Leonardo

Introduction: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art: The Artmedia VIII SymposiumAuthor(s): Annick BureaudSource: Leonardo, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2004), pp. 139-140Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577474 .

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From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art: The Artmedia VIII

Symposium

I n December 2002, the international symposium "Artmedia VIII: From Aesthet- ics of Communication to Net Art," co-organized by the artist Fred Forest, the philosopher Mario Costa and myself, was held in Paris. The Artmedia symposium series was launched in 1985 in Italy by Mario Costa. Its goal was to discuss and promote the works of artists using the means of communication as the tools and materials for their creation. Seventeen years later, the topic seemed more current than ever, and after seven meetings of Artmedia in Italy, and

following upon Fred Forest's organization of a seminar on the aesthetics of communication at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice from 1995 to 1998, the time appeared right to present Artmedia in France.

We had five main aims for this ambitious symposium: 1. To root net art within a historical artistic context. The Net and net art were the hot topics

within the international new media art community. However, even as new and different kinds of artworks are produced, new concepts are not created at the same rate, and many net art

pieces actually rely on concepts that were expressed by artists, theoreticians and/or philoso- phers in the mid-1980s, among them the concepts of the "Aesthetics of Communication" movement founded by Forest and Costa, not to mention earlier works such as Telephone Pic- tures by Moholy-Nagy (1923) or the Radia Manifesto by the Italian Futurists (1933). Telepres- ence, for instance, did not await the arrival of the Internet to appear at the heart of many artworks. A few of the works that were made using regular phone lines include Transatlantic Arm Wrestling by Doug Back (1985), the early Ornintorrinco projects by Eduardo Kac, The Tele-

phonic Tap by Fred Forest (1992) and Telematic Sculpture by Richard Kriesche (1995). Another example is the artworks created using the Minitel (Videotex system), mainly in

France (between 1978 and 1989), the country that invented the device, and in Brazil, which

bought the system from the French, the Minitel being a kind of electronic network predating the spread of the Internet. Two major exhibitions, Electra in 1983 at the Mus6e d'Art Mod- erne de la Ville de Paris (Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris), curated by Frank Pop- per, and Les Immateriaux (The Immaterial) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, curated byJean-FranCois Lyotard, presented artworks for the Minitel. Heiko Idensen writes:

I went to the art show Les Immateriaux. Part of it was a collaborative writing project, where French thinkers discussed via the Minitel-System. Lyotard had introduced 50 terms like "absence" and "navigation," topics that are still up-to-date today. You could participate in this at the museum. I personally couldn't even use French keyboards, but it left a huge impression on me [1].

Recalling this history and its theoretical basis was our primary goal. 2. To pinpoint the ruptures and the differences. On the other hand, the fact that net art is rooted

in 20th-century art history does not mean that the Internet caused no changes (for instance, in the quality of telepresence or the nature of the works), that "nothing's new under the sun." New concepts emerge, new art forms appear. Tracing their development was our second goal.

3. To promote an aesthetics discourse. In the mid-1980s, very few philosophers dared to intro- duce conceptual creations within the framework of their analysis, considering them more technical demos than proper artworks. Unfortunately, it seems that this attitude largely per-

LEONARDO, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 139-140, 2004 139 O 2004 ISAST

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sists in regard to net art. To propose a philosophical and aesthetic approach was the third

goal. 4. To mix different cultural approaches. The world has become a small village with the Internet.

However, we can still witness, specifically in Europe, two "cultural areas," the Latin and the

Anglo-Saxon, which do not seem really to communicate with each other, maybe because of translation issues. Artmedia VIII gathered participants from these two particular communities and tried to bridge the different cultural approaches both in practice (in the artworks) and in

theory. 5. To close the generation gap. Artmedia VIII's fifth goal was to bring to the same floor two

different generations, the "old" one of the early days and the "new" one that was born (al- most) with the Internet.

In 3 days, Artmedia VIII featured over 50 speakers (artists, theoreticians, art critics, philoso- phers), from France, Italy, the United States, Brazil, the U.K., Germany, Japan, Canada and Greece, on the following topics: History of an Aesthetics of Technological Communication;

Body, Cortex and Networks; Presence at a Distance-Telepresence; Form and Event in the

Networks; Thematizing Space-Time as Artistic Practice; Video Games and Hybrid Arts in the

Networks; Net Art in the Museum Context, Commercial and Institutional Circuits in Times of

Globalization; Networks and the Future of Writing; and Architecture, Urban Design and Communication Technologies.

In this and forthcoming issues, Leonardo is publishing a series of selected papers presented during the symposium.

The archives of the symposium-including listings of participants, proceedings (some both in French and in English), exhibitions, bibliographies, etc.-can be found on the web site of

Leonardo/OLATS at: <http://www.olats.org/setF13.html>.

ANNICK BUREAUD Leonardo Editorial Advisor E-mail: <annick@nunc.com>

Reference 1. See Tilman Baumgaertel, <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-1-9810/msg00082.html>.

140 Artmedia Introduction

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