classic study of human-computer interaction, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, and as the author of Computers as Theater, Laurel's complex ideas will doubtless receive a much more thorough explication in her forthcoming Severed Heads: Notes on Computers, Art, and Nature--more thorough, and probably more easily followed, too, than her stream-of-consciousness rendering at the A&T conference. Coming at this point in the conference, moreover, when it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between "converging technologies" and run-on sentences, Laurel's ideas began to assume certain qualities of "virtual reality" that were probably not intentional. For the record, though, the gospel according to Brenda suggests that (1) the role of art is to visualize the future, and then to "send messages back" to present-day culture about what technology should be; (2) we need to visualize what the larger society should be like in the future, too; and (3) it is both our opportunity and our responsibility to devote technology to good purposes, namely, to "cure society."

Or something like that. And lots of other things, too. In any case, it was the educator, David Bolt, who had the final word on this occasion, and that message was not an especially pleasant one: In an era in which most schools have gutted their art programs, and many never had computers in the first place, we need to focus on education. We are facing the prospect, Bolt declared, "of no art and very little technology for the generation coming behind us, and we will live to regret it."

But before any regrets could be expressed, there was still one last panel at the A&T conference. Billed as a "Wrap-Up Roundtable," and entitled "The Intersection of Commerce and Culture," the panel included videographer and CD-ROMist (ROMeo?) John Sanborn, director George Coates, writer Brenda Laurel, educator Ulysses Jenkins (from the School of Fine Arts and UC-Irvine), and photographer Jon Winet (ably pinch-hitting for writer John Perry Barlow). As wrap-up sessions go, this one ran out of paper and string fairly early, but then art and technology is not the kind of subject that lends itself to neat little packages. And before it degenerated into another save-the-NEA revival meeting (at which only Brenda Laurel exhibited any oh-hell-with-it agnosticism), this closing session did offer some useful insights. Chief among these were (1) Jon Winet's exhortation that the real issue was not the distinction between "art culture and technology culture," but between for-profit and nonprofit culture, and the latter's efforts to retain a share of the shrinking public space; (2) George Coates' thumbnail sketch of the present: we don't really know what we're doing, most of the hardware doesn't work properly, and we often operate at cross-purposes--all of which is good, because "we're more alert as a result"; (3) Ulysses Jenkins' plea that more attention be paid to the telecommunications needs (and potential contributions) of people of color and of rural Americans; and (4) Brenda Laurel's assertion that censorship of the Internet, much more than the loss of pubic arts funding, is the most pressing issue of our time ("If we want to continue to have a voice as artists, we have to defend the undefendable," a reference to Jake Baker's recent troubles at the University of Michigan).