WAR AGAINST ART–The Symphony for the On-Line Chat
Communicating from isolated environments
Live from Venice Biennial

Concept:

Gruppo Oreste (http://www.undo.net/oreste/), a group of Italian and
International artists took part on the Venice Biennial. At the time of
bombing Belgrade the contact with a group of artists from Belgrade, who
call themselves "Prisoners of War" (POWs) (http://www.blueprintit.com/)
was established. They agree to make a chat live between the Venice
Biennial and Belgrade on the 19th and 20th of June 1999. They invited
some "nonresident" co-workers. So we also plan the event and the
logistic support for case, the direct on-line communication would not be
possible because of fall of communication system in Serbia
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/partizan/).

The idea was to discuss the communication in isolation (closed
environment) with subtopics:

1) Ways and means of communication/ How one communicates when confined
to closed and isolated environment. How does communication goes within
that environment and how it goes with outside world.

2) The content of such communication. What are the contents of such a
communication. Being in isolated environment and without usuall means
and technical suport it is not complete. There is something missing,
mistakes are made and so on.

3) Esthetics of such communication. Does it make sense. Can and should
we speak about esthetics of such communications?

participating from Venice: Cedomir Vasic, Emilio Fantin, Isabella
Puliafito

participating from Belgrade: Prisoners of war (Igor Stepancic & others)

participating between Ljubljana and Venice: Teo Spiller

+ + +

THE SYMPHONY:

Saturday, 19th of June 1999, 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. -
Part I.(Ouverture - moderatto con sentimento)

It was interesting to observe the reaction of the audience in Venice; As
much the Internet lets the users have very intimate relations between
themselves, is the relation of the (non-plugged) person in the audience
to the computer (plugged on the chat for example) very declinatory. This
chat meant a lot to us, because we understood, what is it all about, but
the audience didn't really knew, what to do with all that. Actually, the
only person from the audience, who participate in the chat this morning,
was a guy, who told us, he is a professional soldier in the Italian
army.

His arrive was the highlight of that noon. He said, they will send him
to Pec (the south border between Kosovo and Albania) in September. We
talked about the feelings and relations between the guys from Belgrade,
who were bombed by the western armies and a guy, who said, he has no
personal relation to all this, it's just simply his job. We talked about
his fear and emotions, going to foreign country to risk his life and to
serve for some things, he don't even understand well.

Saturday, 19th of June 1999, 4 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Part II. (allegro con brio)

If talking about the aesthetic (and "feeling") of our communications, as
we prepaired for this event, before the bombing ended and now, it was a
big difference. At that times, we didn't knew, if we will be able to
hear each other again, we doubt, if we will be able to make this
communication at the sheduled time, we were thinking about alternative
ways of communications in that case
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/partizan/), etc. It was a much stronger
experience than, than now as the communication was able, as guys in
Belgrade weren't in life's danger anymore, etc. It seems, that events
like that have their strong aesthetic value when they are "real" and are
happening on "the edge".

It was an interesting experience to see the difference between the
on-line forum and the chat both using for answering "serious" questions.
It is difficult to "discipline" users not to do only jokes and nonsense,
but when there are not too many users and they really want some serious
conversation, is this conversation completely different from the
conversation in the online forum. Chat forces users to write short
sentences, more remain hidden, there is more content "in between lines",
the conversation is more direct, etc. But maybe, for some purposes, it
works even better than the email-forum.

The most evident thema of that afternoon was, how much can somebody
(artist), direct involved in the war, remain "neutral", so his works
will remain art and not be "ideological" and "propagandistic". This is
one of the biggest problems with the art works about the war; almost
none of them is without ideological message (the most usuall used
ideology is the pacifism. It is an ideology, that suppose an ideal human
(subject) - just like the communistic paradigm did - and is because of
it very unreal. A sweet fairy-tale and nothing more.). The war by itself
is so strong, primary nad senceless, that doing art about it is usually
very obscure. In that context was this chat a nice example, how to go
round it.

Sunday, 20th of June 1999, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Part III. (allegretto)

Guys in Venice succeed to bridge the ruin between the on-line world and
the audience and motived some spectators to participate active in chat.
Most of them were young artists from all over the world. It was a sucess
in the sense of establishing the communication with the audience, but
sometimes didn't match the thema of the project very well.

Dimitrous from Greece, told us a story, how somebody changed the
signposts to the NATO base, so the military column arrived to the fruit
market instead to the army camp. I seems to me, that many guys were
against the NATO because of the "David and Goliat complex". If they did
some actions, it was not because of their political conviction but
because of their ethical inclination to the "David" against the
"Goliat". The western media used the same complex, they just diminish it
for one "unit": there the Yugoslav army was shown as "Goliat" and the
Kosovars as "David".

Udo from Koeln (Cologne) told us about the demostrations in his city. He
just said, something is happening and it is about the International
Monetary Fund, but didn't know more. We looked at the CNN-online and
found out, that about 50.000 people were demonstrating to have the IMF
nullify all the debts to the poorest countries of the world and not just
40% as the IMF decided. Having in mind motives of people of Cologne to
demonstrate for this purpose and the understanding of average educated
inhabitant about the world monetary mechanisms, it seems like they knew
about the topic of the demonstrations as much as Udo did…But it is the
fact, that such reports from all over the world gave this event (chat) a
special kind of…(aesthetic value?).

Sunday, 20th of June 1999, 4 p.m. - 10 p.m. -
Finale (da furioso a allargando)

The fourth part of the event was the most exciting, it sometimes moved
on the edge of some personal reactions, became from time to time very
quick and expressive. The seeming soft chat between some participants at
the beginnning predict the "storm" to come.

The on-line chat as a form of a "serious" communication showed it's
imperfection in fact, that it's very difficult to add any complex
explanation to discussion. The object, I was, as a neutral observer of
the Kosovo crisis most interested about, was the question, how did the
Serbian people accept all the wars during last 8 years. I wrote a
question as a HTML site
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/partizan/question.htm) and asked the other
participants to read it and to discuss it later.

The pacifism in western countries was a resistance against the own
state, the own goverment and was strictly idealistic. People, who talked
and worked aginst the war had no personal reasons to do it. On the other
hand, the Serbs, had enought personal reasons to be against this (last 8
years) wars: they could be sent to die on the front in Vukovar, Sarajevo
or Kosovo and their relatives and goods could be killed and destroyed by
NATO bombs. So what I tried to research was, what did they knew, think
and do about all the victims on the "other side": civilians in Vukovar,
Karlovac, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Muslem villages all over Bosnia, Kosovar
refugees, etc. I tried to confront two different paradigms, arise (by
strong media support) in this last 8 years: the western, we know very
well, and was usually on the side of civilian non-Serbian victims and
the paradigm, built by Milosevich regime, we outside Serbia didn't knew
very well.

The conversation became more gentle latter with the discussion about the
virtual and real (the interesting comment from New York, that the POWs
are closed in their virtual space and have no contact with the reality
of the war). Over questions about the racistic discrimination in U.S.,
Lbachevsky, the theory of the parallel lines and the curved Universum
the debate "fade-out" with some conclusions, that things should have
pretension to be simple and terminal, what ever it might mean.

As Isabella said: "We all think, this chat was a beautiful piece of art."