Against Official Contemporary Art, For an Art of the Present

19961SAST ENDNOTE Against Official Contemporary Art, For an Art of the Present Wwould be making a very serious mistake ifwe thought that there existed only one particular reality. By allowing the invisible to become visible, artists of all times have already shown that beyond the world of appearances there is a multitude ofvirtual worlds to which the forces of their genius and skill have given shape. In the last 25 years, scientific thinking itself has accustomed us to the idea that any reality is but a skin under which is to be found an endless series of other levels of reality. In fact, the technological instruments we call upon to take over our everyday universe modify our perception of that universe by giving us access to other forms of the real. The propagation among the general public of devices for multi-sensory visualization and interaction will plunge individuals into "virtual" environments that will open up new fields of experimentation for scientists, philosophers and, of course, artists. THE NEW FRONTIERS OF VIRTUAL SPACE The merit of the artist has always been to invite us to look at the world with an eye that is "other," a different, suspicious eye. On one hand, artists make us doubt our more established certainties; on the other hand, they substitute one reality for another byasserting new representational codes. It is clear that today it has become easier for us to accept that any interpretation of the world is directly linked to a given form of knowledge , a given moment, a socio-cultural conditioning upon which mental representations are highly dependent. The status attributed to the notion of "reality" is alwaysdefined through determinations linked to a specific moment in history and knowledge. The historical moment is experienced by contemporaries as a sort of impetus, suspended and immobile in time, an illusion of a region of stability that appears as a frozen image. It is often the case that people, in their own time, at their own level, are anchored in knowledge and certainties that only individuals of great stature, such as Galileo, have the impertinence to challenge, even at the risk of losing their lives. Since the appearance of Cro-Magnon man in the development of the human adventure , we have gone through successive ''virtualities,'' which then turned into concrete "realities." What may be a new development beginning with the invention of the wheel-and notably augmented by the multiplying use of electrical and computing machines-is the acceleration of the means of movement to such a degree that it has begun to make visible the movement itself. The frozen image of knowledge (and it was perceived as such) was nothing but a delusion inherent in the limits of our perceptions . Electronic machines offer other possible means of evaluating the real and thus modify our mental structures. The synthetic image changes our relation to the world by giving us the possibility of acting directly upon virtual worlds. In the virtual environments with which we have experimented thus far, the feeling of physical movement is produced by two sensorial stimuli: one of these is based on total stereoscopic vision; the other, on the feeling of muscular correlation. The relationship between the virtual space made up by the synthetic image and the participant's own body is established through cells that create an intimate hybridization between the body and the virtual space in which we are, so to speak, submerged. LEONARDO, Vol. 29, No.2, pp. 167-169, 1996 167 AN AESTHETIC OF NETWORKS The many electronic extensions that allow us to see and touch the immaterial-which is in a way becoming more "real" all the time-construct.a new space around us. In this space, artistic practice will be able to experiment with a new field to produce the new models that are always necessary for a renewal of aesthetic pleasure. The concept of space, once thought to be self-evident, is being transformed and enriched byaspects previously unimagined. The communication space in which we now live on a daily basis is no longer the classic space with which we were previously experimenting , but rather a hybrid, a symbolic form whose representation evades conventional criteria. The...