Salina ? A man in a yellow biochemical hazard suit sits in a glass cage and eats bugs and frogs. A group of performance artists cavorts in front of a series of surveillance cameras. An artist films herself building a scale model of Atlantis at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Strange, yes.

But it is art?

The staff of the Salina Art Center believes it is. In fact, presenting such unconventional art is their attempt to expand the boundaries of what constitutes art as well as encourage visitors to move from passively observing artistic works to actively participating in them.

“It’s been a natural evolution here at the art center,” said Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the Salina Art Center. “Our mission is to encourage active exchanges among art, artists and audiences. There are many ways to explore art today it can allow us to see the world from a variety of perspectives.”

Traditional art specifically paintings and sculptures are still important and relevant modes of artistic expression, but during the past decade, the art world has seen a rapid growth in what has been defined as New Media. This is a hybrid of art, technology and theater that incorporates video, film, digital cameras, music and live performance in an attempt to draw observers into the art rather than allowing them to be passive observers.

“We’ve encouraged New Media to involve our audiences in a more interactive way,” Reece Hardy said. “We certainly haven’t abandoned traditional art forms, but we’re opening our minds, and our doors, to other creative expressions.”

A new vision

A strong advocate of New Media is art center exhibition coordinator Stacy Switzer, who curated a recent show at the center titled “UnMediated Vision,” a combination of film, music, performance and ecological and scientific technology.

“It’s the kind of show I wanted to do since I arrived here (in the fall of 2000),” Switzer said. “There are so many artists working in New Media now, and the issues they address are enduring. We have a responsibility to catch up with these changes, so it was the next logical step for us to move in that direction.”

One of the first such shows was “Real Time,” a spring 2001 show that focused on three performance artists and concluded with a festival featuring “a.k.a.,” a women’s performance art dance group from Lawrence, along with a selection of local and national performance artists.

“In the future, I’m sure we’ll continue to do a variety of different shows in different media. We want to encourage all kinds of experiences with all kinds of art and create a dialogue something people want to talk about,” Switzer said.

But is Salina ready to support this kind of unconventional art?

The art center averages about 53,000 visitors a year, and the New Media and performance art shows haven’t yet caused a significant increase or decrease in general attendance, Reece Hardy said.

Wendy Moshier, director of programs at the art center, said she has received mostly positive responses to these kind of shows and believed people would continue to support the art center in whatever direction it took.

“We strive to balance the art we bring in, but we want it to be memorable, thought-provoking and the highest-quality art,” she said. “We try to give people an experience they normally could only get in larger metropolitan areas.”

More than anything, Moshier said, the art center has strived to be a place of learning and communication.

“We really want people to come and talk to us, to give us feedback that’s why we have such a variety of programs that make people think about things in new ways,” she said.

Switzer said the art center has developed a national reputation for presenting new and exciting projects, and she believes Salinans will be there to support them.

“People here have always been open to new and different ideas in art,” she said. “It’s something that’s special about Salina, and it’s what drew me to the town.”

Keeping an open mind

Not everyone is excited. Brad Anderson, a potter and professor of art at Kansas Wesleyan University, is a strong believer in traditional visual arts and doesn’t believe much of what constitutes New Media can be defined as true art.

“It’s a disruption between form and content that has turned art into something that’s purely conceptual it’s nothing but form now,” he said. “Most of these artists can’t define why they are doing these conceptual or performance pieces because they haven’t thought them through. Not that all their ideas are bad, but I think this kind of art is a transitional thing. I don’t think 30 to 50 years from now this will hold up as a significant art form.”

Still, Anderson is willing to embrace New Media just to be informed and admits that when he took a college class to see “UnMediated Vision,” they related to it more strongly than previous exhibits they had attended.

“There was an immediate connection to this material, more than looking at ordinary paintings gave them,” Anderson said. “I mean, I’d be bored, too, if we just had painting shows every time, but I’ll still be just as critical of these shows as I would any traditional shows.”