Fred Forest. For an Aesthetics of Communication
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Let us emphasise the fact that contemporary awareness is shot through with doubt and uncertainty. Well-established notions of space, notions of time, scales of size, are now called into question. Our age is going through a profound crisis of perception at a time when the theoretical interpretation of various phenomena is being challenged. Our awareness is therefore marked by the surrounding climate, moulded by the continuous effects of the fundamental changes occurring at an ever accelerating rythm. For modern man, the technological media have become artificial extensions which lead him into the realms of time and space, which were still inaccessible to us only yesterday. Television and telephone daily send us to the other side of the globe, and bring the world into our living rooms. Instead of the traditional concept of the distinct object, limit and unity of place, we must now rather react to concepts of interface, commutation and simultaneity. Ubiquity is no longer a utopian vision of the spirit: under certain conditions, communication technology produces it every single day.
The age of awareness in which we live is recognizable by the transfer or information, and by the dynamic configurations which catch us up in their movement. Representations which come to life in structures with interchangeable elements, known as installations, systems, networks, etc. The resulting strongly felt changes in our perception and in our relationship with the world, and also in our everyday behaviour, attest to the birth of a new aesthetics. It is an aesthetics whose designated object lies beyond the visible, beyond the tangible, but lies in the zones of infra-perception, alongside our modern awareness. The technological systems of exchange in which we are directly implicated, both as active participants and (either individually or collectively) as constituent parts of the system, open the way to " awareness " relationships which no longer obligatorily pass through visual or verbal channels. Our daily living experience unfolds in a global field of interactions and events created by electric and electronic media. The permanent information bath in which we live reorientates our ways of feeling into new forms. Inevitably, if art had not been deflected and diverted from its natural vocation by economic pressures, it would have been able to fulfil the expectations of the new awareness. Art could thereby endow awareness with its own specific forms of expression, discovering them as it went along. Forms of expression which precisely spring from Communications Aesthetics, and not from a type of art which is something to see or to listen to. A type of art whose practice and whose objectives lie beyond the image, beyond the pictorial act, beyond the object - in Communication itself, and in its modes of functioning.
The process of dematerialisation of art which goes back to Duchamp, and the recourse of artists to concepts, attitude and intention encourage an open reading of art. It is the very domain of art which is widened. Yves Klein's school of awareness, his theatre of Void, and his cosmic perspective prophetically introduced us to a civilisation confronting the conquest of space and the mysteries of matter. In the age of electronics and telecommunications, man is making his way further and further towards a less concrete relationship with reality, towards the dematerialisation of his everyday experience.
Our awareness cannot but be profoundly changed. All that art can now make us " feel " is that patterns of sound and encoded images are only illusions, behind which millions of electrons are agitating. What Communication Aesthetic artists endeavour to " represent " is a representation which drawls its origins from beyond the real, beyond appaearances and the normal perceptual framework. Technology involves us in " data acquistion " of the world, in which the physical marker has lost its meaning in favour of electronic sources of assessment. Representations on video and computer screens substitute so powerfully for the materiality of distance that they are on the verge of doing away with their referents.
The foundations on which yesterday we claimed to build and legitimise our representations have become precarious and often suspect. In the case of the television image, for example, our perception vacillates under the temporal shock of the instantaneous broadcast. In this image, the physical obstacle, like the obstacle of time, suddenly dissolves in a blue cloud of electrons... Space is flattened out, truncated, eroded by the vector of communication. The fast forward, the slow motion, even the re-wind of the film or video image overthrow our concepts and our conventions about time. The Euclidian heritage of the notion of space as continuous and homogeneous crumbles away before the new concepts of discontinous space.A space which is dotted about with markers which our perception on the human scale is quite incapable of picking out. From now on, me must therefore learn to inhabit the temporary. We have to get used to the idea of permanent wandering. Adapting ourselves to an instability that we will eventually have to to tame. In the end, finding the point, at once fixed and moving, from where our vision will be able to discover and invent this new relationship between our lived-in space, our electronic space and our space of evolution... In order to do this, we must rely on and integrate as rapidly as possible notions bearing strange barbaric words for names: commutation, arborescence, intermittence, modular, interactive...