A Massively
Multi-Participant Networked Happening by Fred Forest
An interactive artwork and public performance created online by
Fred Forest using Solipsis*, projected onto a large screen in real
time and space, “The DIGITAL Street Corner” is a virtual
environment with limitless possibilities that allows Internet users
around the world to connect, hang out together, exchange information,
and communicate.
* Reality exists only because you make it happen!
AUTHOR
(concepteur, réalisateur, coordinateur, producteur)
Fred Forest, communication artist and theorist, author of the work.
forest@unice.fr
CONTRIBUTORS
Joaquin Keller Gonzalez, information science research engineer,
creator of Solipsis, graciously made available by France Télécom
Stéphano, graphic designer
Gilbert Dutertre, project manager
Michael Leruth, translations and contacts
Rose-Marie Barrientos, agent logistics and communication
Catherine Ramus, graphic assistant
INTRODUCTION
“The DIGITAL Street Corner” is not the kind of artwork
that one simply looks at on the wall of a gallery or a museum. It’s
an interactive environment that one can enter and explore from anywhere
in the world. It’s an open window to an artistic net/work
co-created in real time by people on the Internet: a virtual happening
in the midst of which the artist will take center stage to lead
the participants’ avatars in a lively online dance, a small
portion of which he will choreograph and “film” for
all to see, in real time, on a giant screen set up along the exterior
wall of the Bass Museum in Miami. The worldwide virtual happening
and its inscription in physical space together make up the work
known as “The DIGITAL Street Corner”.
PROJECT
CONCEPT
Communication artist Fred Forest—the creator and developer
of the artistic concept—and research engineer Joaquin Keller
Gonzalez—the creator of the Solipsis software program and
technical director for the project) team up to present a unique
work of art at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 1-4, 2005. This work
will be the first of its kind to be presented at a major international
event in the field of contemporary art: a participative “happening”
in which art lovers and members of the general public alike will
be given the chance to come together and explore a unique virtual
environment on a planetary scale. Different identity clusters will
form on the basis of thematic prompts issued by the artist at the
keyboard of his laptop, acting like the DJ of a networked dance,
a portion of which he will also “film” as it happens
live. Through their icons/avatars, the online participants will
be turned into cyber-flâneurs, wandering about this “corner”
of cyberspace in the virtual costumes the artist has prepared. Some
of the movements will be utterly gratuitous: an erratic “drifting”
in virtual space that can be seen as the present-day equivalent
of the kind practiced the Surrealists and Situationists in their
day. Others will be “choreographed” by the artist, who
will issue specific instructions causing the participants to change
places, exchange messages, and perform other actions that will be
visible on the large screen. In order to foster hybridized forms
of communication and play, the artist might introduce a second form
of media (radio, TV, cell phones…) on top of France Telecom’s
Solipsis platform.
Fred Forest is confident that the inherent awkwardness of the first
attempts at participation will soon give way to a collaborative
style of play guided by an intuitive form of collective intelligence.
The world’s Internet users won’t take long to make this
system their own and create a meaningful planetary event.
PROJECT
LOGISTICS AND OPERATION
• The original technical setup as well as the implementation
of each of the subsequent phases of the operation will be coordinated
by Joaquin Keller Gonzalez, creator of Solipsis. Individuals wishing
to join in this game of exchange and circulation will be able to
download the Solipsis/The DiIGITALstreet corner software free of
charge over the Internet.
• A projector will be set up facing a giant screen along the
outside wall of the Bass Museum so that spectators will be able
to follow, in real time, all of the action (image manipulations,
chat rooms, file exchanges) taking place on “The DIGITAL street
corner” throughout the four-day duration of Art Basel Miami
Beach 2005.
• From 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm on Friday, November 30, Fred Forest
will take command of the system at the keyboard of his laptop, just
like a DJ, for a special online performance. The DVD recording of
this performance will constitute the material artwork. It will be
available for purchase by an institution or a private individual.
