Cassandre 50 editorial

We have never undermined communication tools that allow us to diffuse texts and ideas in real time and increase visibility of realities that the general press considers as ’provocative phenomena targeting middleclass snobs’. However, as far as the practices of art are concerned, our first aim is to bring people together so as to stay conscious as members of a human cultural group. Let us subtract ourselves from the general phenomenon of consumption, spoiling almost all of artistic activity.

What indeed can digital art, net art, « new technologies » mean for us today ? A good market for some informed administrators of the ministry of culture ; or with the live arts, a kind of gadget, a parody of interactivity, separating us from real exchange. OK so it also can be a little bit more than that ; a mass-economic tool, enabling the by far most creative, like ®TM ark, in continuing to unexpectedly cut into reality in a political way. New art technologies somewhere between néo-dada and situationnism, are something like fair and smart sabotage.

It is obviously an also very effective way of activating a network. However, it is very possible that this trenching network management structure creates new online ghettos. As it has often occurred in art history, the World Wide Web can be a new ground to conquer for those who are bold enough to reintroduce contradiction, saving expression and defending deeper meanings and relations. But, as always when creation is only a click step away, the matter remains complex and hard to analyze. Let’s move carefully on these rocky grounds, clogged by ambiguous notions like « interactivity », or the extension of the notion of the ’author’. Here, let us try to distinguish real structures from an ocean of trendy marketing methods.