The term 'post-industrial' was first used in 1958 by Reisman. Alvin Toffler in his book "The Third Wave" states that in the ten years from 1950-1960 a new paradigm in evolution began that could be called the "electronic" era, the "technological era" or the "era of artificial intelligence". In fact in 1956 McCarty of Stanford University coined the term "artificial intelligence". The first theorizings about the way to understand and not only recognise the information-message, or to represent it as awareness and thus to infer by induction the planning of an action, have led to a new epistemological evolution.
The discovery of Kornberg (1957) that had opened the possibility of constructing a DNA molecule in a test tube that Watson and Crock had shown in a model of the structure in 1953, opened the gate for the growth of Genetics.
In 1957 the first unmanned space flight took place and the television, computer, the polaroid camera, the xerox photocopier etc. had an ever-increasing diffusion.
After the first successes in 1927 with Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle, Bohr's Principle of Complementaries, the discussion of cause-effect determinism, the new formulation of the concept of quantum-matter, the opening of the field of negativity through the anti-matter dimension, we find that the Quantum Theory has developed an enormous field of knowledge and a new awareness, on the foundations of which artists have been able to operate a dequalification of the image, an invasion of spaces and specifics.
Culture, that had remained behind with respect to technology and the new formulations of quantum micro-physics, set itself up as the clearing-house between the ordinary man and the new field of knowledge and work by means of a radical refounding of the image, that great epistemological revolution in the field of art represented by the possibility of going beyond the hand-made picture, the canvas, picture-frame, design and colour.
Finding him/herself confronted by the continuous and manifold proliferation of new languages and new awareness, the artist turns then towards the piece of paper, the fragment, the minimum structure, linguistic codes, discontinuity, interdisciplinarity, unsophisticated materials, body language and the photographic image. And it is above all the Fluxus movement, into which some of the artists of Happening flowed, that carries forward those new linguistic possibilities, breaking with the object to promote itself as action and behaviour. Art, in its new quantal image, becomes document, practice, route and information, and the problem of value shifts from the aesthetic camp to the ethical.
The year 1962 may be remembered as the most fecund year of that period: new themes invade music, dance and theatre; groups are formed that in a short time disband, creating the matrixes for new actions and happenings. Society is growing and the economy lives the most flourishing period of its history - the indexes of economic growth of those years are a testimony. The great expansion in industry and mass consumption, the great urbanization and the great hope for the future seen in these years were lived by the artists with an enthusiasm for making their appropriation of the urban sign visible through festivals, actions, happenings and their general behaviour.
Pushed by the new knowledge and in parallel with it, art became for the Fluxus artist a total place, available for welcoming any and every creative possibility, both as a personal proposal of the artist's self, of his/her own physicality, and as the visualization of the objects utilised, sometimes as tools, in communicating with the spectators. Through the manipulation and transformation -sometimes violently - of the media such as television and radiophonic equipment, photocopies, newspapers and means such as musical instruments and stage-spaces , the Fluxus artists linguistically worked the salvaging of the then dominant technologies.
Going beyond the object and support, at which certain artistic poetics of New Realism and Azimut stopped, these artists push themselves forward into investigating pockets of negativity, an area hitherto unexplored, and try to reveal a new quiddity in the event itself: the totality of the everyday. It is an everyday that lives the radically new mutation of our relationship with things and others: the loss of the material consistency of objects of perception that became or would become for a new sensibility particularly diffused among the inhabitants of metropoli, truly "immatériaux", evanescent and serial images. And it's for this that the Fluxus movement, in its constantly becoming aware of the multiple levels of life, has in itself the eruptive power and the will to change the myth of the Futurists. In a way contrary to this great movement of the early years of the century, whose action was directed towards the representation of the technological and industrial dynamism of modern civilisation, Fluxus turns its attention to the "daily life" of the global village, to the electric megalopoli of the future founded on the all-importance of information and where the role of the man/woman is no longer tied to the workplace but rather to the time off from work.
An everyday, then, that subtends the renouncing of possession in itself and the unity of the personality in favour of plurality. A real single self no longer exists: only different versions of a person, all of which are legitimate. We are as many individuals and roles as are the situations and social games into which we are placed. The individual comes to imagine him/herself as having different biographies, all possible, that move into the future in different forms and configurations. A person can be many potential individuals in one, can live in a world in which he/she participates in more vital worlds.
In this way the art-game of Maciunas can be read, "which must be simple, amusing, without pretentiousness, and must involve insignificant things without requesting any particular ability ... Everything can be art and anyone can do art."
The art-game of Fluxus is a rear-guard action without pretentions, and has no need to set itself against the avant-garde in a struggle for supremacy. It is happy with its monostructural characteristics, non-theatrical, concerned with a simple and natural fact, a game, a gag. It's a mélage of vaudeville, gags, infantile games, Spike Jones and Duchamp. It's art that has lost its centre, the finality of the market, the product wrapper, an art that doesn't want to be precise, determined, durable. It's the art of indeterminacy, of possibility, of the fragment, the precarious, the art of everything and at the same time the inverse of everything. The infinite variety of the solutions corresponds to the infinite variety of particular possible phenomena. Fluxus is an attitude of the possible; as a quantal image it is a possibility of the indeterminate.