The definitive form and price of this document will be established
at a later date.
• At a specially designated location inside the museum, or
in some other public place in Miami, London, Milan, Berlin, Paris,
or Tokyo, computers will be made available for members of the public
who wish to experience the close encounters of the fifth kind that
“The DIGITAL street corner” promises as active participants,
or who may simply want to check out the event. The images generated
by the participants will be projected non-stop on the outside wall
of the museum and in the public access venues around the world.
ESTHETIC
PHILOSOPHY OF THE PROJECT
The development of digital technologies and the Internet has profoundly
altered the relationship between art and technology, and has opened
up a vast new frontier for artistic experimentation. Given its unique
spatial and temporal properties, the Internet represents an especially
poignant case in point. On the Web, artists act as their own middlemen
and have the power to reach a much wider audience. No less real
because they inhabit cyberspace, works conceived specifically for
the Web challenge conventional uses of the medium, not to mention
art’s traditional means of creation and distribution. The
interactive systems deployed in works of Net Art are helping to
redefine the relationship between the artist, his/her work, and
the public. More importantly, they are creating a new relational
framework for the reception of artworks—something that has
been at the center of Forest’s work since 1983, when he and
Mario Costa co-founded the Esthetics of Communication movement.
It is worth noting that this particular work, in the context in
which it is to be presented at Art Basel Miami Beach, represents
a radical departure prevailing esthetic norms, validated by the
art market and cultural institutions. Its “difference”
from the other works to be presented in the same venue, which can
be explained primarily in terms of its immaterial nature, consummates
art’s break with the esthetic paradigms of the 20th century,
still applicable in the 21st. This revolution raises far-reaching
questions about the nature of art itself, not to mention its adaptation
to the information age. Positioning itself as an interface between
two types of society, Fred Forest’s networked happening, THE
DIGITAL Street Corner aims to change the way we look at art by bringing
an immaterial work into the heart of the marketplace. However, the
real uniqueness of THE DIGITAL Street Corner lies in its capacity
to make something RELATIONAL happen in a space where there used
to be only material objects on display. Destined to play a decisive
role in the history of art, it is this revolution that Forest will
celebrate in Miami.
TECHNICAL
PARAMETERS OF THE PROJECT
Based on a technical
architecture similar to that found in peer-to-peer file sharing
systems, the virtual environment of Solipsis allows for total freedom.
Solipsis is comprised solely of software programs that individual
Internet users download and install on their own computers. Since
it doesn’t rely on servers, it cannot be tracked, censured,
or stopped. This freedom from servers has one further consequence:
this software program developed by France Telecom Research and Development
has virtually infinite capacity. Since the information resources
(computer and Internet connection) of each individual participant
become part of a collective pool, the computational power of the
system automatically grows in proportion to rising demand. Moreover,
the environment’s topology is configured so that the surface
area expands with the number of participants. It’s like a
two-dimensional torus, or an air chamber that expands as each new
entity enters Solipsis. Its overall maximum capacity is 1073 entities
(a “1” followed by 73 “0’s”)—the
same as the total number of atoms in the entire universe. This unique
technical architecture automatically leads to a number of questions
of a philosophical nature. Since it is alive with the “spirits”
of the entities—the virtual objects and beings—that
make up its texture, it is the functional equivalent of an animistic
universe. In other words, Solipsis does not exist in the mind of
some omniscient god-server, but only the minds/computers of its
individual constituents. In concrete terms, this means that it is
never possible to tell who is in Solipsis at any given moment. The
only way one can get to know Solipsis is to enter its universe,
only the small portion of which—that which is in virtual proximity—is
visible from any single vantage point. In this regard, Solipsis
is not unlike the real world, in which we are able to perceive only
that which surrounds us. In the world of THE DIGITAL Street Corner,
there is no omniscient God, only the transcendent power of the collective
imagination of thousands of participants, set into motion by the
artist.