RENAISSANCE 2001 AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ART/TECHNOLOGY INTERFACE
We live at a time when the impact of technology on art as never been more apparent. The artist's toolbox has been extended to such a degree by digital technology that even the traditional benchmark concept of "medium" has broken down, erasing the possibility of capturing and containing the artwork by describing accurately the physical support system required for communication of the idea that supposedly lies at its core.
The current trend towards "conceptual" art can be seen as an instinctive response to this process: artists are moving their activity into new areas in an attempt to isolate this aesthetic core from a series of physical media in which they have subconsciously lost confidence as a storage or communication mechanism.
At the same time, this digital technology is revolutionising the basis of human communication. The groundwork was laid more than twenty years ago when the world's telephone companies started the explosive growth of IDD (International Direct Dial) facilities. IDD has freed up international telephony and resulted in a massive growth in international network bandwidth. People started to regard global communication as being normal, natural and direct. Simultaneously, rules (Internet Protocol) have been created for inter-computer communication via this network. Because digital technology enables a combination of store-and-forward and real-time facilities, it is now possible to communicate globally via computer at a previously unimagined level of complexity and sophistication. Thus we have the extraordinary phenomenon of the Internet.
The advent of the Internet, and its explosive international growth, has given a powerful new sociological dimension to the changes created by the revolution in digital technology. It has democratised communication to the point where the tools of publishing and distribution are now passing into the hands of the individual who originates the cultural objects that were previously mediated, and hence controlled, by a variety of organisational structures: dealers, galleries, museums, publishers, academic institutions, etc. etc. . This trend is fundamentally subversive, in that it calls into question the role of the entire set of social structures that have grown up between the artist and his audience. And, for that audience, there is now a new possibility of direct contact and communication with the originators of the cultural objects that it consumes.
It is against this background, and as a response to it, that Renaissance 2001 (R2001) has come into being. The following list serves as a non-linear guide to its key concerns and characteristics:
ART, CONTENT & COMMUNICATION
Traditionally, art 'movements' have been (as social constructs) defined by some organising principle based on content - that is to say, some perceived common thread inherent to the work of the participants.
Thus, it should be possible (assuming prior induction into the grammar and vocabulary of Art Criticism) to recognise and distinguish between the work of, say, an Impressionist and that of an Abstract Expressionist.
R2001, in contrast, is pluralist in its basis and relatively unconcerned about content. Instead it focuses on areas of intention, recognising that superficial similarities of surface appearance have become inadequate criteria for categorising cultural objects. The members of R2001 share a common, loosely defined, humanitarian purpose: to create art that makes a positive contribution to human social evolution during a period of unprecedented technological and social change. As artists, we are most comfortable with the idea of achieving this end through intuitive, 'organic' methods. An important aspect of this preference is the use of the Internet as a means of working together and building an international audience for our work.
R2001 & THE INTERNET
Until very recently, artists have tended to use the Internet in a relatively conservative fashion, as a straightforward communications channel (building their own 'homepages' and 'virtual galleries) or sales medium. R2001 represents the next stage of development beyond
such activities: as a phenomenon, it has arisen as a result of, and could not exist without, the Internet. Its organisers live in Tokyo, London and Helsinki, and have never met face-to-face. Its membership is drawn from artists living in Japan, Australia, Spain, Korea,
Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand, Finland, England, Italy, Norway, Canada, Turkey, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iceland, France, Scotland and the USA. Its website draws hundreds of visitors daily from every
part of the world. And all of this has been accomplished in just a few months via the Internet - a logistical exercise impossible by any other means.
R2001, ART & SCIENCE
R2001 comes in many different flavours, with an artistic, cultural and ethnic diversity that already puts most conventional international arts festivals to shame. Its artists use the computer and the paintbrush
with equal comfort, evolving a new relationship between art and science that integrates the new digital media with other, more traditional, forms in a bewildering rush of styles and virtuosity. This tendency is supported by a growing database of digital resources held at the R2001 website for the benefit of members and others. Moreover, the R2001 council has become proactive in a series of initiatives to extend the benefits of
leading edge digital technology to artists who would otherwise lack the technical skills to deal with it: in the website's Virtual Reality section there are a number of Java, QTVR, and Virtus Player applications we have developed in order to display members' work in a public setting that they themselves would not be capable of initiating. It is already clear from the response to these efforts that many artists are keen to engage with new technologies if given a context that is sufficiently
supportive of their work.
