ITA ENG

DIGITAL ART AS AN ACTUAL EXPERIENCE

Taking Part in the construction of communication codes

Tommaso Tozzi - Hacker Art - 1989

through the actions of a collective body simulacrum

by Tatiana Bazzichelli

A thread of continuity links up the Twentieth-century Avant-garde, the 60's-70's Neoavant-garde artistic experimentations, the Punx, Writers and hackers' experiences, with the interactive context creation performed by digital net-workers.

Each one of the active Zone’s quoted above, helps by some points of view to break in a desecrate way the traditional concept of Art, loosening its rigid grid to pour in the real life and the concrete action of people. Art becomes common experience, a field of performative experimentation on the language code, a chance of taking part personally in the artistic product-process creation, open crack of construction and de-construction of the sense of communication stream.

The whole history of contemporary art, step by step, has destroyed the concept of Art as fixed merchandize hung up on a wall or as window goods in a petrified museum, subject to the rules of a closed art market and to an all-inclusive Art System. Tryng to make the spectator role active, he has been put on an impermanent expressive event, he could have benefit from, only becoming the director of his own paths of sense. The user needs to make a cognitive work, beyond deep diving in the drift of his inattention, and towards being able to interact actually with the art product, testing its critical state, making it personal. The role of the artist as golden creator has also been broken up, step by step, into the action of the users requested to live jointly the artistic happening (see Fluxus experience), so that what takes place is a potentially never ending process, set by the creative spontaneity of the audience.

The punk experience had a hand in collectivizing art conception, showing that the idea of an artist raised to genius rank and an audience banished to passivity's marshes, is unthinkable and that it is possible to produce one's own art, starting from communication media's self-management. Through the horizontal use of media, the Punk experience let everyone create their own music, magazine (called punkzines), infonews, breaking up the dualism between cultural industry and standardized audience, making each person take an active role in the creation of his own art. The concept of self-management of the expressive forms, comes to mind also considering the writers' experience, in which the "artistic product" becomes a performative act that travels the post-metropolitan drifts, wrapped up in the life of the city itself, and in unison with its speeded up rhythm. A TAG becomes a journeying act, a nomadic identity that communicates with other wandering identities, impermanent factor in a kaleidoscopic context.

All these T.A.Z. illustrate how art and technology have come closer and closer in time to each other, and how it is now possible, through an aware and self-managed use of media and language tools, to entertain an "hacking art", to carry out an event-flow in cooperative evolution. In interactive digital art this spiral of progressive dematerialization and collectivization begins to whirl more and more vortically, while the viewer role becomes fanciful, as he acts directly on the art product-process, through the psychomotor action of his simulacrum-body.

Immaterial border zones (i.e. computer graphic interfaces, virtual and artificial reality's space, interactive installations, etc.), where each person can construct and deconstruct his communicative ways, directly working on language icons, through his dematerializing acting. Unlike generalist media, where everyone can identify themselves in a simulacrum generalized and ordered from above, new media let them personalize imaginary ghosts, making them actual experience. Hence, while the communication event was carried out by traditional media through the action of an hidden ego that projected itself into the great universal simulacra vivified on the screen, new interactive media allow the user to gain visibility and to leave personal traces inside the medium, by means of a performative mise-en-scène of his own bodily simulacrum, a flowing virtual body. The relationship with the medium becomes psychomotor and the user's action changes into the main pin of communication process. Thus, an art that keeps up with time is an art that relates with the existing sociocultural outline of technology and lets the user be the protagonist of an artistic event, giving him the chance of self-determining it. New interactive and "global" media give also the co-authors (as they should be called) the possibility of setting up virtual communities which could form a rhizomatic action and re-action's network, helping the future creation of an art process of cooperative evolution. So the artist becomes the creator of the contens of exchange, the one who plans the platform where the user can start dancing, twisting around many others virtual bodies that, like him, leave a trace over the interface's mechanism, self-determinating their own identity.

Art makes sense if the user can act, mix with other dematerialized bodies, sharing a joint event that travels through virtual links like a reproducible virus. The art's work becomes a stream of patchworks, unbroken working out, contamination, copying, reproducing, alteration of language codes and icons through which it appears: it is born and grows from the horizontal and extemporized action of many people.

Art melts down with people's acts, with their bodies, with virtual universes self-determined, with the drifts of flowing links, with action of our mind that turns into digital prothesis, with self-managing experience... giving rise to continuous open episodes to be filled with the crossing of networks of personal ralationships.

Oedipa.m translates (mirellac@tin.it)

Blicero revises (blicero@ecn.org)

Tatiana Bazzichelli is a Berlin-based independent art curator, communication sociologist and organizer of exhibition/events on hacktivism and net.art, she is the founder of the networking project AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism and owner of the mailing list on artistic activism aha@ecn.org hosted by Isole nella Rete Italian collective. She curated several exhibitions in Italy and was involved in different activist events in Berlin