Significantly Different

When Niall Sweeney, former art director of pioneering Irish multimedia firm MTI, much-lauded graphic designer and digital artist, and well-known organiser of such decidedly iconoclastic and challenging Dublin nightclub events as Gag and Powderbubble, was appointed last autumn as the new artistic director of Temple Bar's new media art centre Arthouse, those in the know fastened their seatbelts.

Arthouse could hardly have found a person who fits better into the space vacated by outgoing director Aileen McKeogh. Sweeney's creative soup of a background, as well as a meticulous dedication to high standards, willingness to experiment and - perhaps most importantly - an unlimited sense of playfulness are all qualities needed by the beleaguered centre as it moves from its initial five-year "groundwork" phase. Over five years, McKeogh brought the arts centre from concept to reality, enduring plenty of turbulence from the more traditional artistic community and flak from a bemused public as she argued for a sustainable level of funding from the Arts Council, and proselytised in boardrooms for corporate support.

Back then, nothing like Arthouse existed anywhere in the world (there are still only a handful of other institutions dedicated entirely to the fruitful and challenging collision between art and technology). Without a point of reference, many found the whole concept threatening to perceived artistic and organisational hierarchies.

In particular, Arthouse alienated many artists when it took its original brief - to be a centre for the Sculptural Society of Ireland in Dublin's growing "cultural quarter" - and transformed it into something entirely other, involving computers and scanners and software packages considered more the realm of bespectacled nerds than creative types. And what was multimedia - also known as new media, or interactive media - anyway?

Sweeney sees his job as exploring rather than answering that question. "It's just an emerging medium; it's not anything specific yet; it's on its road to somewhere. And it needs a massive amount of attention," he says. "I think it is significantly different. It's not a new way of doing something that happened before, it's not a new way of thinking and it's not a magazine with moving pictures - all these strange analogies which are made about multimedia. It's definitely not just a cross between a television and a book."

As a matter of fact, despite the fact that Sweeney certainly looks about as new media as you can get - a small stripe of modest mohawk crosses his otherwise shaven skull, and today he sports a large, pointed steel stud through his left eyebrow - he is almost disappointingly conventional in his argument that what new media is, in some ways, is a throwback to old media. This is because, as both Sweeney and Arthouse's new chief executive, Dr Aoibheann Gibbons, insist, it is the audience's role which has changed, not the artist's.

Indeed, Gibbons and Sweeney immediately jump on a visitor's naive use of the word "viewer" in relation to a new media artwork's audience. "You say viewer; we say maybe participator or engager," says Gibbons. With truly interactive art - and Sweeney is quick to point out that much of what gets termed "interactive" and "multimedia" is actually static, "as predetermined as a book is" - the audience participates in some way in the piece, making it different for each person.

"There's a shift that happened in art in the 20th century, from being documentation, iconic, about information, about describing stories whether they're related to health or religion or whatever," he says. "But it's that shift into personal expression which is a very significant change. It's almost getting back to something that's far more participative." So, a convergence between old and new, which is also how he sees the creative process for new media - many products as well as artworks require the work of a team of people with special skills, which he sees as a throwback to the Renaissance model of the artist's studio filled with collaborative assistants.

But isn't that collaboration between artists, or the collaboration between artist and audience, threatening to an artist's traditional sense of autonomy? "That's only if the artist is bringing all that baggage of `It's only art if it's square and on the wall'," says Sweeney. Gibbons says she likes the idea of just placing a work on the Internet and allowing people to transform it, "like Brian Eno would support the notion that a piece of art is not finished, it should be continuously evolving. There's a real place for that in terms of what we're doing now."

Sweeney and Gibbons spark off each other in conversation, which is a good thing considering that they are actually two halves of what was formerly one job. When McKeogh announced last summer that she would return to teaching (although she remains on the Arthouse board), Arthouse began a search for a new director. But the job requirements were so extensive - everything from fund-raising and organisation to determining the entire artistic direction of the fledgling institution - that it quickly became apparent that they really needed two people.

Gibbons, a neuroscientist with a biotechnology and business background who had been with Arthouse in a variety of roles since 1994, was awarded the chief executive position last summer, had a baby in September, and began work in October. Then an international search began for an artistic director and, says Gibbons, "Niall was definitely the best man on the day."

