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“The DIGITAL Street Corner”
MIAMI NOVEMBER 2005

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.

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