SCAN

SCAN was born in 1980 at a time when mainframes ruled and WANG was a powerhouse dominating the word-processing field. It was two years before the IBM PC was born and several years before the Mac. SCAN'ers were a few crazy people who thought they could create art on Commadore, Amiga and other hybrid personal computers with a 64 Kbytes of RAM and a tape drive.

And create they did-early SCAN symposiums were attended by rock stars, writers, futurists and computer people who truly pushed the envelope of creation. Music, performance, sculpture and computer prints were all present from the beginning. Our presenters are now household names or have been swallowed into some huge anonymous corporation or, sadly, they or their innovative products of the time no longer exist except in the art that they produced.

But that was 20 years ago and this is 2000. Now powerful computers are relatively inexpensive and sophisticated software is available for artists in many if not all disciplines.

Yet the use of computers in the arts is still in its infancy, with new ideas and applications for artists appearing all the time.

SCAN 20/2000 is about the cutting edge of the computer art scene. SCAN 20/2000 Symposium is not a trade show, it's an exchange of ideas, mostly from artist to artist.