Introduction: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art: The Artmedia VIII Symposium

In December 2002, the international symposium "Artmedia VIII: From Aesthetics 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. 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 philosophers 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 Pictures by Moholy-Nagy (1923) or the Radia Manifesto by the Italian Futurists (1933). Telepresence, 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 Telephonic 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 Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris), curated by Frank Popper, and Les Immatériaux (The Immaterial) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, curated by Jean-François Lyotard, presented artworks for the Minitel. Heiko Idensen writes:

   I went to the art show Les Immatériaux. 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. 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. 3. To promote an aesthetics discourse. In the mid-1980s, very few philosophers dared to introduce conceptual creations within the framework of their analysis, considering them more technical demos than proper artworks. Unfortunately, it seems that this attitude largely persists in regard to net art. To propose a philosophical and aesthetic approach was the third goal.

4. 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. 5. To...