Fred Forest. For an Aesthetics of Communication
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Electrical, electronic and computer technology have now brought us firmly into communication society. This technology is at the heart of changes which have come about in social reorganization over a century, thus modifying not only our physical environment but also our mental system of representation. Electricity, electronics and computers today provide artists with new instruments of creation. The way our surroundings are being transformed in this direction a little more each day, together with our continually evolving adjustement with an ever-changing reality, is doubtless what is is most important. This is why we must constantly reconsider our perceptions in order to apprehend the world in which we live. On this level, the artist has something to say, something to do. Throughout the ages, the successive emergence of new technologies (the technology of raw material transformation, that of energy harnessing and most recently information technology) has involved people in varied and successive forms of expression. Contemporary awareness is moulded through the multiple channels of the mass media. The previoulsy prevailing notion of " art for art sake " has been called into question. Today's artist, and more precisely the Communication artist, re-introduces aesthetics into its original anthropological function as a system of symbols and actions. A new aesthetics is in the process of emerging : Communication Aesthetics.
The very word " artist " necessitates some adjstments in a society which is undergoing mutation. The roles, the means, and the awareness which it denotes are evolving. It is imperative that the word become dissociated from the ideological connotations which still link it in our minds with a romantic and anachronistic vision of art. There still exists a gap on the political and educational level between " acquired culture " and " culture in creation ", and it has perhaps never been so noticeable as it is a the present time: the computer and television age. Stricken with vertigo and anguish before a changing world he is unable to come to grips with, man has a tendency to seek refuge in the past.
The artist refuses this retrograde vision. He faces up to the present, pushing himself to explore its possibilities. The artist is also a man who both observes and is involved in the adventure of his own epoch. He can neither ignore nor escape from the radical changes currently shaking its foundations. In his role as an artist, it is he who is faced with the imperative task of grasping its " meaning " and formulating its " languages ". His intention is not, of course, to challenge the scientist and the technician on their own ground. This would be stupid and naïve. On an altogether more modest level, his intention is to use, even to " divert " the new tools of knowledge and of action in a attemps to widen the horizons or our perception, or our awareness and of our consciousness, in order to revive our codes, our ways of seeing, of thinking, of understanding. And, in the same way, to allow the individual to find his place, here and now, in the world. This surely is no simple undertaking.
" If /the artist's/ attemps is to communicate about the unconscious components of his performance " writes Gregory Bateson , " then it follows that he is on a sort of moving stairway (or escalator) about whose position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his efforts to communicate. Clearly, his task is impossible, but as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily. " (6)
More and more, the concept of " relationship " plays a key role in the current of contemporary thought. All modern sociology gives considerable room to the concept of relationship whenever it is analysing society as a " whole ", as a complex system of relationships and interactions, and not as an isolated and inert body. The idea of relationship is, however, not only present within each science, but is also central to an on-going interrogation about sciences as a whole. Beyond science, it questions life itself. The individual is caught up in a tight and complex network of interrelationships which form the join in a loop where everything has something to do with everything else. At the present time, this idea has assumed an important place in many branches of sciences, and it pervades our awareness. Art refuses to be excluded from systemic concpets. The idea of communication relationships is the hallmark or our time. Such fields of research as cybernetics, information theory, games theory, and decision theory, all have natural links with the preoccupation of artists who are particularly attentive and receptive to the " wavelengths' of their age.
If what Von Bertalanffy terms the concepts of " wholeness, sum, mechanization, centralisation, hierarchic order, steady state, equifinality " (7) can be found in different domains of natural science and in psychology as well as in sociology, why shouldn't they be found, in one form or another, transposed to the domain of the arts ? It seems to me both necessary and inevitable to reinsert art today into the systems situated at various levels of the organisation of reality, by knocking down disciplinary compartments. In our society, the artist inhabits a multiplicity of specific times and spaces. His life and his work are made up of a complex network where everything circulates in all directions along different connecting circuits. Today, it is these connections which must be expressed by the artist, along with speed, nature, rhythm, flux and the data which flow both through him and through us, before he ever deals with " content ". Although not always recognized as a prime investment in our utilitarian society, art, too, has its rights and makes its demands, just like the sciences, technology and politics.
It seems appropriate here to develop at length some remarks on the nature of the relationships which link art to its entry into computerized society. This is not with the intention of considering any specific problem, such as the effect of computer generated images on creativity, manufacturing production and the resulting economic structure, but to remain at a more general level, a somewhat more philosophical one. The relational aspect, of which we are not always conscious and which is about to affect the art world directly, is of prime importance.
Having lived through various production societies, here we are now
in the Communication society. Even if today electricity, electronics and computer
technology have provided artists with new creative instruments, one cannot help but notice
an enormous resistance within the social body to all change. this resistance is
particularly felt in specialised art circles and institutions where the prevailing
mentality is frequently that of an earlier century. Outside of the market-place, a few
artists nonetheless doggedly pursue fundamental research, despite a nostalgic fashion in
art which is constantly advocating an unquestioning return to painting.
By giving pre-eminence to pictorial pigment, the current art market is only responding to
short-term economic imperatives. Tangible objects being, of course, essential to supply
the coommercial art market! The circuits of dealers have not yet found a way of making
information part of their capitalisable merchandise, unless it has first been made
material and tangible... Telephonic stock-exchange information has become an electronic
" object " in itself for a stockbroker, just as have erotic telephone calls
charged on a 15 minute basis. (8). It seems that poets, not to mention painters, will have
a long way to go before their productions can be sold in this way! This, of course, is due
to the fact that art,contrary to applied science and economics, has no practical
application whatsoever in everyday life. It must be behind the times! For the most part,
it is unfortunately considered as being purely " ornamental ". The "
pressure " from our surroundings is not, however, without having an effect on the
very nature and type of artistic production. Despite the extremely slow rate of adaptation
of the art distribution and consumer circuits, a notable evolution has taken place.
Different stages have taken us first from the aesthetics of image to the aesthetics of
objec, and from there to the aesthetics of gesture and of the event (the happening). This
trajectory shows a slow " dematerializataion " and " disintegration "
or the art object. (9).
The concept of Communication was already the central idea of Sociological Art, the first activitities of which I carried out as early as 1967, and the principles of which I first expounded in 1969. (10) I have always considered that the natural field of artistic action is the terrain of social activity. A field which may be enlarged and explored thanks to the new Communication technologies. This option upsets the holders of a fixed concept of aesthetics, who are incapable of grasping the obvious articulation between this type of practice, the concept of art, and a society in transformation.
We are called upon to ask the question, " Where are the frontiers of art situated ? ". It's a brave man who will stick his neck out! There is no frontier. Art is an attitude - a way for relating to something, rather than just as there is an aesthetics of object. We have now to take a new category into account: the aesthetics of Communicaion. The media of this aesthetics are often immaterial: its subtance comes from the inpalpable stuff of information technology. In the sky above our heads, the electric signals of this information trace invisible, blazing and magical configurations.