PUBLIC TASTE & THE GLOBAL AUDIENCE
R2001 is creating a global audience for an expanding group of artists from every part of the world. A key aim in this process is to subvert and reverse the traditional processes whereby public taste is manufactured on a top-down basis through the arbitration of institutions that have hitherto 'owned' the world art audience. The power of museums, public galleries, art critics, commercial galleries and academic institutions is exercised (sometimes unconsciously and sometimes quite deliberately) in such a way as to shape and mould public taste in art.
R2001 seeks to democratise this process by creating its own audience via the Internet, and then by converting this influence into pressure on institutions to embrace the art to which its audience has responded. This possibility of reversing the directional flow in the process of constructing public taste, may well be the single most significant outome of the new digital techologies. And it is notable that this outcome portends a socio-aesthetic rather than a technical change, in the form of a shift in the power-base for determining which art gets to be seen where and by whom.
The first art galleries around the world to mount R2001 exhibitions, consisting partly of computer screens linked to R2001 members' Internet sites from every corner of the globe, will be active participants in a fundamental process of change that encompasses Art, Science, Technology and Communications. It is R2001's belief that this change will constitute a paradigm shift in socio-aesthetics, creating the basis for positive and permanent change in the relationship between artists and a new, democratised, global art audience.
See at what is happening at R2001 at http://r2001.com Gerald O'Connell
And now for something even more completely different. A very major work of art, nine years in the making, groundbreaking, able to be seen ONLY via the internet:
The Flux Aeterna project commenced in August 1990 with the development of a single imperfect curve. I was, at the time, only faintly aware of the thought processes that had attracted me to the idea, but, as the drawings proceeded, I found much of the activity to be mechanical. I was, therefore, able to reflect at some length upon the genesis of the work, and also upon many aspects of its aesthetic and psychological significance. I have attempted here to set out some of these reflections and to impose some sort of order and coherence upon them. I should make it clear, however, that I can promise nothing that would amount to a rationale, explanation or justification. Instead, I offer a modest record of some of the thoughts that have formed and accompanied the making of a series of acrylic ink drawings. The series is incomplete, and, I suspect, must necessarily remain so. Much the same can be said for the thoughts...
In July 1990 I afforded myself the luxury of a day spent in various public and commercial art galleries in London. I saw paintings and drawings of every type and from every era. I ended the day, before returning home, by passing a bookshop specialising in exotic travel. In the window was an enormous relief map of part of the Himalayas. Deeply and suddenly fascinated by the flowing density of its contours, I was surprised to find that I drew more pleasure from the map than anything else I had seen that day.
In a popular discussion of cosmological themes I came across the engaging speculation that the entirety of existence is owed to a single random disturbance in the primordial waveform. 'Being', it would seem' is nothing more than the relentless and often chaotic development of this irregularity.
All we have, our only means of understanding, is the picture. The totality of our discourse, internal and external, is by way of analogy - by means of various kinds of pictures. We tend to think of maps as a special, very powerful but limited, type of picture. But perhaps we should regard every picture as really just a type of map - an attempt to make a diagram of an area of thought.
Flux Aeterna could be regarded, perhaps mischievously, as a philosophical enquiry into the nature of change and movement, conducted within cartographic parameters - because some truths cannot be explained, they can only be drawn. The pen is mightier than the word...
There are certain mathematical patterns that are of great fundamental simplicity - basic expressions of quantity and extension. They can seem to act together as a kind of motor for being, always in flux, shifting, ticking away beneath the veil of the physical. They are independent of categories like mass or time. Any graphical representation of them must be totally ambiguous as to scale, appearing at once as both cosmic and microscopic. In such maps there can be no objects or things, only the shadows of action or the trajectories of potential. In an age of religious superstition the cartogropher who sought to record these pathways might have been described as exploring God's fingerprint. In our age of scientific superstition the same activity will, perhaps, be described in terms of chaos theory. ...not things moving, but movement itself - so persistent and inevitable that it creates coagulant clouds and apparitions out of itself; and we mistake these blurred ghosts for the ultimate components, the particles and forces from which, we persuade ourselves, existence itself must be constructed..
I have, from time to time, been forced to describe these drawings as 'abstract'. But the abstract represents forms of conceptual reality, while the representation is merely an abstraction from the real. We cannot stand apart from reality. An idea is a thing. Every attempt to bring reason to bear on this activity seems to end in paradox, and it is not clear whether the problem lies with the activity or with reason itself. Perhaps paradox is all there is...
I am aware that I am making another world for myself, a garden of forking paths where every step taken invites yet more. I walk to feed a sense of astonishment upon which I have come to depend. Thus, what commences as an activity becomes a condition.
You can see Flux Aeterna at http://www.gaoc.demon.co.uk/flux.htm.