Before the Fluxus movement, artists were divided by cultural matrixes, different poetics and by geographical distance. Fluxus wanted to dissolve these divisions and fragmentations in order to create a single community in which everyone can freely enter and leave. In fact the movement was worldwide, from America to Japan and Europe and presented itself as a reference point for an attitude and way of being with reference to things, people and institutions.
By means of the unhinging of artistic specifics, Fluxus became the possibility of moving outside confines, an opening that creates a flux, "a movement through which art acquires the movement of life." Art no longer represents reality but completely coincides with it. Painting, sculpture, poetry and music no longer exist, rather an event that encompasses in itself all existent disciplines. Through a notion of time coming from the oriental doctrine of Zen, which sees time as an incessant succession of moments that qualify not only the most extraordinary happenings but also those which are most anonymous and everyday, time in Fluxus art respects the scanning of the time of life. And space, that has gone beyond the limits of institutionalised space such as the picture or the gallery, becomes the space for social communication, extendable to infinity, that connects different realities far away from each other. And in these places, the world of Fluxus contaminates poetry, literature, music and architecture and ties them together in an interlacing of relationships and contamination.
Florence, the place chosen by Fluxus where the musicians at the end of the 50's lived side by side with the theoretics of Quantum Physics, visualised better than any other centre these interactions. Visual Poetry, Radical Architecture and the Post-Fluxus musicians are all links in these relationships. Jean Marc Poisot, in speaking of the posterity of Fluxus, said that this movement has been a movement of exceptional experimentation, common to both Europe and North America, and is at the beginning of all that was constituted as artistic activity in the 60's (with the sole exception of minimal painting).
Far from being an ephemeral phenomenon, Fluxus has left behind a great number of published ideas that in the greater part were realised in the following years: cutting a trunk led to Land Art, using a word as material led to Conceptual Art (Henry Flynt, 1961). Action Art had its origins in Fluxus events.
'Poor Art', too, is greatly indebted to this movement. Fluxus represented in the greatest possible way the dissolving, or at least the rarefaction, of the historical awareness of the "continuum" of an anthropological awareness, with the progressive decline in all historical philosophy, for which it slowly substituted the idea of a true existence as the resolution of the world (Lowith) to that finally of the utopic existence where the world no longer has its one place and its precise definition and can no longer be circumscribed by its own determined environment, i.e. it is no longer "the place of history".
I conclude with the affirmation that Happening & Fluxus, even in its different angles of vision , has been the referent closest and most faithful to the knowledge of quantum theory, but at the same time has represented a generating matrix of a new reality finding multiple expressive forms that will develop increasingly in the Post-Industrial, Technological era.
In the history of evolution, as in the history of the awareness, it's never a question of the organisms on the one side and ideas on the other in adapting themselves to reality. Instead it's the reality through the narrowness of the possible that eliminates that which is not vital, that which doesn't respond to the constitution of the real.
The 'natural selection' of philogenesis (as in the history of awareness) doesn't positively select the more resistent elements but functions simply by leaving all that which doesn't resist to perish.
History exists in as much as it creates a dilution of events, a temporal dilution that guarantees a continual reading which is other than that which was thought, in a standardized way, the only truth.
The theory of evolution can suggest a precious analogy: the relationship between organic structures and the environment finds a precise correspondence in the relationship between cognitive structures utilizable in a given moment and the moment of experience. In both cases adequate forms are found. The first ones because the natural circumstance of the mutations has given them the forms they have now, the second because human intention has formed them with the aims that they finally reach in mind. The aims are: explanations, predictions, or the control of distinct experiences.
Art is an environment subject to a degree of systemization, and after giving up the idealogical schemes of the Second Avant-garde or the "avant-garde of quantity" of the 60's and 70's, now throws open the space of non-identity and difference. We have a fitting example in Inexpressionist Art where the awareness is clarified that that which forms the identity of the work isn't the poetic will-power of the artist but the capacity of the operator to grasp that which radically structures and adapts the work.
The artist plays on the acceptance inside the system knowing that in exchange he/she will have the possibility of attributing to the same the status of a work of art. He/she appropriates the system elevating it to the status of a work ofa product looking for another way of arriving at a linear determination of the meaning. We are dealing with a second-grade ready-made: the ready-made is no longer made on the object (Duchamp) but on the system with regard to which the artist must give his agreement at the right moment in order to seize that which becomes standardized as the work - the delegation ofwork of art provided by the system.