Sweeney, too, had long been familiar with Arthouse, using its resources to pursue various projects. The two of them appear to fit well together, "upstairs and downstairs, meeting in between," says Gibbons, whose airy light-filled top floor office contrasts with Sweeney's windowless basement headquarters, covered in posters advertising his past club nights.

Now that the two are ensconced in Arthouse's purpose-built steel and glass structure, the big question is what are they going to do. In the past one of the biggest complaints hurled at Arthouse's glass house is that no one seems to know exactly what goes on in there, or where their (admittedly scanty) funding goes. In addition, the building's exterior is particularly alienating, making it difficult for even the best-intentioned visitors to tell if there's an exhibition going on - or even to notice that Arthouse actually contains a welcoming cyber-cafe with Internet access on the first floor.

Sweeney is defensive of what Arthouse has accomplished so far: "There's been a lot of quiet development. There's been a lot of stuff which hasn't really had a public face," he says. "Part of the shift now is to get the feelers out, nationally and internationally." One of the ironies for Arthouse's staff has always been that, by contrast with its national profile, it has a high level of international recognition, earning praise from artists like Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. It is regularly visited by international delegations interested in setting up a similar project in their own countries.

Arthouse's home-base anonymity is partially due to its own low-key efforts at self-promotion. Although it has laboured for years to assemble a massive online and CD-Rom database of over 700 Irish artists, called Artifact; runs a wide range of courses for the public and highly successful, oversubscribed new media skills programmes for FAS; holds regular events from exhibits to club nights, and gives very low-cost training to artists, most people could probably not say what Arthouse is or does in the way they could with nearly any other cultural institution.

The other part of the problem is lack of funding. Last year Arthouse scraped along with a measly £10,000 - a paltry amount for any gallery trying to bring in exhibitions but impossibly small for new media works, which require all the digital infrastructure to make them happen.

For example, a large show at the Barbican in London which Arthouse had hoped to bring over would have cost £30,000. They brought over the artists instead, for a weekend-long conference - and the artists had to show their works over an Internet link.

They are pleased that their funding has risen this year by 50 per cent ("an endorsement of new media as an art form", says Gibbons), and Gibbons will dedicate some of her time to luring in corporate support. They both recognise that what's needed are what Gibbons calls "awareness activities".

These will include a building makeover, already under way; an opening up of two unused ground floor rooms for exhibitions, including archived work which they have stored; perhaps an increased educational role (Gibbons would like to see a relationship being established with Ireland's colleges and universities, where Arthouse could offer modular courses on everything from artistic technique to digital critical theory). Arthouse's open spaces already are being used in new and inviting ways to draw strollers in but shows - what the Arthouse refers to as "a cultural sushi of work" -- remain uncompromising in content. A recent exhibition, Jim Dingilian and Alan Phelan's collaborative work Self-Rescue Mechanism, literally ran from floor to ceiling, filling usually closed-off nooks and even the cafe. As usual, an inventive Website was an integral part of an exhibit based, if subtly, on the self-rescue techniques used to prevent dangerous auto-erotic acts from killing the participant. Cultural sushi, indeed.

And, hurrah, Sweeney is deep in plans for an event night, to be called Aspidistra, which will utilise the entire building space monthly for performance art. "We're going to use the first floor, and the cafe space so we have this big dynamic going on. And the lift." The lift? "It's just using those physical elements and the technology of the lift. You've got buttons there, you've got the doors, and you've got volume." Volume? Well, he wants to put opera singers in the lift, so that when the doors open, the audience gets a louder blast than when they're singing between floors.

And for Sweeney, the name "Arthouse" sums up exactly what he wants to do as artistic director. "A `Kunsthaus', an art house. The word `house' is actually a great metaphor for the whole thing. All these rituals, the comfort of being in an environment which is art and technology-friendly. But the other side of it, too - the validation of new media as an art form."

JustArt, the second half of Arthouse's current show Streetcosmos 98, opens tomorrow, with a live performance by the German collaborative artists involved in this "cyclic narrative of nature and technology." Arthouse formally launches Artifact, its CD-Rom database of 750 artists on May 5th.