" INFORMATION " ARCHITECTS

Artists have plenty of soil to turn in what is still virgin territory for them. They have yet to contribute through their practice, their thought and their imagination to the creation of the fundamental precepts of an art built on Communication: a Communication art which irrigates the networks with a flood of data of the imaginary. The Communication artist employs telephone, vieo, telex, computer, photocopier, radio, television, and so on. He does not simply use them one at a time, but he arranges them into systems and installations. From now on, this is how his capacity to create and invent will be brought into play. He makes up given configurations, networks of varying complexity, within which he positions transmitting and receiving multi-media equipment. He organises it into interactive systems, which he then animates. The Communication artist has become a sort of Information architect. He sets off processes in a interactive relationship of participation between interchangeable partners. " Diagrams " or " information architecture " assemble and dissolve. They can, at any given moment, become the subject of a " photograph " which freezes them. The fulcrums of his network are not fixed points which are just technical of formal: they are anchored and directly connected to the social fabric. Information technology facilitates interference between compartmentalised sectors. For the first time, the artist can now hope to express himself in fields other than those restricitive ones which were previously assigned to him. It is highly probable that the key idea of " bringing into contact ", which makes our thinking and practice today, will become a preoccupation of artists and will feature ever more significantly in their creation in the years to come.

The over-proliferation of visual media and the booming growth in the number of images which they produce contribute paradoxically, if not to the disappearance of the image in its aesthetics, at least to its devaluation.This suggests an explanation for the shift towards a new form of perceptual behaviour latent in society. It is this which the Communication artist seeks to integrate into the realm of art, and this which he seeks to organise into the new framework which he is advancing, Communication Aesthetics. Writing about what he calls the " oversaturation of the world " by the image, Jean-Luc Daval points out that " those whose function it was to produce the richest and the most meaningful images had no alternatives but to disappear or shift their field of practice. It is this which explains why the creators of today need to produce new images far less than they need to know what to do with them, drawing upon their power of communication and of contact. At this stage of cultural development, the work of art must change its function. Henceforth, instead of conveying concepts or ideologies which are exterior to it, it must rather call into question its own status, the elements which constitute it and its power of relation. When the media freed the image from the exemplars found in museums, there was nothing left but for artists to put it on trial, and relativise it completely. The question of the relational in art is going to have to be put differently from now on. " (13).

We have already seen in Umberto Eco's notion of the work as an open structure (14) the ideas of system, the arbitrary and the implication of the spectator in the process of communication as advanced ty the artist.In the new self-assigned role of Communication artist, he no longer presents himself as the " manufacturer " of a material object, but bases his approach on the particular, specific and original relationship which he establishes between himself, the spectator(s) and the environment. For the sake of clarity, it must be repeated that this kind of approach can in no way be assimilated to the kind of creation which stems from conceptual art. It is true that the Communication artist, like the conceptual artist, relies on one singular idea, but its presentation owes nothing to what might be termed abstract " beauty " in a formalized setting, destined solely for the well-targeted art museum or gallery. Works which stem from the sphere or Communication and which invoke its Aesthetics give rise to the concrete and operational installation of a materialised, functioning system, even though it may be that, spread out in space, the whole system cannot be entirely taken in at first view.

The observer can always notice the presence of certain elements (physical) or signs (visual or audible) which, by the process of mental projection, lead him to reconstitute the overall presentation. He can intuit the representation of the positioning and of the relative placing of its various elements in a space which itself has different levels of reality (geographical, extensive, social or communicational space); it is also the representation of the flood of information and of its configuration in the movements which bring it to life... By proposing systems of communication as " works " discernible in terms of their functions and motions, the Communication artist claims quite simply to be modifying our habits of perception; he claims to have a effect on our perceptual behaviour and on the very interpretation of art. According to Edwart T. Hal, " The transactional psychologists have demonstrated that perception is not passive but is learned and in fact highly patterned. It is a true transaction in which the world and the perceiver both participate. A painting or print must therefore conform to the " Weltanschauung " of the culture to which it is directed and to the perceptual patterns of the artist at the time he is creating. Artists know that percepion is a transaction; in fact, they take it for granted. The artist is both a sensitive observer and a communicator. How well he succeeds depends on part on the degree to which he has been able to analyse and organize perceptual data in ways that are meaningful to his audience " (15).

Now that he has become the conceiver of information exchange systems which he designs and animates in a social communication space, the artist's status has changed. In the past, he " manufactured " objects rather like a craftsman, sometimes more like an industry. Now, though, art has lost its materialism once and for all: the artist " produces " a service. This evolution corresponds perfectly to the curve of evolution in society: it has been transformed over several decades from a society of production to a society of exchange. Art as practised by the Communication artist is the art of organisation, which is no longer concerned with objects, but rather with functions.

Throughout the history of humanity, successive technologies have emerged: the technology of raw material transformation, the technology of energy harnessing, and today the technology of information. Unquestionably these stages have conditioned the developement of certain forms or art at given moments, and will continue to do so. The most recent stage, the technology of information, no longer produces objects, but pieces of information which are organised into messages or into " communicational situations ". Art now transmits, receives, organises and diverts information and messages. Hence, it must lay the foundations for the new Communication Aesthetics, and can be regarded as a reflection on the nature, the circulation and the representation of messages in the social communication of our time.

As advanced scientists, with their advanced technology, expand, manufacturing industy, which is concerned with the transformation of raw materials, steadily gives way to tertiary, service industry. Why, then, should art be exempt from this evolution affecting every other sector of society ? By what miracle or by what mysterious aberration should it escape from the entreaties of sociologists, or the technological necessities imposed by its context ? Sociologists have noted that in our socity, more than half of the actions performed by people are dedicated to communication, and to neither the transformation nor the transportation of raw material... As of when the population of any given country spends one hour out or every two on communication, there will certainly be within its population an awareness corresponding to this nascent activity. It is this situation which will see the development of the new concept of Communication Aesthetics, and the chances are that tomorroww it will make its mark on the consciousness of our contemporaries, once it has first influenced their awareness.

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