The French Neo-Conceptual situation reveals the understanding that the system has recently adopted art as a linguistic fact, in the way of advertising, on the condition that each language act reveals itself immediately in an act of communication (the utilization of language typical of the publicity media). This operation in language provides an artistic product proportional to its becomingcommunicative media. The becoming a 'work' through its 'becoming a communicative act' remains equally subtended to the decisions that structure the system: the French Neo-Conceptualists work in favour of the work of art in its having meaning, in such a way that this meaning is communicated in compliance with the dictates of the system, where the gallery becomes the agency protecting that same system.
It is not a coincidence that the greater part of the French works bring to their artistic "appointment" the icons and logos of multinational companies: the work of art is its sponsorship. In Italy, in parallel to France from 1984-5, certain Tuscan and Ligurian artists, neighbours to the work of Giuseppe Chiari and with the artistic experience gained after the exhibition "Inexpressionism" organized by G. Celant in 1981, forwarded in a wholly autonomous manner a new problematic of knowledge based not so much on abstract problems of language but rather on a cognitive awareness of the real that we receive as a linguistic entity: a new awareness not so much connected with the formulation of the image of the media but rather as an operative questioning of reality, of the world.
An awareness, then, that wants to go beyond the image to the operation that makes non-real every given datum and that thus produces an awareness that is indifferent to the single, concrete content. These artists don't stop at the three-dimensional rendering of the image of an object, at the social holography of the society of performances: they want to put forward new problematics and new tasks.
Their working operation turns to the questioning of what is real, what is realization, what is legally determined as 'real'. Their working proposal doesn't carry a message, then, but confronts the structure from the informative datum about that which regulates and determines each meaningful act, and substantially what makes the reality of a fact.
They don't operate a process of evasion of and liberation from a definition of the real tied to a constrictive and definitive circuit, but rather affirm the appropriation, the feasibility of that same process which continually tends towards homologization, towards making the real uniform.
To move and present a fact is understood by the artists in terms of the opererativenessof the same fact, a possibility that restores a theoretic truth which distances the artists and differentiates them from each other. Their work, as linguistic machines, span the category of Dissipation. The work of art has always established its finality in the realization of a product. The analytic line that ran through the 60's and 70's demoted the process of 'making a product', making as its final aim only its route of realization (outside the picture).
The work became its own conceptual route (Happening, Events, Tautology, Monosemia, Metalanguage). The pretext that made this operation become true was centred on the fact that the object, the product, was dissolved in favour of the useful recovery of its theoretical-conceptual expression. What was lost sight of (and that is still recycled in Neoconceptual circles today) is the fact that the quality-of-object is reincarnated anew in the concept: basically speaking it finishes up making an apology for its intentions.
This deviant reading of that great period of the historical evolution of the Cold Conceptual is that which moves the managerial cynicism of the so-called Neoconceptual. It's different with the artists of the Dissipation category: in a certain way they examine the work done in other disciplines in the early 80's and that now, in its development, takes on the form of a real paradigmatic revolution in the creation, conservation and circulation ofknowledge. In those years (and therefore in ours) a network of radically new ideas about the construction of the relationships that man forms with his structures for the invention of the real, is elaborated. That passed through the reformulation of the idea of entropy which early cybernetics considered only in terms of noise, destruction or thermic death. The thermodynamics of systems in a state of non-equilibrium has sustained that the so-called thermic death came at the beginning of the universe following the 'big bang', and that in that period there was no energy in the universe.
This revolutionary intuition creates a debt to the newly born sciences of complexity and stampsan unknown possibility of thought: the noise inside a system becomes, in fact, disturbing and not solely and merelydestructive. It is annihilating and innovating at the same time: the closing of a world (to paraphrase one of the great thinkers of complexity) becomes, substantially, the opening to an infinity of other worlds. Just the formulation of this theory at the beginning of the last ten years - but which is now giving its mature fruit - adds a historical value to the work of these artists who confront in their different ways the reading of the analytics of these problematics and regain from them, through their new operative and theoretical journey, the widest opening of thought. The 'becoming a work' becomes a pretext for discussing, acting and dissipating the forming of the work itself.
The category of linguistic machines sets going the possibility of recuperating the act of intelligence, the thought-act, wherethe same operative intentionality becomes a model for the discussion of the generation of the work.
These artists confute the deviated reading of the Neoconceptual that made the plurality of reality converge in one only i.e. the artistic one (and so re-elaborating the Prometheus-delirium of Aestheticism), with " interactivity answers to dissipation". Interactivity, in the elaboration of a work, produces the dissipating effect right there inside the process that would like to guarantee it the reality of being a work. If the value of an innovation is also in generating new ways of reading the past, the work of these Italian artists is above all to disentangle the dullness (or the foolishness ofrecent years that aims at eliminating all that which doesn't comply with the daily attempts at cultural blockage) and the happy-go-lucky quality with which Postmodernism has tried to oppose and annul the cultural results of the Second Avant-garde.
