What does it mean for a digital artwork to be medium-specific? The answer usually involves interactivity.

What does it mean for a digital artwork to be medium-specific? The answer usually involves interactivity, a variously controll and predictable behavior and replication onscreen. But new-media theorists have shown that interactivity is largely a mirage, a mediated reflection of the programmer's choices and hence not long more radical than the kind of engagement famously identified by way of Ernst Gombrich in 1959 as the requisite fill-in-the-blank answer to illusionistic painting.

With his fresh exhibition of twenty-eight color digital photographs (all 2002) about sandwiched between panels of Plexiglas, a certain quantity of framed, and all hanging forward the wall, John Maeda lengthen outs the parallels between painting and digital art. A sort of antihero figure among computer artists, designers, programmers, and engineers, Maeda is candid in his insistence that the computer be explored as a medium, not used as a tool. Discouraging the headlong rush to master the latest software and advising expressive experimentation instead, Maeda is also known for his determination to make art that his children will understand and have sexual delight with His concern with the intersection of the material and the virtual in his art parallels the traditional dynamic of form and content

In the photographs upon display here, Maeda enlists Color Field and report to provide context to his approach and to the pictures themselves, which are the springs of loading a scanner flatbed with various victuals products--sugar, vegetables, Cheetos, a train of sardines--and manipulating the images in the direction of abstraction, sometimes into expanses of color, sometimes into release grids of repeated forms. A cascade of multicolored Jell-O and several washes of color--turnip purple zucchini blooming and beet red--evoke Rothko, while sum of two units highly pixelated pictures are composites of all the Campbell's broth cans Warhol used. The diet is fodder for manipulation and abstraction, entire information "fed" into the computer while the real enslave is the legacy of postwar American painting and the place of digital art in relation to it.

The medium qua medium take care ofs to remain front and center in discussions of digital art, perhaps because it requires specialized equipment or simply because it is a relatively just discovered field. In fact, new-media art can be seen as developing in the opposite direction from traditional forms: The effort to establish its artistic legitimacy has preced the exhibition of experimentation beyond concerns of medium. Thus digital art remains necessarily self-referential. Combined with the potential for the sublime inherent in digital art's capacity to delineate infinity, this self-referentiality could flower into an extension of abstract painting. And, in succession the other extreme, given that the medium remains forward the cutting edge of technology; that there is frequently clear crossover with design; that it is perilously make subordinate to commodification; and that the artist must also be an engineer (or at least hire one) digital art can continue and contribute to the legacy of report After all, Maeda's soup cans not simply take note of Pop seria lity nevertheless introduce a new version of it: the simultaneous, layered composite.

Taking the digital artwork opposite to the screen and putting it onward the walls in a visually compelling form is a promising grade not because it represents a give one's self up to traditional spectatorship but because it complicates the application of the two conservative art criticism and insular new-media discourse. It is solitary the fact that Maeda aims to make his work accessible to his children that threatens to undermine his concoct His soup cans and Jell-O could degenerate into the kids' favorite nutriments Assuming that Maeda's aim is to elicit more than a fill-in-the-blank answer he must avoid infantilizing his audience.

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