To be an artist, you can’t simply come up with an idea – you have to push it into the world like a big screaming baby. But for artists who find that the technology they need doesn’t exist or are told “that’s impossible,” there is one solution: Create the technology themselves.

“New Frontier, and more specifically our venue New Frontier on Main, was designed to embody artistic activity at the crossroads of art, film, and emerging new technologies,” explained Shari Frilot, Senior Programmer for the Festival. “You will find artists in this year’s lineup who are using the moving image in incredibly fresh and innovative ways, and who have in many cases developed their own hardware and software by hand to create the work,”

New Frontier on Main is a dynamic lounge with installations and screenings, located across the street from the Egyptian Theatre. Like the artwork, the space itself is a created installation. Walls were built; the lighting was designed; projectors, monitors, and sound equipment were brought – all to create the lounge, three galleries, and two micro-cinemas that make up New Frontier on Main.

Jim Campbell’s Home Movies 300 lights up part of the New Frontier Lounge. Like many of the artists, Campbell has a non-art background that influences his pieces. This artist/electronics engineer began designing and building electronic art in 1988, creating things he could not buy. “I think a good measure of the success of an electronic artwork is that it still has meaning many years after it’s been made and after the technology has become trivial,” Campbell said. “Sometimes this is hard to tell ahead of time as the technology is so subliminally seductive.”

Working with old super-8 and 16mm home movies as content and a curtain of light-emitting diodes as the format, Campbell juxtaposes both the lo-fi and the lucid qualities of memory. In the process, he is able to evoke the feelings of past events. “A lot of my work — and specifically over the last seven years — has been about what’s lost in the process of going digital,” explained Campbell. New video makes our images clean and crisp, but memory doesn’t work that way — we remember what we want, how we want. In this installation, we are forced to work against the logic placed onto the “auto” setting of today’s technology.

In her vibrant installation Mike Kelley, Jennifer Steinkamp uses existing programs to create the new software that runs her motion art. Consisting of four moving, twisting, changing tree projections, Mike Kelley seems simple at first and then blossoms into an intricate world of its own. Since she started working with software in 1982, Steinkamp has consistently used established computer programming tools in ways that no one — including the programs’ developers — ever intended them to be used.

“I first came across computer-generated art when I enrolled in Gene Youngblood’s video art course at Cal Tech,” Steinkamp remembered. “I saw computer graphics as a means to explore new ideas, images, and motion; I still possess this excitement. I use 3D software to create virtual objects and space; I then place these into real space. Both the real and the virtual spaces are transformed by each other, forming an in-between space, a space your body can understand.”

Steinkamp’s work has a unique style that is not specific to one time, based on the technology. “For me, it always comes down to the art,” Steinkamp said. “The importance of the experience is about the thing you are looking at, not the technical virtuosity. I don’t care if you know how I created the work or not.”

This sentiment can also be applied to Daniel Rozin and his “mirrors” of wood and snow. Rozin uses these natural materials to reflect images with moving light. His Peg Mirror is a circle made of individual wooden pegs, which turn and move in order to mirror the shadow of what is in front of them. Snow Mirror consists of digital flakes of snow moving side to side on a silk curtain, adjusting to reflect what stands in front of it.

“The type of art I create — digital interactive art — is by definition interactive,” Rozin said. “And therefore, it’s usually about creating not a finished piece or experience but rather creating a tool or premise for people to interact with, and the final experience is a shared one, unique to every ‘viewer’ who becomes the co-creator of the piece.” Rozin’s mirrors are open-ended, unique every second, and totally dependent upon interaction — without an audience they make no impact. The pieces physically embody the understanding that art is always an interaction.

Like much of the work in the New Frontier program, Rozin’s work shares footing in the art, film, and even videogame worlds. “Just like the art world,” Rozin said, “the film world looks at the interactive/game world and recognizes that there are benefits (especially commercial) to venture into these areas. But the film world finds it vulgar and distasteful. So I find myself operating in the vulgar overlap between these two giant worlds. A small, distasteful creator.”

Cory Arcangel, who started computer programming 10 years ago in search of a job, also creates artwork based in the nexus of different worlds. Both museums and film festivals showcase Arcangel as a purveyor of popular culture reassessed with his fingerprints. Along with Paper Rad collective, Arcangel will be presenting a performance of videos and music in the microcinema, which includes work made from videogame art.

“I think right now especially, the Internet is blurring the line between these genres,” Arcangel said. “So, Paper Rad and I are more part of this blurring than either art or film [worlds]. It’s exciting. Any technology that brought you that ‘pop’ media is ‘pop’. Walkmans, Tube TVs, etc., etc. The great thing about technology is that it moves even faster! You laugh at a cell phone from three years ago, but not the equivalent TV show.”

In addition to exhibiting artists who are pushing the boundaries of technology, New Frontier is also showcasing an artist who has found a way to recreate an old technology — drawing by hand.

Self-taught animator and musician Brent Green presented a collection of his short films while performing with the band Califone. Green played instruments and narrated the films live, becoming a preacher alongside his movies, which are almost the opposite of high-tech.

Green’s drawing style is raw. You see where the lines, tape, and paste are. It is a far cry from the gloss of computer-generated animation, and the more unique for it. “If I went to college I would’ve gone to be a hatter or a cobbler,” Green said. “Something where you fix things with cloth and small nails. If I could fix the law with cloth and small nails I’d be a lawyer. If my friends would let me perform invasive surgeries on them there’d be half a dozen people walking around who could never pass through metal detectors and are constantly leaking blood internally. No one ever lets me operate, so I make cartoons.”

There’s the old cliché that if you look at an artwork or film and decide you could have made it yourself, then it must not be good. The accessibility of laptops, programs, and video equipment makes filmmaking possible for anyone with an idea, but Green understands what is really important. “I do think the transparency, the idea that we could all do this ourselves, is wonderful. Fuck those critics and audiences,” he said. “The accessibility of all this technology has really allowed film, music, and most art to get down to the basics again.” He also observed that “in order to rise above the fray, the writing needs to be there; the tragedies, jokes, and beauty need to be there. Accessibility to technology has forced us to make good films to get noticed.”