But to return to Dissipation, that category has to be considered as a theory for approximation, in that it is radically far from the rectilinear quality of Western thought, and it is exactly this that creates the possibility for the rediscussion of the constitution of the work.
Dissipation is, paradoxically, the concentration of the making in compliance with the dissipation of its own presentation:
Dissipation of becoming a meaning/product (Ivano Sossella)
Dissipation of the system of functioning (Marco Formento)
Dissipation of the identity of the text (Cesare Viel)
Dissipation of the identity of place (Luca Vitone)
Dissipation of the status of artist (Tommaso Tozzi).
The status of work subtracts from and dissipates the moment of work and the work appears increasingly open to interactions (to reality). It's not so much life that enters and collapses in art, as in the 60's, but rather that both, art and life, interact indifferently.
Now, while we leave behind us the aesthetic of representation, the effect that makes things unreal, the dissolving of reality and the conception of the present as an instant that immediately dissolves, a new operative momentcomes to the fore in which knowledge, its conservation and its transmission are closely joined.
And so the need to identify and theoretically investigate new semantic-conceptual fields according to lines that go beyond the single disciplinary articulations (interdisciplinarity), but also the separation between research and information, between thought and the social body.
The transliteration of the sense, the role, the place of the languages of art on the part of many artists today doesn't signify having reached the limits of the insurmountability of "meaning itself".
At the moment the art system still plays the linguistic game of the "moving or transfer of meaning". In fact the sliding between the signified and the signifier and their cohesion allows the possibility to emerge that the value of signification inside the work of art is continually regenerated.
In the spoken or written language a word is, in fact, usedmany times with a meaning thatdiffers from the usual usage. The "normal" meaning is the so-called literal meaning and the "other" meaning is called "figurative". One usually says, then, that there is a metaphorical or figurative use of the word each time the same word has a meaning which is not that which the word has with direct reference to the linguistic code. The metaphor usually proceeds from and refers to an image that is inherent in the first meaning. The problematics of metaphors is particularly intertwined with the referent. A particular metaphor is a word that is usedin place of another in order to render a referent which has "a different meaning". The metaphor thus substitutes the word that is more exact but less expressive. According to the branch of linguistics treating origins, the metaphor takes its cue "from a deep structure in which the presuppositions about the literal and habitual reference of a lexical voice are violated and cancelled."
When the methodological security connected with a pre-existent knowledge are brought into question by the affirmations of new certainties and new acquisitions of cognition, and the ideas that are born refute the previous concepts and categories, the metaphor becomes the tool that is the mostuseful for visualizing the new visions of the word by means of new forms of expression. In fact in metaphorical assertions you find concepts and values intimately combined in that the new categorical concepts proposed by the metaphorical assertion cannot express themselves except through a transgression of the rules of usage as normally applied and to which they refer. Metaphor and transgression are intimately linked such that we can affirm that"there is no metaphorical thought without the presence and existence of an alternative thought." The transgression is a vehicle for new theories which produce change and these finish up substituting new knowledge for the previous. A theory isn't just an idea or a group of connected ideas but a coherent system of ideas whose aim is to furnish a complete and satisfyingexplanation, from the cognitive and ethical point of view, of the world in which we live.
A theory, in diffusing a sufficient number of pre-existent and unexplainable facts, makes these facts inadequate and by making itself aesthetically attractive overcomes and modifies the metaphysical dimension that each of us entertains as regards knowledge. So that a theory can be better acquired and accepted, its basic unity is underlined, each part presenting itself in simple terms at a primary level of observation (even if they can't be so at another level). In this way, through simplicity a better regularity is reached. And in this way, not a system of static figures but a 'pattern' ofdynamically conceived forces is set up, a new structural theme where each element has its own formalization. The growth in regularity, understood as a governing innovation produced by the arrival of new knowledge, finishes up being a self-regulated processinside the new metaphoric order. Even if the basic unity could appear simple through a momentary crystalizzation of its elements, the transmission of the dynamic contents moves from a simpler complexity to a greater complexity.
The process of evolution of the passage from the simple to the complex which we meet in the system of knowledge is present with equal value and urgency in systems which are correlated with the development of man, such as the system of technology, the social system, the biological system and the system of nature, the socio-economic system etc. Incorrelating themselves interactively, these areas tend to take on greater and greater dimensions, develop increasingly complex relationships and create increasingly wide-ranging and flexible kinds of communication between themselves. As a result of the general irreversability of technological and scientific innovation, while the journey covered by the most advanced societies moves from a kind of system that is more linear and elementary towards a type that is in terms of interaction and performanceall the more complex, the evolutionof the awareness tends towards the surpassing of the language itself as a possibility for the analysis ofthat language through practical action.
The awareness, in the passage of the years, metaphorizes itself through the successive accumulations of knowledge which, however, don't follow a rigid chronological order but rather a categorical testing that is known for its 'irreversable advance".
