“Into the Den” came about when Humphrey discovered that a 1993 George Romero horror movie, “The Dark Half,” was filmed in the Pittsburgh house where he was raised. He rented a tape of the film, played it on his monitor and froze the images he liked–mostly rooms. Humphrey erased the actors and replaced them with distorted fragments from a family album he’d stored in the computer. A laser printout was the study for the painting. But Humphrey doesn’t use the computer just for its endles morphable images. “It gets me away from my gestures,” he says.
Humphrey works at the conservative edge of the art-intoelectrons spectrum. Painter Harold Cohen used a computerrun stylus to draw on canvases in the 1970s. Abstractionist Peter Halley is making pictures to be downloaded and printed by collectors. In 1987, Matt Mullican created a virtual-reality tour of an imaginary city (he’s still working on it), and in 1994 conceptual artist Muntadas put “The File Room,” an interactive archive about censorship, on the Internet.
For Humphrey, animated, hypertextual, interactive works are certainly art. The problem is that the CD-ROM or Internet format homogenizes them somewhat. “I’m interested in that binary-generated image on the screen,” he says. “But I’m also interested in the biological, human world my painting is about.” Computers tend to divide people into two groups: digitalites who think that ultimately there’s no such thing as biology, only physics; and humanists who tend to think there’s an impermeable membrane of something between physics and biology. Humphrey is in the second camp, but doesn’t see computers as a threat. “I like to think that painting is adaptable,” he says, “that it can address the rest of the world, not just mop up and try to keep up.” For many artists, however, computers are required simply to stay in the race.
