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© 2004 - C3 Center for Culture and Communication Foundation |
If we consider that the much of the 20th century was a warm-up or technolgical training ground for the utopian wonders of the 21st century - seamless harmony and unambiguous equivalence between the human and the machine - then the dawn of this new century has introduced itself as being exactly the opposite. The hopes placed into creating the mechanisms of desire which the marriage of technology and ‘being’ implied - open global systems of borderless economies, infinite mobility, simultaneous communication and the immeasurable public domain of the internet - have, through their own rhetoric of limitless success, proved to be fallible structures stretched beyond the tenure of their intended functions.
Yet we yearn to create these Open Systems as a means to ensure our intrinsic freedoms - whether in art, politics, technology or the environment. But what exactly are then open systems, and how do we create the context within which the desire to achieve them may be realised? What are its boundaries and how do we define the moment between or beyond the threshold of that which is (perceived to be) open? The Internet has, within the space of a decade come to define the arena of open and global social, cultural, economic and artistic expression. Its basic structural and conceptual tenet, that of the freedom to move and communicate in an unbounded matrix of open paths - to evolve into a self generating system fed by the necessity and breadth of communication lends us the model (as per Maturana and Varela) of an ‘autopoietic’ open system. Have such systems, in the era of mediated terror, begun to erode themselves into mere control mechanisms confined by the closed para-governmental structures (an Open System, bound by a Closed Organisation) from which they originally emerged?
Through its exhibition, forum and presentations DEAF04 - The Art of Open Systems explores the territorial tangibility of such desires and taps into the artistic potential of seemingly open systems.