This testing, in its push forward, necessarily has marked, retroactivefeed-back cycles, moments of suspension in evolution suitable, however, for creating the conditions for a successive innovative jump. In art and its story a reflex of this irreversability thus exists whichshows itself in the continuous movement "in progress" of the cognitivedata that in the greatest part is set up in the moments that are most fruitful for the production of new linguistic constitutions and innovative visions of the world.
In this way the work of art, while testifying to the commitment present in the human social condition,is also always able to make new openings that indicate the continuous vitality of art to direct itself towards the possibilities of new ends.
In the reality we live in today we experience the ontological problem to the extremes of its deflagration. "Our extreme that is lived daily is no longer ingenuously original and autonomous but permeated by symbols, images and metaphors transmitted to us by science and art: languages that constantly drive and elaborate our experience of the limits, transforming it more and more into experience-limit. By now we are already surpassing the notion of time as 'distension' and 'continuum' and time itself as 'caesura', 'rhythm' or 'discontinuity' in order to articulate it in a new conception that, according to Benveniste, sees time as an "opportune mixing of different elements"andas "moderation or a propitious mixture that is able torestore to us the sense of our being an 'evolution cut-out'". It's a time, then, which as a conjunction of elements "becomes a relation and structure for welcoming the various forms of life in a particular space, which in its turn is made a remnant" and finishes up being "nature out of its element that delimits time itself". With this statement of time as "moderation, or self-control" we have gone beyond the theory of the arrow of time to a time that "like the tides, waits for no man", " to a time that isn't essentially different from space". Penrose, in affirming that the time we perceive doesn't run on ahead in a linear fashion in which we perceive its flow, reintroduces the consciousness of the observer as the seat of mathematical ideas which allow us to discover the paradoxical configurations of the universe. The functioning of the external world can thus be understood, in the final analysis, only in terms of a precise mathematics.
This mathematics, in fact, functions as a description of the physical world andmust undoubtedly exist as "another world of identity, or a world of mathematical ideas". The mathematical nature of reality is nothing else than a manifestation of prototypes of the absolute truththat resides there. Through this approach the necessity for a new Platonic conception of the world is reborn in that the mathematicians don't invent mathematics to confirm their discoveries but rather mathematics becomes discoveredand drawn attention to in an existing parallel world. Differential equations are the means most consonant in the language of mathematics todescribe the nature of its working in the most efficient way. For this reason, that descriptive capacity is exercised through three distinctive elements: the "algorithmic structure", i.e. the determination of a future state starting from the present state, the "initial conditions", and the various "constants" that are unaltered by the application of the algorithm. The different principles of symmetry permit us to anticipate in a general way the algorithms that are admissable as laws of nature. These algorithms, tobe coherent with the observations of the world already noted and to be universally applicable must satisfy certain conditions. The initial conditions and the constants of nature are significant properties of the world and thus not determined by its laws. In fact as there doesn't exist any way of determining the initial conditions, they are only "presented". Their independence of the laws of nature is a measure of their usefulness. "The constants of nature" are understood as constants of "proportionality". One of the great objectives of Fundamental Physics is to discover the reason why the constants, that appear in equations describing the laws of nature, have a precise numerical value. In the future we will perhaps be able, by means of the discovery of a "principle of internal coherence", to understand what the logic is that regulates and expresses those constants.
This problem is increasingly occupying the attention of physicists and mathematicians, especially those who are trying to find the "secret of the universe", i.e. the deep principle from which every other understanding of the physical world derives.
What makes our understanding incomplete even though we have sufficient information about the laws of nature, initial conditions, forces, particles and the constants of nature isthe way in which the symmetry of the laws of nature has been hidden by the various casual breaks in that symmetry during the history of the universe. If the universe, then, contains in its own structure elements that are intrinsically casual, inherited from its quantal origins or by the casual breakup of the symmetry during the first phases of its evolution - elements which therefore determine a universe that significantly differs from place to place - then our localized observations of a universe that is perhaps infinite cannot give us anything else than an incomplete knowledge of its structure.
That whichis truly important about what we have described and listed here is the fact that the physicists and the mathematicians have placed at the centre of their research the following problem: the existence of, and the possibility of investigating, a "total theory" whose application would allow the message of nature in each particular circumstance to be deciphered.
The difficult search for such a definitive theory satisfies the modern aspiration for completeness. In fact the idea of a unitary universe is deeply rooted: a description of the world which doesn't have a unitary structure but seems fragmented into distinct parts leaves us unsatisfied and stimulates us tolook for new principles able to connect the different parts of a common origin. This need for unitariness which is expressed through the search for that "total theory", is nothing else than the aspiration of science to find a single, abbreviated representation of the logic behind the properties of the universe, a unifying, comprehensive principle for all the workings of the world.
