ART IN REAL-TIME I André P. Russu

In our techno cultural society there is a need for new domains of expression that don’t create an outlined limit for the transavantgarde of our day, offering endless possibilities to utilize modern technology and communication in a community-oriented environment. Opportunities to develop a global art market where the individual artists are happily divorced from pressures of the tribal art market. In recent years, the new means of expression are evolving rapidly and artists are supported for refusing to be trapped in the predictable scapes or thought schools of the past. The Art in Real Time Global Art Movement is a quality art publishing and an interactive art competition for visual art, video, animation, sound, music, essay, poetry and fiction, organized and curated by André Russu. It integrates the multidisciplinary visual, literary and audio creative production, and is the first interactive global art event featuring contemporary artists on virtual online exposure and publishing.
Moreover, in these early years of the digital and virtual a number of web-sessions and online debates have sent significant ideas for the discourse involving terms such as: virtual space, digital manipulation, computer graphics, 3D structures, modules, PDF’s, .JPG’s, mode, resolution, processor, worldwide, dot-com, all of which appear quite often in approaches made by critics and artists, but also by the scholars, designers, engineers and architects invited to collaborate. It is an opportunity to experiment with the virtual art works, objects, and installations designed by contemporary artists belonging to the new and old generation. The series of the online collective art events generated by a more or less experimental exhibitions which by its subject and some of the works shown, make the transition towards another type of artistic sensitivity and research. This opens the gates to a new stratified cultural metaphor and to an eclectic trans-aesthetics virtual domain and publishing.

The trans-aesthetics virtual domain is a change of cultural mentality and aesthetic paradigm that occurs gradually over time. This is an experimental art, which becomes gradually more elaborate to an almost aesthetic ethos. Molded by optimism in this search for knowledge, in some cases even positive enthusiasm bears specific features: the rejection of traditional means of expression, such as painting, and a certain uniformism could be the exploration of natural or artificial materials in process of art making. The experimentation of certain new artistic methods originate in scientific techniques or industrial technologies, the interdisciplinary attitude and the specific ideology that wish to shape the natural or social ambient by a symbolic configuration of real life materials, or even by merging with industrial design. This becomes a temptation and an attempt to create art in everyday life, in “reality” and not exclusively in art terms, these phenomena start a big demand to be community oriented.

Ctrl28 [ctrl28.com], Medialworks [medialworks.com], Artoteque [artoteque.com], Art Addiction [artaddiction.net] and WoA Publising [worldofartmagazine.com] are windows into the global art world for the 21st century art lover and critic, a place for the artist to express himself as his central platform for the viewer. A platform that is exclusively focusing on representing all techniques, schools and trends open to all professional artists and beyond. This is possible through curated exhibitions created for the purpose of reaching as many people as possible. Since the seventies and eighties art has been changing rapidly and effortlessly as many more of today’s artists live the same experiences and vaster amounts of work are closely related to the same world that we see around us as we become more globalized. The work becomes an expression of internal and external factors of our society and modern thought schools which are globally connected on a scale that is both remote in time but also close to our own. Some artists make their Online debut under the influence of the digital experimentalism through the dot.com channels, the late echoes of pop art and hyperrealism, deformed by the more recent experience of digital painting: a relatively new online trend. It cannot be denied that, in spite of the tribal cultural disintegration, the online art echoes around the globe and is able to act as fermentation that is necessary to provoke a diffused mutation of sensibilities which in the global artistic environment is caused by specific frustrations and underground tendencies. On Medialworks.com, Ctrl28.com, Artoteque.com,  ArtAddiction.net or World of Art Publishing a single insertion is equivalent to a publication and an exhibition which is transfiguring them into a dynamic collaboration, never mooring the artists achievements in one place as many art galleries do around the world.
It is not a question of condemning the current art affair in which things are run, but to bring it forward into a dynamic ground where publishing and exhibition coincide, with points of departure for the individual artist that are clear but exist in real-time and in a virtual space with unlimited points of arrival designed to best insinuate their goals. Suited equally well for both emerging and well known artists alike. The eruption of the new online trend is like an inevitable reaction against the consumerist institution.

In spite of political constraints and economic decline which became obvious in the past years, the experimental online avant-garde trend maintains a certain pace, certain effervescence: there is a gap between political decisions and their consequences in the cultural field, by virtue of a certain creative passiveness which is slower in modifying its mental and behavioral patterns. The members of the art community continue their individual studies in everything natural, in the spirit of which it transforming and emerging more organic and effectively converting their creative impulses into educational programs which will greatly stimulate the digital art field, particularly in the fields of web design, computer graphic art, and video art. In various artistic and cultural actions such as virtual or traditional, solo or collective ones, help maintain the guilds dynamic drive and become in return models and inspiration for debutant artists.

