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“That is why music and art are decisive.” Updates on Gabriel and colleagues’ multiethnic and multimedia research are naturally available on the Web. Music, conceived as a virtual extension of the record market, increasingly enters the network, as composer Sergio Benoni, responsible for Video On Line’s Musica & Multimedia section, shows in his investigations of Internet “ghost labels”.
Network art—the Internet as an original medium for artists and distributors—encouraged by accelerating globalisation, dematerialisation and cultural nomadism, also concerns Philippe Quéau, Imagina’s scientific director and a Virtual contributor. Almost contradicting himself, he now advocates greater humility for the always utopian future of the total artwork: “The truth is that the virtual work that interests us must not merely deserve our attention; it must inflame our spirit and touch our hearts.”
An extreme possible outcome of this philosophy is the altered consciousness collectively released in so-called techno-trance at rave parties: vast spaces where tens of thousands of young people dance body to body without interruption, even for two days, sustained by techno music and sometimes psychoactive substances.
A tunnel through the earth
Among the works, Nicola Sani’s intermedial creations merit attention. The electronic composer attempts to renew exhausted forms of music theatre through integrated sound scores and visual writing. So does the musical morphing of the Ambiente interattivo modulabile in tempo reale, or AIMTR, designed by architect Pierluigi Copat and composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi: a new form of performance in which spectators, through their physical presence and movements, influence the dynamics of sound, light and image in a hypertechnological space that proves sensitive to the human factor.
Let us return for a final look at virtual experiences supported by Paris’s IRCAM, a research centre listed among the Fiat [the following name or phrase is cut off] partners in the sound-design operation described at the beginning. In Mestre, visitors were shown Le Tunnel sous l’Atlantique, Maurice Benayoun’s televirtual work created in September for ISEA 95, with sound by IRCAM.
At Montreal’s contemporary art museum, hosting the symposium, and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, a gallery opened simultaneously in the ground, revealing a distant image into which visitors could metaphorically “dig” with a joystick, carving a virtual passage to reach their interlocutor across the ocean. Orientation came through spatialisation and processing of the other person’s voice, transmitted together with movement data. As in “real” reality, the ear—now distracted by too much useless background noise—claims its share of virtual pleasure and glory.
Author note: Paolo Grespi, thirty-eight, from Milan, began as a theatre critic. After several years in periodical publishing, he returned to freelance work, dividing his time between other people’s books and multimedia.
Caption fragment: Two drawings by Maurice Benayoun for the staging of his televirtual work Le Tunnel sous l’Atlantique.
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