PIAZZA VIRTUALE

Amongst all the experiences we have been leading since fifteen years, PIAZZA VIRTUALE is one experience that makes evidently visible the concept of network. Today artistic practice is no longer being the privilege of an individual being, kind of divine creator who would project the idea of creation onto the world: an idea plasticly fulfilled with which we could quench our thirst of knowledge to satiety.

The time of the "machine-bachelor" is ending. It is ending with the primacy of mechanic industry over human activities. Today comes the reign of information. From the state of advertising object submitted to the glorious, critical speech of industry, information has become an abstract entity that controls and regulates the content of reality and of its artificial corollary, language.

The interpretation of the world can no longer be submitted to the single plastic object, criticism of an apology of consumerism. Post-modernism has speculated on Pop Art and we find ourselves with a disposable wrapping, unsuitable for recycling.
So after having had the religious world glorified, and then the more mundane world of phenomena, artists are confrontated with the media practice as vehicles of conscience. Mac Luhan expressed it in a simple way: "message is media"

The immediate accessibility of a distant point in space and time, thanks to the media, forces conscience to mental gymnastics, different from the aristotelitian representation.
Articulation does not deal anymore with the power of representation and the sacralisation of the finite object but with the power of presence and the process of perception.

Today art makes light of declining the process of presence on every kind of perception and no more of elaborating forms on every kind of representation. The egotic notion of the solitary man, attempting to control the world (the Winner), gives way to the tangential notion of the interfaced man, blasé player of a virtual world (the Joker). We went from the existentialistic anguish of the being into the conjuring stage fright of participation. Unless it make the theorical rules that drive us be revised.

Could it be possible that the concept of network, extended to the field of art as a practice and as an ethic, becomes the new stakes of creative intention? Could the concept of network give rise to a general language suitable for transcribing the percieved emotional experience into the practice of the process of communication, through the use of media?
THE CATHODIC AGORA, generical notion used by the UNIVERSCITY TV network, is the example of an artistic work that is not situated anymore in the field of representation but in the field of the bared process.

The technique of ALL OVER

ALL OVER. Here, the instruments of composition have nothing to do with the usual artist's array. The set up configuration calls on the technologies of communication: telephone, fax, modem, touchtone, computer, visiophone, ISDN lines, satellites. Arranged and interconnected to one another, these tools give the possibility to create a virtual space peculiar to the network: an interactive television.
As soon as he is present in that virtual space, each participant has the opportunity to cover, thanks to these instruments, a part of the composition, in terms of sound, pictures and data. He can embrace in any instant the pre-existing states and intervene in the communication flow.
PIAZZA VIRTUALE offers a framework that would make visible, in real time, the very process of language: "the presence of the other to the self and the reciprocity of that state, the conscience of the self given to the other". The intervenors calling out to one another through that space build up layer by layer the elements of a fluctuating work, always in becoming. At the same time creator and vehicle, each of them uses of his virtuosity to compose the work according to the technique of ALL OVER.
An epidemia of signs is propagating in the core of virtual space and is developing a chaotic alphabet primer from which emerges here and there the sense of a self-discovering speech, of a peculiar work which makes itself see. It is peculiar because pre-existing before any intelligible manipulation, before any interpretative treatment. At the intersection of imagination and experience, all over the media, it signifies its own existence in the instant when the system is operating, that is as soon as the network uses it. The electronic architecture of THE CATHODIC AGORA embraces the space and the mental time of our attention to the world. Its prospect interacts with our senses and is created as it is expressed and practised.
On this place, no vanishing point , no distance, no time-lag. Each present person, is he in Vancouver or in Riga, makes up the active principle of the work. He is the work himself, as he is invested with the power of presence lengthened to the process of perception. ALL OVER.

The Emotional Logic of the face-dancers

We often forget about the fact that, whatever is the intelligence we have of the world, we are beings little prone to analysing the patterns which urges us to put in order, to put forward a chronology, to establish a sense in our relationship to reality.
For what reason does THE CATHODIC AGORA drive us out of the phenomenological world and make us penetrate into the virtual world of process? Some could think it only deals with vague, wild techno-utopistic imaginings that have been realized by hackers longing for some adventure. There is, indeed, no reference and even less no historical chronology of such a configuration in memory. Nevertheless, in that prospective of cyberspace arises from our being an active principle that gives us the possibility of reasoning our presence through the process, of knowing the state of our action and of our finding as it lets itself be seen in the media with a reflection effect, a mirror effect that adjusts our conscience to the immediate expression of our perception.
This active principle gives the account of the stages we cover in the media, no more in terms of time and duration linked with a casuality, as one finds them in the cinema continuum of picture-time, but in terms of use and practice linked with an emotion immediately transcribed into the media. This virtual world no longer tries to represent reality. It is a world in itself. That world, artificial indeed, for technology creates it, has its own rules, its own laws, still to be explored. We recognize a guiding principle in that virtuality, because it reachs the cross-roads of imagination and experience. That principle has the possibility of full existence in that new continuum. We call that principle EMOTIONAL LOGIC. Imagination and dream made us envisage such a virtual space. Experience gave us the opportunity of arranging it. Emotional logic makes it active. The public place where people call out one another, tell their stories, regulate their exchanges, answered to a structurizing necessity of thinking. It set the common place of our existences up and, in the profusion of noises, colours, motions, composed a choregraphy in which each individualized and undifferencialized himself in turn, in the diverse representations of the social body.

