Философия/1. Философия литературы и искусства

Nikolaeva E.V., PhD in Cultural Studies, Assoc. Prof.

Moscow State University of Design and Technology

Media Art Communicative Spaces

The report investigates media art communicative spaces (MACS) which are initiated by different kinds of media art objects. Art objects are considered as a message coded in a specific way and media art communicative spaces are classified in accordance to the reference of the participants and elements of the communicative act to the “real” and virtual realities.

Key words: art object, art communication, communicative space, media art, virtual reality.

Any art-object, including digital ones, is a “text” (in J. Derrida’s meaning) coded in a specific way, a message with a multiple addressee, and thus it can be described with R. Jacobson’s communication act formula.

A traditional artwork causes image-mediated communication, all participants (objects and viewers) and components (code, channel, etc.) belonging to the common “real” reality and homogenous communicative space (which we call the first order homogeneous communicative space). The only “virtual” (digital) thing here is the creative algorithm of the art object, e.g. fractal art works elaborated on the computer are printed on paper/canvas and exhibited in a city gallery. One of the first examples of this media art communicative space (MACS) type is the “Images of Complex Dynamical Systems” by H.-O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter (1984).

Contemporary art projects often initiate besides the traditional vector of communication (“author-artwork-viewer”) a viewer-object interaction. Such art objects create a kind of communication space where the communicants are located in different realities (real and virtual) and the interaction vector repeatedly crosses the borders of the realities in both directions. The addressee involved into communication physically passes from one reality to another and consciously or in a random manner affects the events in the virtual reality and the “text” of the art message. The genuine author (addresser) is absent existing beyond/above the communication space like a demiurge that has created the laws of a virtual world. Some earliest examples of this MACS type are video installations like CAVE – cave automatic virtual environment (e.g. “Legible City” by Jeffrey Shaw, 1989–1991; “Metropolis” by S.Biggs, 2005; “Bycicle” by I. Nakhova, 2006; “Dramhouse” by A. Dementeva, 2009, etc.). In this case one faces mixed (augmented) reality and gets into the first order heterogeneous communicative space.

It is also possible when the art object can only exist as such entirely in virtual reality like the hyper-project “The Life Phantasmagoria” of paintings by I. Kamenev (Russia). In such variant of a mixed MACS a virtual space plays the role of a kind of media environment (e.g. virtual picture galleries and interactive computer artworks) where the virtual copies/originals are located and a virtual/real context arises. Then the art object only exists as such one entirely in the virtual reality, while its initial “corporeity”, the author and the percipients belong to the “real” reality. The bright example is the Brahms symphony in Hamburg (4.03.2009) with different instrumental parts being performed separately in different places of the real space (a stadium, a supermarket, etc.) and the fragments only assembled into the whole in the virtual space of the Internet.

In the uttermost case the art object can create virtual reality which serves permeable border between the two (inner and outer) subspaces of the “real” reality (e.g. the aqua-luminous art project “Digital Water Pavilion (DWP)” by Smart Cities Group (MIT), 2008).

Most art-objects from mixed spaces of art communication contain (image-contextual or intertextual) markers of heterogeneity fixing artificiality of the art object and its reality.

In the second order homogeneous MACS all the components of the communicative act including the addresser and addressee are implemented exclusively in a virtual communicative space (e.g. on the Internet-site Second Life). Thus a virtual context emerges and both the author and the audience have to incarnate into avatar personalities, “residents” of the virtual life universe to exhibit and to perceive art objects. There are some artists like Gazira Babeli who only exist in virtual reality.

Finally, a virtual art object may come back into the first order communicative space – as an exhibit item in real life art galleries (e.g. “Virtual Renaissance”, Florence, October 2008 – January 2009) – to loop communicative chains of different types in the integrated hyper-space of art communication.

References

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