Art and its system, after the great years when Newtonian reality and Euclidian geometry were superceded in order to embrace the new reality tied to non-Euclidian geometry, the new relativistic concept of space and time and the successive one of the breakup of the deterministic cause-effect introduced byQuantum theory and the Indeterminacy Principle, today confronts the great and complex problemsconnected with Dissipative Systems, the break in the symmetry of time and the associated problems of self-reference and the auto-creation ofsense. These are problems that I have already discussed amply in "The Quantum Machine and the Second Avant-garde" (1988) and "The Evolutionary Arrow of Irreversability" (1992). I refer the reader to these works for a detailed examination of a possible interaction between the developments in Physics and the world of Art in the last decades.
At the moment a new epistemological development is coming about in the area ofsense-perception which mainly interests itself in the new possibilities created by the virtual.
Virtual reality is cutting our links with the world of things and the body, having strong repercussions on the possibilities of our experience with the physical universe. In fact virtual reality ends up being a plausible representation of physical reality inside computers through replication, simulation and mathematical formulation, elements which now give the observer the possibility of participating directly inside the fact itself. The user can now exercise the possibility of intervening directly inside reality in that "the possibility of walking inside has been opened to him/her". But, even thoughnew possibilities for the awareness and for experimentation are opened up, this new virtual reality is still confined by its self-reference.
These spaces end up being illusory spaces "that self-organise inside themselves" without ever escaping the rigid ties fixed by the electronic programmer. They end up being powerful devices for modelling that are, however, unable to autonomously interact with physical reality, giving them the auxiliary role of a 'robot' only. Robot systems work in such a way that the actions performed inside the virtual space are repeatable in real time in physical space. And so the creative use of these virtual possibilities, because they actualize the conscious subject as the subject-agent and thus favour the quality of design of a cognitive interface of man with his own world.
The exhibitions in Milan (October 1992) at the Oggetto Studio and then in Genoa at the V-Idea Studio (the first entitled "From the Conceptual to Anonymity and the Outside-Artist", the second "Outside-Artist") were born in this categorical climate and find their precise justification and workability in the present complex of knowledge.
The need to visualize the maximum limits of irreversabilityas the end-product of the evolution of art and the need to register a "virtual" synthesis of artistic working and theory after the great experiences of Anomia by the Time-Square of Max Neuhaus and certain European experiments such as Art (Dissipation), Guillaume Bijl and Filippo Falaguasta, have undoubtedly created the conditions for a new verification of the artistic datum of art.
Theworks of Einstein, Heisenberg, Prigogine and Hawking are authentic depositories of knowledge that with its force breaks the great creative syntheses of the century and thus are testimony in an irrevocable way to the desire to visualize the knowledge as the dynamo of everything: an extreme synthesis that puts itself forward in all its expressive nakedness as the last point in the journey of all art and its history. Art as "knowledge" was an underground, germinative constant during the centuries, clothed in differing languages and expressive modes. Making this element emerge in its singularity, not as an aesthetic element for use but as presentation of a categorical idea, means destituting art of its legitimacy as a textual and objective product. In fact in the era of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, the dissipation of roles and the rise in the emphasis of interaction, the anthropological status of man is undergoing a deep restructuring.
Small portable computers with their powerful memories increasingly reduce Man's memory function and substitute it in his cognitive operations. New problems continually arise in the iconic field owing to the production of these new digital devices that profoundly disturb the possibility of utilizing the idea of plane semiotics (i.e. that which studies the iconic representation on a plain, two-dimensional support), in that we are witnessing an irruption of virtual, interactive space which volatilizes two-dimensionality. This breaks up and cancels that special membrane which separates the "space in front of" things from that "behind" (Gremeis' Heteropicity) in order to substitute it with a total iconization of space. The heritage of iconic analysis that semiotics has accumulatedduring the century is put in a critical positionin that we no longer have at our disposition new conceptual instruments that are able to interpret the new world of communication.
Without doubt the "Outside-Artist" in its expository essentiality and formal reduction wants to point to the difficulties which the semio-linguistic matrix of semiotics still tied to structuralist linguistics finds itself in.
This in fact is increasingly trapped in formalistic exercises without any exit and in firework displays of jargon.The "Outside-Artist" wants to favour a semiotics that gives preference to the dimension of pragmatic action, the transliteration of its contents, the roles of he/she who operates this choice, and the possibility of art existing without the participation of its traditional producer, the artist. Art no longer remains anchored to the identity of its promoter but becomes itself the possibility of existence outside the market and its mechanisms. The fact that these books are anonymous, unsigned and unclaimed by he/she who wanted to show them, liberates the object-book from its having to be a work. They are only presented bytheir 'trustee' who puts them on show and in doing so only lays them out on display but doesn'taid them to function as works of art. They have to remain a simple testimony to information, and their aim is to set up a simple communicative interaction between the receiver and the promoter who shows them. In this way an overturningof what the receiver expects (buying the book) and what the promoter wants to obtain (the simple 'pointing out') is obtained. An expectation is set up and a feeling of 'being lost'caused by the removal of certain functions both from the place and its content,in that the gallery stops being the place that gives the status of work of art to what is contained there, and the content-book, without the author's name and not on sale, is displaced as a work of art.
