*Poetry in virtual motion at cyberarts fest
By Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe Correspondent, 5/3/2001

The Boston Cyberarts Festival has dubbed the Boston Architectural Center ''CyberartCentral,'' headquarters of the computer art extravaganza that runs through this weekend...

Fractured assemblages

Two other exhibitions have stronger visual art foundations. Mark Snyder's ''Honey Apparatus'' at the Little White Box shows photographic assemblages made with a digital camera and an inkjet printer. Snyder mounts the camera to a device that allows him to shoot a sequence of 56 contiguous photos, which he then prints and mounts on a grid.

The resulting fractured assemblages abstract and contort the presumed ''reality'' of the original scene. So ''Robe,'' a picture of a green velour robe stretched on a black linoleum floor, ripples outward, its folds and contours repeating and expanding rhythmically until the garment almost comes to life.

''Somnophilia'' has a nude woman curled in a fetal position on a tiled floor. The grid here is on a diagonal, framing the angle of her body. The shapes not only repeat but appear to shrink into themselves: The curve of her back cradles a smaller echo of itself. This print has lovely, almost painterly skin tones, more delicate than you'd find in a traditional photograph. ''Somnophilia'' may suggest an ardor for sleep, but the image is more one of vulnerability than one of passion...

Exhibits like these demonstrate how versatile and common a tool the computer is in artmaking. The more integrated it becomes in the culture, the more it will shape how we think and what we make. Chances are, the Boston Cyberarts Festival will one day find itself redundant, because digital art will be everywhere and no longer need to be feted.

This story ran on page 3 of the Boston Globe on 5/3/2001.
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