Virtual reality
2005
Is multi-media art virtual? By multi-media, I understand the use of data-processing, numerical and traditional technologies to create hybrid works, by their contents, and multiples, by their supports.
New technologies are often limited to their informative and promotional aspects, sometimes ludic. While educational, cultural, social or artistic projects multiply, the numerical remainder prerogative of the play and the communication. Thus, numerical arts meet if not of reserves, at least prejudices. The ignorance of these practices is maintained by a kind of principle of precaution. The systematic comparisons with traditional artistic medias are still surrounded of many phantasms. One opposes virtual and real, futile and deep... but it is in fact question of form, seldom of contents.
The most widespread prejudice relates to the virtual character of these works in opposition to the materiality of the pictorial works for example. Would an electron projected on a screen be less real than a photon emitted by a pigment? In fact, one confuses real and representation of reality. While speaking about virtual, one insinuates that the numerical one would be a representation of our world, or an expression, falser than painting; how the numerical one would have invented the illusion in the image!
In addition, one assimilates virtuality and ubiquity. Our directions led us to believe that what belongs to reality is single or countable. Thus, the unicity of a work of art would be a guarantee of its value. Fetishism related to the modern art, and sometimes contemporary, is a historical residue maintained by the market. One assimilates value and commercial value.
A multi-media work can be incarnated in various supports: Internet, Cd-Romanian, projection on screen, impression... The cinema and the literature share this reproducible character ad infinitum. And however, one will not say these forms of art are virtual. Undoubtedly because their unfolding is determined by their author. Thus, which is discontinuous and relating to the spect-actors could not express a reality. However, without speaking about Quantum Physics, isn't our life, at every moment, a field of the possible ones? Continuity and determinism are in fact properties of the past but not the present.
New the media hustle the production and the diffusion of art. Internet is still an anarchistic network and the numerical tools bring a freedom which is not always controlled. However, the codes and the executives of these new practices are spirit to build itself in continuity and opposition to the history art.