Art thus stops being "product" to become "practice that is effectively knowable in the theoretical act". The theoretical text that supports and puts into effect the presentation collected in the volume "The Evolutionary Arrow of Irreversability" put on display by the same executor becomes the place that is central to the whole exhibition. The absence of the artist is in fact virtually substituted by the critical action and its creative product. We find ourselves confronted with an intersection between two sub-systems that want to belong simultaneously to a single "together-environment" i.e. to the knowledge of Physics that of itself permeates the awareness of its historical procedure and that of Art as a theoretical datum of this knowledge.
The divisions of the exhibition show 4 absences:
1) The absence of the artist.
2) The absence of the signature, the name as identity and recognition of the product-art.
3) The absence of the mechanisms of commercialization and the market.
4) The absence of the status of work of art as textual and objective work.
The exhibition retains elements still belonging to the art system that are shown as permanent features:
1) The presentation of the artistic datum as theoretical datum.
2) The presence of the gallery which makes the act of exhibiting possible.
3) The operative existence of the executor and his/her theoretical creativity (and not of his/her artistic production) as the final act of irreversability.
The "Outside-Artist" takes on the form of a willed and programmed event that is able to produce effects and generate information. This event-sign visualizes itself through such a configuration in that it places itself in relation to a time, a context with which it wants to interact. It puts itself into a strongly dialectical relationship with a second polarity, i.e. in opposition to the rule that wants every work packaged for a precise end, its own commercial collaboration as an art object to be bought and sold.
The Outside-Artist, as solely "knowledge' and "as the end structure of theirreversability of art and history", wants to put itself forward as not only the ultimate limit of linear and dialectically totalizing reality but above all as the separation between that which is "art" and that which is "image". By means of this borderline that by now assumes the form of that between a world of a prevalently human character and a new reality characterized by the strong presence of "artificial substantiality", a new era seems to be opening, that of the "video-sphere".
In fact as distances are eliminated, the understanding of territory and the sense of living the "real" and its irreducible exteriority are lost. The speed of visual circulation increasingly liquefies the consistency of things and takes away their particularity. The de-realization of external reality, the logical disjointing of facts and the dispersion of the sense of time-depthtakes away the thickness of history and what it represents, as the work of art does, to substitute it with a world of images, a "videocratic" universe full of a continuous visuality where packaging, windows, animated pictures, photocopies, printed publications, sketches, graphics, electronic displays, crafts,furnishings, the kitchen, hairdressing and all that is appearance, enters into the world of the visual image.
In fact in this universe one can challenge the absence and frustration of ideas of truth and the absence of universal ideas but not the crowding together of visual representations which persist and are diffused everywhere.
The ubiquity of information, the dematerialization of the supports, the recalling on the electronic screen the icons of things are realities that are accessible without the minimum effort. And so we shouldn't be amazed if in the near future this world without frontiers becomes a world without art.
The "Outside-Artist" is pointing to this new "optical inattention" in our gaze that is fluidified by the increasingly artificial reality of the means of transmission. It could be that this new state of "deplacement" and "uprooting of art" corresponds to the birth of another nature, still obscured by the incoercible overlapping of images in the retina and by another space (that of the means of transmission, no more of territory), measurable in units of time and not surface. The "transliteration" of the roles and tasks of many American artists who "instruct" exhibitions and presentations in cultural and "outside-artist" facts, certainly shows the need on the part of the "art-makers" to come out from their own production territory to become themselves the means of the transmission of other cultural fields. Their exceeding of limits and the trespassing of their own role in other systems doesn't take away their "bad conscience" about belonging to a field of work thatsees, in its own dissolution and disarticulation, the possibility of a survival of their own name and market. The forceful charge on the part of the "Outside-Artist" of this transmutation of work and existence visualizes the grandeur of the operative instability of the artist, right there in the present "unartistic" moment and its crisis point.
One of the ways out of this embarassment is to put an end to the poetics of art understood as an expression of "feeling an individual" in favour of operations done by groups of persons who find solidarity in their team-work. Their works would be distinguished by an intense"pluri-sensibility" as a consequence of the multiplication of languages and their possible superimposition. The object of production thus more and more tends to present itself not as a work but as a stratified complex of experience. And so the figure of the artist, or rather the operator of images, will find even more space for existence and thought, but he/she will be increasinglyaskedfor a strong commitment to being "other and different". In the future the museums and their teams of administrators and curators will have to accept the new operative dimension of the image and its formulators and support their organization through an understanding of a new categorical condition. An unknown reality has been born. Undoubtedly the "Outside-Artist", if accepted and discussed in all its transgression and disruptive force, can be an aid to the understanding and evaluation of the latest instances of irreversibility and understanding its developments and necessary projections
The works of Giuseppe Chiari and of the artistic and cultural movement named Fluxus are becoming more and more central and most significant inside the art system. Actually one must today regard the work of this florentine artist as one of the first attempts to introduce flexibility inside the Italian culture, considering that the latter still keeps inside its own context considerable marks of cause and effect determinism and unremovable witnesses of the old 'principle of sufficient reason' providing the independence of the object from the observer. As a matter of fact the observer inside this categorial system did not take part in the event itself, staying aside, a stranger before the happening of the art event.
