No Subject

P: Many 'media-works' supposed to be artistic are following the very old Aristotelian principle of mimesis: the work is just imitating nature with a new technology. Here you deal with the nature without any 'naturalistic' reproduction. We experience a complex of processes that are going on and define a new dimension of communication. Could we define it as a model of digital environment?

C: Yes, we are on environments where the senses of the body are connected via interfaces to dynamic architectures. Sometimes these knowbots also have the 'mimetic' potential for dynamic processes, they are representing real 'data fluids' which you can contact and transform. Mimetic not in the meaning of traditional art: mimetic potential means the agent incorporating the process.
We can't use anymore the term representation because you are included now as an observer of reconstructed representations. I would like more to consider the word phenomena. 

P.:In your installations one feels a massive use of technology. Formally the only material one can see are computers and communication hi-tech equipment.
As artists using this technology which is your critical position regarding the economical-political process which is running together with the information world?

C:  We are inside the technological system whose direction and speed are defined by the industry and science. Politics.  and arts have to follow and it is nearly impossible to do anything without being inside. It is a confrontation which can't work if you play with the traditional ways of art.
You have to be inside so that you can really see the consistency of the new technology, not only to say: "OK this is their world". This is our world and becomes bigger and bigger. We all depend on computers.
I try to keep my vision free to understand what is outside and deal with both of these worlds. There are still many parts of our life which the technological system can't incorporate.
Therefore I define myself an artist who can fight inside this self regulative order. Though I know everything I do could be good for the system because everything is connected but I fight and give up the respect for the big machines I am working with.

P:The industrial revolution has delivered one of the biggest concern of our time: the pollution of the environment. The South Pole is an environment almost untouched by the man, where it is possible to make important observation about the environmental problem. Many scientists are able to visualize the effects of pollution, but it seems they have much more difficulties to reveal the origins. For an artist should be more important to fight the causes and not to the effects of the industrial pollution. 

Y: Yes, a real solution is not fighting against the effects or against the people who destroy the ecosystems. It's necessary to struggle against the thinking of the people who make these strategies, against the scientists and politicians  who think they can predict reality by computing nature. It's an old artist's strategy to make politics and scientists aware about the consequences of their concepts of reality.

P. What's your feeling about the time you need to produce this kind of work? 

C.: It always takes too long to realize a project when you work with technologies. It is a kind of paradox, not only for the technical complexity, also for the economical support.
The production's process of art takes longer than you want. You can't produce ten pieces a year. This is maybe  not understandable in the traditional way of art.

P.:As we can speak of cyberspace, virtual space, we could think of a different notion of time. Past, future and present are existing together in your installation: the past is the work of the scientist, the present is the interaction in your installation and the future are the potential information going to be updated by the knowbots. How would you define the implicit time of this work?

Y: We are familiar with the notion of cyberspace, how can we modify space, compress space, extend space. I think you can do the same with time and the way you experience it. We make a concept for the practice of vision. The time we try to realize it is the present.

C: Maybe if the work succeeds when somebody gets into our installation he realizes that there is a complex of different new aesthetical and cognitive structures to deal with. We can't offer results in our work, everybody could experiment in his own way, we offer a model which is still in discussion, which offer different layers of nature concepts simultaneously: a traditional physical model with light and temperature zones, a scientific simulation with the illusion 
of linear references and a networked info-aesthetical model generated by knowbots.





**********   I  N  S  T  A  T ?    H  O  C    U  T  I  T  U  R    **********
Paolo Atzori
Academy of Media Arts  Peter-Welter-Platz 2                       D-50676 Koeln   
Office:      *49-221-20189-141                        Fax:    *49-221-20189-17
e-mail:Paolo@khm.uni-koeln.de     URL: http://www.khm.uni-koeln.de/~Paolo