[1] It is a theory of aesthetics calling for artistic practice engaging with and working through the developments, evolutions and paradigms of late twentieth century communications technologies.
At the occasion of Artmedia, on Video Art organized by Mario Costa, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Fred Forest had been invited to enact a performance and installation involving the Italian National Television Broadcaster (RAI).
As a result, Roy Ascott, Antoni Muntadas, Stéphan Barron, Marc Denjean, Natan Karczmar, Jean-Claude Anglade, Mit Mitropoulos, Christian Sevette, Robert X Adrian, Jean-Marc Philippe, Wolfgang Ziemer Chrobatzek, Tom Klinkowstein, Eric Gidney, Ugo la Petria, Horacio Zabala, Daniel Dewaele and Piotr Kowalski expressed their alignment with the informal international group.
Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, in direct communication with Fred Forest and Mario Costa, then set up a Canadian group titled “Strategic Arts” responding to the same concepts and objectives and in which Norman White was involved.
“The hooking-up of computers to each other, and also to other machines, is a fore-runner of the opening out of the telecommunications network and the abolition of certain constraints of distance.”[3] And, once again, it is for the artist to understand and harness these modifications and constraints so as to engage with these evolutions in the name of communication: “We can but remark that all these transformations brought about by media systems are, without our knowing it, reorganising our whole system of aesthetic representation.”[3] Lastly, Communication Aesthetics engages with another more problematic implication of technological innovations, the increasing intangibility of perception and sensuality resulting from the rise of the virtual.