Even if the Italian context went through the great cultural revolution linked to the einsteinian theory, first with the Cubist movement coming from France, then with the properly Italian one of Futurists, where actually one would leave the plain space of the linear perspective searching for a new outlook over space and time (in fact with the theory of Relativity these two entities cease their being absolute to become subsidiary to each other, through a reciprocal intrusion of one element into the other), such an environment is still now preserving some strong valencies of cultural fixity and stillness.
Yet there are 69 years running from the discovery of the Principle of Indeterminacy on the part of Heisenberg, father of Quantum Physics! This principle is only now producing some epistemological importance and attention, as a learning media of our nowadays culture, and through such principle we have a continuous we have a continuous dissolution of the cause and effect process, giving way to a new vision of the reality where one asserts that the fortuitous origin of a phenomenon represents the eventual casual origin of another phenomenon and not its necessity. The quantic vision of the matter, which enables it to appear under different shapes, both as energy and universal matter (since all the elementary particles of the matter may at sufficiently high energies, be transmuted into other particles) opens absolutely inedit horizons to the potential visualization of new languages and of new trespassings for art. The person who best of all went hrough this new frontier is of course the american John Cage, forerunner not only of the Happening movement, but of the Fluxus one too.
Not only did he introduce the new categories of probability inside music, art and theatre, but even the concept of complementarity, of indeterminacy ad interdisciplinarity. Art together with its works can thus move away from its specific and, having left behind the tools of its doing, it can mainly privilege its statute of information medium.
In Italy the works of Giuseppe Chiari, who draws inspiration from John Cage music though exploring higher and more difficult territories of language, represents in its complexity and expressive and interdisciplinary moment of such a linguistica articulation as to create a true evolutive stage, which I nmed some time ago in few essays of mine art of the "off picture".
Through this category art ceases to be an aesthetic phenomenon and becomes a quantitative one. The off-picture art does not anymore rely on the experience of an opposition (for instance, painting which presented itself as the contrary to photography), instead it carries out the dissolution of any original opposition between art and its "otherness", between the idea of truth and of history. Art left without an opposite and no longer presenting itelf as truth, goes beyond the dialectic concept of getting through. It ends by placing itself in the space of the event, a nihilistic space where the dialectic means, dealing with non-contradiction and synthesis, fail. That is art which no longer bases its statute on the significance but places itself in the area of a new significant going beyond the significance itself.
Privileging the value of exchange when reported to the value of use, it doesn't any longer present itself as aesthetic object and becomes fragment, trace, photograph, natural element. Art to this artist becomes the "total place" suitable for collecting any creative possibility. It isn't by chance that this movement appears simultaneously with the advent of television, since such artistic trend gives prominence to the derealization brought about by the TV media, both by visualizing the new reality of the image causing the loss of consistence of things, and showing up the "daily life", which points out the renunciation to the selfpossession, that is to the unity of the personality in favour of plurality.
According to Chiari we can be many beings in one, we can live in one world taking part in many vital worlds.
This book is a very lucid example of this cognitive approach. Chiari says that: "playing means singing with the instruments" and that every music is a whatever sound or noise we are not able to explain. Music to him is an adventure, where one plays a music just imitating a music he has listened to, one preceding ours, which doesn't exist yet. Since music isn't a sonorous representation of rules, it becomes shape and substance of itself. Music is experience and one recognizes it immediately. We venture with Chiari at a level of a mental threshold where we consume more by imagining than through our senses. His works, concerts, performances, music pages become deeds of an artist who recovers and upsets techniques, sounds, languages showing their limits and extreme borders. This book can be regarded as a sigificant and fundamental text which makes us think over music and especially over culture, unveiling us the categories of our renewal, which too long were neglected, and encourages us to open up to a new learning that is still to be assimilated and studied. "Learning' which we ought today to master ever more if we want to build up the new multimedial reality, looking for a continuous opening to the problems of communication, of quickness in technological change, of psychic identity of man who is compelled to an evolving effort of huge proportions. Of course this identity needs new resources for its survival, such as those which conjugate simultaneously the category of unity inside variety, interactivity and autoreference. In order to defuse the rhetorics which stressed the different values of separation and identity of the different cultures, we are now obliged to make use of such values as meeting, comparison, hybridization among different individual and group experiences.
Here flexibility becomes a need to build up the complexity of our nowadays society in its social and economic valencies and the linguistic multidimensionality of artists such as Chiari helps us a lot to share the difficulties of this common future.