Art as Platform of Discourse

http://postvideoart.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/art-and-information/

Art and Information

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Art as Platform of Discourse

In the world of today not only new artistic qualities (pieces of information) are produced. Thanks to digital recording we can preserve them in an unchanged form and make them available to the general public (so far for free, and we have to fight for it, but not necessarily allowing breaking copyrights). Today, everything which consisted ephemerality of the old world of rarities: vinyl records, photocopied poetry volumes, unique vhs recordings, books offering cheap enlightenment, music and videos, so elusive and tempting, everything landed in realms such us youtube.com, vimeo.com, in countless different chomik.pl, or in computers joined in p2p networks. Private information became available to the general public and lost its intimate character. The process has been ongoing so far. Cameras monitoring streets, car parks, chops, malls, staircases or registers of entries to offices and houses - these are only temporarily separate cyberspace fields. Sooner or later they will be joined or their users will want to integrate them into one network, which we will ask what to eat for breakfast in the morning. The archives of present-day intelligence services can answer that question even today. In such world the art cannot be just interactive and remain only a commodity. Art has become a continuous feedback, fluctuation of data, creation of living structure or organism, constructing a social network service or a platform similar to processing or even an institution animating artistic activities. Museum of Art in Łódź (a.r. group, mainly Strzemiński and Kobro) at its beginnings or Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Weibel) are examples of such institutions. Today such collective works are usually internet projects, such as Perpetual Art Machine, Human Emotion Project, or Exquisite Corpse. These projects are created by their authors only at the very early stage, and are then developed by other individuals, so the work has a collective character. The type and quality of such projects vary, depending on the level of development and interference of the artists, introducing such platforms into the cyberspace or social tissue. Most of them, however, move towards direction pointed by the Dadaists, later avant-guarde movements or different artists creating collective artworks. Moreover, art has opened to the subject not only as a viewer-consumer but also as a creator. Artist no longer offers ready, completed products but delivers creative platforms. We can thus say that the transition to the 2.0 culture has been made.

In other words, we have moved from art as objectively treated information to art as objectively treated space. Life has become the final effect of art or maybe the art itself has become life-designing. Artists such as Ben Fry (creator of processing - platform used by Andre Sier) create complete works, giving unlimited opportunities of transforming into countless number of artworks, which are signed by names of other artists. These works form one organism, present in many places, which creates different algorithms or data processing structures. However, this organism is also a living environment, which we can organise, given the opportunity of introducing new elements and rules into the visual space. Thus, the art of today is a result of the dialogue between the computer and the living environments. The works of Andre Sier, who uses processing to generate his own worlds (through visualisation of the data of our presence in the gallery), become a rhizome of the dialogue. Entering such interactive structure, created by multiple authors, we become a part of his artwork. But are we its authors? The authors are the artists - creators of software basis or the programmers, such as Andre Sier, who presents his co-works, which do not exist without us. The art needs you!

http://postvideoart.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/art-and-information/