New media have augmented owing to enthusiasm and receptiveness of gentry involved in different forms of the art field, essentially through intense engagement and dedication to understanding new technology, demand, and contemporary philosophies. Only those who are totally indifferent to the new global culture phenomenon can omit or pass over the development in art with new media and the advantages it brings. Thanks to the outgoing fortitude, this complex project has a deep significance for the global culture through its dramatic change required by the computerization in art and the transfer to online exposure over the traditional art exposure. This project will continuously be considered and we will have the support and confirmation of the public who is ready to experience a new art movement. Exhibitions involving two or more academic disciplines based either on very local problems or on the artistic process itself makes online global art exposure an experimental event, bringing together under related forms the representatives of various artistic and contemporary idioms, visual, musical, and literary. Motivated by conceptualism which deals more with culture than with pure visual, the exhibition are not only the collective work elaborated by personalities from the fields of culture, it is also the collective metaphor of an active and energetic generation of artists through a virtual synchronicity with global contemporary artistic movements, original initiatives that made themselves known worldwide through this medium.

Virtually every important art magazine produces an electronic version alongside, or instead of its printed issues, and these online versions have largely replaced print in day-to-day use. The printed art magazine that once made sense but now stands as a significant barrier to art progress. ERSATZ _apr (art public relation) announced as a quarterly printed art magazine will remain online, independent of the number of readers or advertisers, because we believe there is a better way.
Everyone with an internet connection will be a click away from a comprehensive online art information and exposure in ERSATZ_ art public relation online global art magazine - a resource that will foster the art progress, lead to more emerging and established artists, and ensure no one will ever again be unable to see an important piece of art just because the artists does not subscribe to a particular art magazine (who is published in Art news, Art in America?, Art Forum?...).

Until recently, the cheapest and most efficient way to distribute art information was by printing art magazines, catalogues or leaflets and delivering them to newsstands, galleries, museums, curators, collectors and art lovers. The cost of publishing a printed art magazine mostly came from advertisements and by producing and distributing printed pages, and naturally scaled with the number of readers and subscription -based art business model that made good sense, and was reasonably efficient and fair.
With the rise of the internet, the sound premise of this business model has vanished. The cheapest and most powerful way by far to distribute published art work is the internet. In online publication of new art and artists, all the costs intrinsic to publication are spent in producing the original peer-reviewed, edited and formatted copy of each work. With printing costs eliminated, and distribution infinitesimally cheap, the costs of publication are now independent of the number of readers.

The virtual exhibition space is exposure capable of reaching more than seven hundred thousand visitors per month. Such extensive coverage is possible due to an exhibition listing and advertisement in cotemporary global art publications and online art galleries. Works displayed online reach thousands of collectors, journalists, curators, artists, art dealers, museums, and gallery visitors which until now has been an almost impossible feat to read - for this to be embodied it took a lot of investment because global exposure was hard and cumbersome to maintain.

 

I have reached an outburst of coverage and power in the art world through a dynamic network that shares the same movement. Always attentive to the sensibility of the artists, thus making indirect cultural references that are deeply rooted in the subtle motives that are translated in a single organic force, thus condensed and ready to offer the possibility of limitless perpetual coverage, seen by an extensive client base of artists, galleries, museums, curators, journalists, art schools, collectors and the art lovers around the world. This cultural exchange is directly distributed to over fifty thousand international collectors, consultants, advisers, critics, writers, curators, dealers, and other visual art professionals. This achievement is best demonstrated by a database demographic which shows us that it is truly an international affair in which 40% is in North America, 45% in Europe, 25% in other locations (American, Australia, Japan) etc...

However, statistically speaking, the number of artists willing to participate in virtual events involving the experimental trend drastically increase in comparison with the previous decade. Moreover, the solo exhibitions of the most active artists who asserted themselves earlier within this aesthetic front gradually show a significant change of attitude. A kind of interiorization of the purely experimental approach which occurs in the interest of research objects or the exterior artistic process to the researching subjects and inner world. The artistic act no longer consists of a purely aesthetical and symbolical reality, but tries to visually configure certain models of cultural archetypes or spiritual instances of the self. Thus, with certain artists there is a sort of slow alteration of the initially experimental impulse, a kind of spiritualization of the creative experience, which seems to clear itself of the former virtual avantgarde and cosmopolitan motivations to rediscover and project itself back into the field of the local spiritual traditions. The exhibitions made in the past years by Damien Hirsch, a British artist known for experimental works involving animal parts and Gilbert & George proved influential in the pioneering of this field. This shows the focused movement from a more or less prospective vision towards a rather retrospective or introspective one.

Synchronously with the well known names there are a lot of new talents that will flourish in the future and they will eventually open new perspectives in art. This portal aims to show the art world its multifaceted resources and status: these are new lines of thought that protect the development in our cultural structure. The traditional art history and art theory valuations became gradually set aside. The new generation use up most of their time on the internet therefore the depth of thought is that online global art gallery will provide our target age group through the freshness and vitality a thorough insight into contemporary global art. This is an opportunity for the artists to receive through comparison the confirmation of their artistic capacity to express ideas in the stimulating field of media related arts. Simultaneously their works represent an important component to the Art in Real Time Global Art Movement art projects.