PIAZZA VIRTUALE answers to one necessity of the digital world of information. The epidemia of signs that is spreading within its core is the symptom of the need of participation for isolated individuals in front of their cathodic screens.
The media's hegemony having dissolved the social body in favour of a systematic manipulation of information, individuals do not have the ability of acting physically in the space and time of exchange on their own anymore. They became passive consumers, they are no more than the statistical convergences points of a system of information that regulates the economic field.
Their virtual avatars are the "face dancers", who act as substitutes in playing the simulacrum of a social body that has become a political deceit. The emotional logic of the face-dancers thus gives human conscience, always ignorant of the patterns that urge it to arrange the sense of its relation with reality, the opportunity of finding a new ground of investigation for thinking. Emotional logic forces the network participants to act in the virtual world of media.

That world of simulacrum will only reveal its essence at the roundabout of its evolution, in its permanent interactive use. We will see the appearance, step by step, of a mediatic body that will compose, accepting the implications of a mutation from analogical languages to the digital ones, a choregraphy even richer in emotion, even richer in desires, bound for thumbing its nose at our mortal limitation and for tempting to flee the vicious circle of frustration and lack of understanding, linked with the being's eternal unsatisfaction.

In order to have done with the sentence of God

"in order to have done with the sentence of God". That being's unsatifaction is a maker of truth. As wording these philosophical presuppositions on the tangible experience of PIAZZA VIRTUALE, we want to have done with god's sentence, which defines the good and the bad, the creator and the creature, the master and the slave, the dominating and the dominated, the model and the copy, illusion and reality, truth and falsehood.

That sentence is linked with our immoderate taste for Form when we content ourselves with calling upon historical time and its references. We keep on taking as a standard the past in its representations. The consequences of that sentence can be seen everywhere. Today we see the collapse of its values and dogmas. All that bears witness to a run out vital surge, to a spiritual cowardice. We don't take into account multiplicity, duplicity and the ubiquity of the desire of thinking to transcend our knowledge of the world.
The power of enactment, invented by the face dancers, is not carried out anymore into Form, but into transformation. In the space of PIAZZA VIRTUALE there is no truth nor ultimate look. There is a process that belongs to the past present of perception, which perception keeps on transforming in a becoming in constant evolution. Because the truth of such a virtual continuum is not bound to be reached, found, nor reproduced; it kept on being created during the artistic process.
The existence of such a continuum gives thinking thinking. It expresses the unthinkable of thinking. It creates clairvoyance in this world, an enlightening clairvoyance from a new point of view, of ethics, aesthetics, religion. In this sense, PIAZZA VIRTUALE is to be considered as a revelation, a tele-vision of thinking.

"I am the thief, I am the thou, I am the three, I am the thing" sing the face dancers.

The Ubik project carries on that notion of multiplicity, duplicity and ubiquity of the desire of thinking to transcend our conscience of the world which has been pragmatically experienced in the Piazza virtuale project. The aim of the project is to test the validity of its concept. As happiness does not imply comfort but the consideration of its value, the art of such an ethic is to accept in any circumstances the art of its value, in essence economic, par excellence, as inventing in applying is to demultiply its symptom: but be careful: not to demultiply without any necessity. In matter of wisdom, decrees or hypotheses stand for consumption

"Whoever imagines any dispositions aiming to change an existing situation into a preferred situation, is a designer".

The composition of the teams who worked in this project is organized within the frame of artists who have been conceiving their practise for twenty years as the setting up of new aesthetical patterns. At the present stage of experience the operational centres of UNIVERSCITY TV are now organized into MediaBases through the world (Lyon, Paris, Caen, Poitiers, Marseille, Nancy, Hamburg, Hanover, Berlin, Riga, Moscow, Ljubljana, Milano, Barcelona, Vancouver, Quebec, New York, Nagoya and Tokyo).

1992/ Christian Vanderborght