Art does not contemplate solutions or answers, because it is itself perfectly unpredictable and admirably useless.
I think about the avant-garde, not like the irruption or contrast with previous Arts, but like a complex system of relocation, mechanisms, that lead to certain combinations of abilities and impact (set of ideas and styles) to be given a name. This appears in front of us as it is when it inevitably becomes another thing.
After a natural disaster, the landscape can change. Majestic trees are uprooted and along with their great roots, they are transplanted. There are no safe places.
In front of us, everything that we will learn to see for the first time appears.
Throughout history, Art has fallen in love with the media, trying to define that relationship through an adjective that always comes after it.*
If the term “Cloudy Art” existed, we would be forced to think that a climatic phenomenon has such an important effect in the world that it is inevitable that Art is interested in it.
Artists try to form an alliance with the new medias but these inevitably escape towards the other direction: Art is always going to be wrong, and Technology is going to agree with it.
There are no sensitive technologies, because in them creation is not implied in any way.
It is the artist who must do without technology to be able to use it beyond their conception.
Such is the eagerness of Art to be fused with its loved one that it is able to surround it in all type of variables until there are no signs left of it.
But Art is a virus that operates on itself, given its impossibility to create damages to the system by which it has been fascinated.
For that reason, I think that Art can change the world, but only when it has truly agreed to take chances and be destroyed with it or simply when it decides to emancipate itself from its second name.
Once the glare provoked by the first encounter between Art and Technology is over, I perceive that even if it is unnoticeable, we are looking at the Dawn of the Post-Electronic Art.

*In Spanish, the adjective that defines each type of art follows the word “art”, that is why further in the article it is referred to as its second name (ex.:Arte Electrónico)

Manifesto 5th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
by Lic. Gina Valenti
Trieste, Italy, 2008