Background
At the occasion of Artmedia, a colloquium 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). The ensuing encounter revealed their mutual enthusiasm and interest in the evolution of the place of art in society given then developing communications technologies. Following an evening of intense discussion they wrote and signed a manifesto with Argentinian artist Horacio Zabala acting as witness. From the next day onwards, they established a list of artists whose practises reflected the artistic movement they had thus established. 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.
Communication Aesthetics is currently intact, though for geographical reasons it is today broken up into three distinct spheres of thought, action and intercession:
- Mario Costa holds positions and furthers action within the universities of Salerno and Naples in Italy
- while Fred Forest is active in France as professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and currently the National Art School of Cergy, Sorbonne Paris 1
- and Derrick de Kerckhove upholds the North American connection as Director of the Marshall McLuhan programme at the University of Toronto.
Read more about this topic: Communication Aesthetics
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