be used. Educationally, it's an extremely difficult thing to do, and I think that a lot of so-called pedagogues that are involved have never even understood that. So, thinking that it's sufficient to understand how to operate Photoshop to make art with the Macintosh is just absurd.

W.V. We might say that the generation of "Desktop Artists" is in mortal danger because they write their proposals and budgets on the same machines they make art with.

D.F. When you taught in Buffalo, what approach did you have in breaking down that attitude?

W.V. We had machines. We got a Rutt/Etra Scan Processor there and later a Bill Hearn machine. I had just cracked the Rutt/Etra for myself and was eager to tell everybody about it. The digital machines turned things around. Now the teachers had to learn from the students. Our student Jeffrey Schier told us everything about binary code, how to operate digital machines and how to write programs. We got such an exquisite educational experience.

D.F. You really learned from your students as well?

W.V. Absolutely! We also built the machines together. I think it was very good for the students, but generally we got more educated than they did.

D.F. I think that's one of the reasons why people are teachers.

S.V. In this field the teacher is not ahead of the student. If a teacher has any role at all, it is just by being older and therefore having the respect of those that are younger. If you as the older say, "This is not good enough," the younger might do something more challenging. You cannot really do much else.

W.V. Also, the teacher provides connections to the world, in all practical senses.

D.F. In that same fashion I considered your Theater of Hybrid Automata made for Artifices 2 in Saint Denis to be a "teaching piece".

W.V. Yes, it is a didactic piece.

D.F. And what I saw there was a so-called intelligent space that is going to become a more common environment. What do we do with it? And what is the artist's relationship to it? And what does it mean socially and so forth? By the same token, because of that a lot of people that I took, because I took more than a class, I took two classes, some of them were frightened by it. They saw this thing existing there independently of themselves, with certain intelligence. It was once again the Luddite fear of technology, which in some

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