Art and Internet

The French translation is here / La version Française se trouve ici

From the cave’s paintings… To the JPEG files…

The art and Internet are at a time the best and the worse of things.
The best is anyone can initiate the communication with another, one of the mutual interests of this concept. Maybe the worse is when someone wants to eventually do anything with bad aims…
The art, from the caves paintings to the pure mathematics, while passing by music and the writings, is a vital need for some people. The artist or the programmer, often join themselves, in a common impetus and supreme goal, difficult to reach: opening communications with all others.
This exchange doesn't necessarily make itself by the way of speech: the view is essential for the painter or the photographer, the hearing for the musician, the touch for the sculptor, the character of printing, the mind and the verb for the writer, the space and the balance for the dancers and all others previously quoted... Except the perfumers!
Now, canvas, photography, music with or without interactive partition, a novel or news, a trip in virtual 3D can be easily found through the Web. Better and better, some associations are possible between all these shapes of art, except, I repeat it again, with regard to the odors because the common actual machines (personal computers) cannot create such of them.

Four millions years ago, from the African Rift, from the Australian Red Rock, in Lascaux and, also in the Chauvet underground, and with more precision, everywhere in the world, the man attempted to translate, to express, his fears and his expectations with strength ocher’s, oxides of iron, manganese’s, cobalt’s, kaolin’s and coals…
The pen, the brush - it was certainly a vulgar stick of wood - or even the finger or the hand have let some traces in most caverns.
All it in only one goal: to attempt to make the other understand what one feels, what one lived, what are our origins… How to fight, how to survive… Because at theses times, the freedom of expression was only reserved to the minority that succeeded in escaping the tigers, lions, rhinoceroses, bears and others various predators of the human specie, half peeled, and without defends against the toothed adversity and to the sharp claws…

Therefore, in substance, the art would be born there: in the obscurity of the caves.
When the caves discovered - disguised or rather tame - fire, they began to destroy the traces of their destiny: The carbon issued from smokes partially covers and damages the magnificent frescos and traditional paintings of our very old ancestors.
Bows and arrows were the first instruments for the reign of our kind and drawn to even the partitions, praising, before the hour, of the exploits worthy of the giants and Odysseus' Cyclops, some pagan ornaments exalt the passions and lead the prehistoric man to his apotheosis: Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, then Modern man…

At the emergence of the big civilizations of the ancient world, the art becomes representational. The thin and precise replaces the more or less. Everywhere, from China to Mexico, in Egypt, Greece, Rome, in the Pacific islands, the cultures develop with more or less of happiness and artistic liberty.
After the painting, the sculpture and music is added the writing. Some big priests, philosophers, astronomers, translate on the stone or the papyrus the biggest newborn ideas. An enormous impetus of liberty appears. The artist painter, sculptor, writer, engineer, doesn't support so more the emptiness of the constraint and long for to express themselves fully.

It is not going to last. Thanks to the different churches, more particularly Catholic, a big period of obscurantism is going to happen. The art is going to stand of it, to stand by. Very little evolution except maybe in architecture because the builders know how to create every day of new shapes and the more and more steady balances.

And the technique evolves. The true light, the one that we know all, finally appears. Since all links together and unleashes itself sudden. Suddenly the lamp bulb light, the transistor, the flea and, finally, the marvelous microprocessor allowed the trivialization of the computer and his diffusion until the very breast of the family’s cells. Some millimeters of silicon, plastic coated, replace the huge cabinets of the calculators used previously. Great gain of space and energy!
In the same way, the user-interface, become intuitive, replace the rows of seers and switches, only visible elements of a perfectly hermetic language, allowing the specialist to drive his machine with dexterity. Things are improving!
To be continued…

The first networks appeared. It was easy to divert them from their first military vocation to create a new tool to serve all the people: Internet. Its origin goes back up to the modern antique.
The creation of the telegraph, the mastery of the radiofrequencies generated the stitches of a network becoming highways of communication, more and more rapid. It is especially comfortable to connect itself onto it. The tools of which we arrange henceforth are numerous and effective.
After the handwritten or typed letter, there was the FAX… Now the Promenade is a king!
It happily replaces an obsolete complex: the paper, the pen, the envelope, the stamp and the Postman.

The Internet messaging, the "Chat", facilitates the communication, the communion: The woman artist painter, adept and disciple of the Techno, can meet the programmer, the musician, the writer, there. It seems to be able to occur sometimes, often by chance. To discern the inside before the outside do the couple form thus would not it been as reliable as another appearing more conventional?
It is as especially exciting and valorizing to self promote while using the Net. To be known, to get in value and to succeed in. Getting an exhibition is not necessarily easy thing: Either one wins the big price or one deals with big swindlers.
Eternal course of the fighter, always to show evidence of discernment…
Finally, ultimate stage: to possess own Web site. Window of yourself. Accessible to most people, including to other artists, perhaps exchangers. Convivial and easy to use. It is thanks to him that the art, under all shapes, fate of borders, this is the ultimate performance, the computer Nirvana. But the use efficient of the present means requires a non negligible material and temporal investment. It is necessary to maintain it in perpetual evolution, to adapt it, to remodel it to our own picture, always changing.

And one takes itself to dream… About the reality…

The art seems finally free and moves henceforth in the ether…
But a particular and cordial media will always stay. The book, well achieved, will always remain an object of lust and collection, for the same reason as the paintings, sculptures, jewellery, music and numerous other works of art that the man doesn't have a rest to invent and to create...

To digitalize them finally,
then to distribute them on the Internet…