The new sensibility in art brought with the new generation of artists who were emerged in this field during the nineties share less and less the experimental attitude of artists ten to fifteen years older. Although they begin their career in a slightly timorous way and respect the industrious and energetic older generation, which is natural that they imitate in the beginning, the younger visual artists seem to feel less motivated by the prospective type of visual research, which takes over ever larger slices of reality. They enter the new centurie's cultural stage at a time of a drastic artistical shutdown. In a stagnant social situation the young generations of artists inevitably turns towards the individual world, towards other values and functions of the creative acts. A big part of this generation doesn’t attempt pure experimentalism, but experiments with a new realism, a new sensibility expressed by choosing a rough figurative style cultivating primitively existential or radically eclectic themes populated by personal philosophies. Quite often reduced to the mundane or purely biological life, combining an iconography with mass-media or art history clichés. A new figurative style is created, attracted by the expressionist attitude and by violent instinctive colors done by sudden distorted gestures, with an oversized and spectacular style but also by irony and ridicule. Undoubtedly, painting is the favorite medium of this new wave of artists, who without having a unitary aesthetic program shared ideas, and sometimes refused the same ideas, outlining quickly and passionate trends in the art of the period.

The global art climate in the early 21 century’s became perceptible at the level of the whole cultural artistic mentality. However, due to its multiple implications, the term avantgarde and then the international transavangard (*Achile Bonito Oliva), is sometimes replaced with related terms like innovation and experiment. In other words, the avantgarde inevitably becomes a type of experimentalism, thus, one might say, in Gugliemi’s words that “experimentalism is the style of present day culture”. After the effervescence of post modernism and the post conceptualism, installations and performances questioned and rejected a certain enhancing of the exposure notion and was gradually advancing, bringing a multiform of Multimedia types, Digital, and Virtual. The new online attitude can be understood as a definite refusal of the common place art, opposed both to the current cultural and social affairs. The internet exposure stands out as the most productive innovation worldwide, from London, New York, Tokyo, Paris or Sydney as it’s an international affair. There are today many collective online exhibitions which have displayed or declared aesthetic programs of the new online generation.

It is quite relevant that online exposure and the digitalization became the favorite trend foremost of the young artists, and also the whole artistic generation worldwide. This is a sign that the misrepresented visual discourse of “official” art is not longer important and representative of the global movement in art. The potentialities of the virtual creative act in its relationship with digital technology, nature or society, cultivate more intensely the metaphorical values and symbolism, either personal or widely spiritual of the artistic act and its traces in space and in a global consciences. The harsher material conditions become and the constraints imposed on society make the artists prefer computer and techniques such photoshop and photography processed art with various ways of manipulation.

Ctrl28.com, Medialworks.com, Artoteque.com and ArtAddiction.net online exposure gives the freedom to choose a desired inclusion ranging from visual arts, music, and writing supporting all techniques and schools of thought, a display of several chosen works that go through a rigorous selection, whereas submitters need to pass two individual selections conducted by a qualified reviewer of works. This new system offers dual qualities, a substance both visual and intellectual for a wider range of people.
Curating shows and giving out information, exposure that transcends a relationship rich in potential for other galleries and museums who wish to advertise, likewise for sponsors. You could say that there only exist three types of people, people who make things happen, people who see what is happening, and people who are wondering what is happening. Is there a right place for art? Our target audience ranges from galleries, museums, collectors, art centers, art fairs, cultural institutions, subscribers, and our worldwide global online audience. We show artwork from professional artists only, as opposed to other websites who list unselected works from a majority of non professional artists, and that is the reason why we it is possible to integrate the passion to curate such an extensive movement.

In addiction to publishing artists in their rightful place towards the top, the online art gallery, which includes international artists, provides a unique opportunity to build a thriving business via the internet and unique art publishing projects. The art website provides a network between artist and viewer, additionally our websites provides facilities such as personal communication through forum based systems for every individual artist which many of today’s peremptory galleries dismiss and ignore that such a development is positive for art. This mode of curating gives form to an enormous opportunity that chains contacts and relationships to the extent of transfiguring them into another more powerful position, where more art lovers are put into contact with emerging artists, it is offered a glimpse into the person behind the art, an open invitation to peruse their portfolios and welcome an artistic dialog. The Art in Real Time project it is one of the largest Global Art Movement projects on the internet within art today, representing many talented and creative artists that continues to make major contributions to the vocabulary of the new computer connected, fast-paced action of the art scene.

Unpretentious multimedia actions and events with power of communication and wide spread circulation makes it possible to sublimate frontiers and participate in these global events, without their authors in contemporary global art events, medial art annuals and biennials such as Ctrl28.com, Medialworks.com, Artoteque.com and ArtAddiction.net.
 

André P. Russu
Artists and Curator,
ctrl28.com / medialworks.com
London 09/01/2006 ©