Fred Forest. For an Aesthetics of Communication
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Modern man may be seeking to master his physical universe, but he is increasingly preoccupied with the conquest of his own inner space. A number of signs point to this preoccupation, which is becoming even more evident in a pendulum swing back to the individual. The principles of Zen, which teach us the wisdom of renouncing the desire to explain the world, teach us rather to concentrate on acquiring the ability to merge into it. Isn't this what is happening, on one level or another, when a commuter on the platform stares at the closed-circuit monitor to the point at which he forgets to get into the train which would have taken him to his destination ?
Contemplating the world is an exercise which Communication technology is making ever more accessible to us, as it allows us to come face to face with our present, and come to terms with it through instant mediatisation. It is new technology whose modes of functioning enables us to reappropriate time in a certain way - to " rediscover " our Present. Working as if they were extension or our senses, the new media eliminate structured and linear thought, break down concepts, and lead us into different forms of anthropoloical behaviour. In their way, just like meditation, they bring about specific and privileged states where our relationship to time, space, matter and objects is revitalised. The new media open the way for other types of knowledge, other forms of consciousness. The reflection on Time and Space which the work of Communication artists entails is not a reflection in terms of discourse and theory, but comes about as a result of original and unusual procedures. The artists are thus endeavouring to make us conscious of immanent truths, in which they directly implicate us on a adventurous exploration of, and navigation through, the universe of telecommunications, which becomes denser and denser and more and more complex. A journey to the promised land where biological time, chronological time, technical time, profane time and holy time all merge into one unique, unified time of hyper-awareness.
The goal which art today is aiming for is to make us aware or a radical change in our behaviour patterns. In this change of behaviour patterns, the artist is putting forward his own models. These new models have as their function a greater knowledge of ourselves. The new technology is an extension or our perception and predisposes each individual, through his own experience, to push back the frontiers in order to attain the domain of the hyper-aware, shimmering out there now, at our fingertips... This net of ever finer mesh which is woven by our communicational environment will bring forth in the long term a global consciousness which will eventually take the palce of the typically Western notion of individual fragmentation. By reinforcing a certain synchronism, the new media reinforce the collective unconscious. Modern man, enveloped as he is in a moving sphere of information, must find the tempo of his own score in order to achieve harmonic integration into the whole symphony. Communication Aesthetics brings out new forms of expression in keeping with our times. It brings out forms which are extremely diversified and rest upon one fundamental concept: the concept of relationship. In these art-forms, the basic notion of " interval " constitutes the determinant factor. We have now entered the periode of arts based on " the interval ". It is this very field, surrounded by energy, which in the context of dynamic relationships brought into play and in the multiplicity of exchanges and interactive combinations set ut by the artist, constitutes its principal object. The art-forms which belong to Communication Aesthetics are based on the natural rythms inherent in each person's life and relates them to our everyday technological universe of Comunication. A bridge is built between nature and culture... Through the complex synchronic process we are constantly involved in, we have the continual feeling that we are part of a global beat made up of an infinite number of distinct little rythms. When we are in situation, we have the overwhelming feeling that we are deeply part of our surrounding world. The frequencies which occur in our cerebral activity are the same ones, in a manner of speaking, as are found magnified in the electric, electronic and telecommunications network.
Where does the nucleus of contemporary art reside today ? It is in the " bringing into contact " of individual rythms with those found in the telecommunications networks, and in the uncovering of human rythms which are connected with fields of cosmic energy. Here is experimental contomporary art, which must above all not be confused with the artistic production inspired by the market. Yves Klein, a precursor of " awareness " through the use of monochrome, already showed the way in this direction. His untimely death unfortunately did not permit him to see the astonisthing developments of our electronic and communcation age. It is nonetheless clear that in many ways his artistic practice and its underlying theory fall directly in the field which Communication Aesthetics covers. For him, as for us today, the problem or art was not a problem of object, form or colour, but above all a problem of energy. Energy which is to be localised, manipulated, shared out, represented. Perceived knowledge comes from specific practice which is more based on lived experience proposed through the form of interactivity and, sometimes, through live participation.