Monochrome

Thank you to send us your netart/videoart projects by email ([email protected]).
Only the works using technologies (photography, video, interactivity, generativity, network, etc…) will be selected.

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The Monochromes paintings have been a keystone in the Art history. They were first introduced as a critical caricature, on a humoristic tone, but they soon became a way to state strong views and conceptual intentions. The Monochromes stand at the intersections between pure perception and abstract concepts. By painting monochromes, artists have tried to approach infinity through emptiness. One can ask if not showing any image equals to void… But isn’t the only real void monochrome the bare canvas waiting for a concept, for a creator?

What are the links between “Monochrome“ and the digital trio “computer/data processing/internet”? Are they compatible? At first, there seems to be an immense gap between them: one seems very simple, the other too technological.

We all experience the fact that a computer is a machine that crashes, bugs and produces errors. It often ends up as a blue screen. Sometimes the screen shows a number referring to the error, most of the time it remains completely blank. In a certain way, the blue screen of the computer, with its emanating light, is as ideal as a monochrome painting. Even turned off, deprived from any signal, the computer screen stares at us with all its blackness.
And on the internet, the monochrome is most coherent: this media and this genre both deal with the same immateriality, the same unseen, the same virtuality.
Take for instance the colour background of an Html page, as revealed in one of the first internet work: “Unendlich, fast…” by artist Holger Friese in 1995: a perfect, smooth, impalpable, flat blue coloured page.

Yves Klein's main preoccupation was the idea of the immateriality in art. Working with the Klein blue was a way to question the meaning of art as a whole and to apply a philosophy to the Monochrome.
What is more immaterial than computer data? Didn't we speak about virtual reality for long enough?
The internet has the capacity to challenge and redefine the notion in a very creative way, still keeping the claim to strong concept and identity. The monochrome has now to integrate new components: time, space and geographical location, generation, sharing, participative construction, and randomness, to list only a few.
The network will bring a new life to the Monochrome. A virtual one. What is yours going to look like?