Stéphan Barron at the Old Treasury Building
Catalog of the International Adelaid Festival
 

In 1990, I was driving north fom Los Angeles to San Francisco on US Highway 5. The billboards flickered mindlessly past promoting the usual commodities: Camel cigarettes, United Airlines to Hawaii and the telco wars between MCI, Sprint and AT & T. Then a huge billboard advertising an obscure integrated circuit caught my eye ! We were, of course, in San José, the capital of Silicon Valley and these billboards were meant to catch the attention of the commuting engineers who design and build tomorrows personal computers. Last wednesday evening ,one of my graduate students, attending our weekly seminar on computers and the arts, brought along a receipt from her local supermarket. On the reverse side, along with the usual two-for-one video offers and dry cleaning ads was a promotion by a local internet service provider. Unlike the niche focussed billboards of Silicon Valley this advertisement was pitched squarely at Mr. and Ms. Average Consumer (and their siblings) who shop at any suburban mall in middle class Australia.
In just two short years the internet has blossomed into public attention. An anarchistic information bush track, created by hackers and academics, has caught the attention of a public who were, in any case, well primed by the rhetoric of both the corporate «infoBahn» and also the government’s «Creative Nation» (DOC94).
This general net awareness also provides a perfect dessert for the moves to pluralism instigated by post-modern socialism that will, hopefully permanently replace the legacy of right-wing nationalism that dominated the middle years of this century. The Sydney-based writer Ross Gibson recently defined the new «nationalism» as a boundary that contains difference rather than similarity (GIB95). And now the Internet promises to remove those geographic boundaries and create an egalitarian global information resource.
Let’s put to the back of our minds, for the time being (this essay has to be short), the fact that four fifths of the global population probably desire a reliable source of food rather than of information. And lets try to ignore the disturbing fact that many of those who are most eloquent in espousing this new electronic democracy are non other than the US Republican party (who doubtless intend more democracy for the ultra-right, white suprematist,Christian fundamentalist who sustain them (and... who can also afford the hardware).
Lets look instead at two pieces by the French artist Stephan Barron which weave together the technology of the internet with some of the aesthetic, social and political agendas that globalism implies.
His piece Ozone is a timely comment on the residual colonial arrogance of the «First World» nations of the Northern hemisphere. Their high rates of overpopulation together with their commitment to the ethics of redundancy implicit in post-capitalist consumerism allow them to generate immense quantities of chemical pollutant gasses that are destroying the protective Ozone layer of the earths atmosphere. As most Australians will be aware this destruction is focussed in the Southern Hemisphere Ozone hole and is manifested as higher than normal levels of ultra-violet radiation and the promise of high cancer incidence in years to come. During 1995 several of the culprit nations announced their intention of reneging on previous agreements to cut the output of these noxious chemicals using the excuse that doing so would undermine the competitivenes of their national industries and economies.
Ozone addresses this global nationalistic conflict of wills. The artist precedes his description of Ozone with a quote from the American composer John Cage : «The function of Art is not to communicate one’s own personal ideas or feelings but rather to imitate nature in her manner of operation».
The piece also reflects Cage’s own work with «prepared pianos» . Ozone uses two pianos, one in the Old treasury building in Adelaide, the other in Roubaix, France. They are «played» by an automatic procedure that has two sources. One measures the amount of Ozone pollution produced by automobiles in the streets of Paris. The Other measures the high UV levels due to Ozone depletion over Adelaide.
Barron describes the process :
«Two acoustic computerised pianos located, one in Europe, and the other in Australia exchange sounds produced according to the Ozone coming on one side from the automobile pollution in Lille, and on the other side according to the hole in the Ozone stratospheric layer».
«This installation is a metaphor of an «Ozone Pump» between the Ozone produced by pollution and the natural Ozone».
«An «Ozone Pump» between Europe and Australia, between man and nature».
«This music is elaborated not by one person, but by human activity on a planetary scale (pollution of the Ozone) an by interaction with the sun». (BAR95)
Ozone links North and South in a dynamic dialogue regarding the future of the planet. It’s also a healing process that converts the symptoms of the problem as manifest into digital tokens that simultaneously express sorrow for the harm whilst also creating a symbolic exchange, a gift of Ozone, that inverts the process of depletion and reverses the physical damage that is being done.
«The project also expresses the immateriality and complexity of the phenomena with which contemporary man is confronted. The Ozone and the UV rays are factors of complex phenomena where human physiology interacts with economic development (BAR95)».
Barrons other work Day & Night links East and West across a 12 hour time difference that gives the word it’s name. It’s based on an earlier piece Le Bleu du Ciel   (The Blue of the Sky) produced by Barron in 1994. Here two French sites, one 1000 km north of the other were linked and the average of the colours of the sky above them was calculated and displayed. Barron compares the work to the blue monochromes of Yves Klein : « The purpose of this project lies in the imaginary sky, an ubiquist sky that exists somewhere between north and south, somewhere in our imagination. A never ending sky. The never ending phone network.
«These live and imaginary monochromes, cosmic and in harmony with the real skies distant by a thousand kms; follow Yves Klein’s project and his monochromes (BAR94)».

Day & Night changes the axis of the work from north-south to east-west and connects the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, Brasil with the Old Treasury Building. This axis, of the revolution of the Earth, is also the axis of time. The geographical distance gives a 12 hour time difference and since the piece will be exhibited at the Equinox the division of day and night should be exact -as the sun sets in Sao Paulo it will rise in Adelaide.
Cameras at each gallery will continuously record and transmit the colour of the sky above them. The two images will be averaged and displayed at each site. Apart from this conjunction of dusk and dawn the resulting images will be a mixture of day and night.
Its a simple piece that nevertheless embeds a profound poetry. Barron discusses the concept of Planetary interdependence : «It becomes more and more apparent that our destinies and gestes» are linked with those of all humans, even the most far removed.
«A solidarity, a planetary consciousness slowly elaborates itself.
«The beauty, the poetry of distance is essential. It allows us to redefine the dimensions of our consciousness (BAR95)».
The richness of the allusions that are embedded in these pieces unfold in our minds: fractal chaos, or non-linear theory where we are all subject to the effects of minuscule and distant changes; the Noosphere of the Jesuit philosopher De Chardin; the dawning awareness of symbiosis and interdependence, of the erosion of individualism. As these implications flower in our thoughs we too are drawn into the piece, we become a part of the matrix, the network,the Tao :
«The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth, the named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
«These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth,
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery.
The gateway ofthe manifold secrets (LAU63)».

Marvin Minsky has described language as a set of tools for building ideas in other peoples minds (MIN87). The poete William Burroughs has described language as a virus. It is this power, that results from the rejection of intrinsic self-referentiality in favour of extrinsic indictors, of semiotic initiator, that gives telecommunication-based art it’s value and context in a post-modern era. What is particulary interesting about Barron’s work is its historic reference to modernist artefacts like land art whilst his use of telecommunications undermines the need for the object and simultaneously adds layers of reference and implication.
Barron is one of the artists associated with the «Aesthetics of communication Group» which also includes Derrick de Kerckhove, Fred Forest amongst others. De Kerckhove is director of the McLuhan Project in Toronto and the idea of telecommunications as a Mc Luhanistic extension and connector of human minds is a common theme in their work. Group Member Mario Costa is quoted from a 1983 document by Frank Popper:
«In this type of event, it is not the exchanged content that matters, but rather the network that is activated and the functional conditions of exchange. The aesthetic object is replaced by the immateriality of field tensions and by vital and organic energy (mental, muscular, affective) and artificial or mechanical energy (electricity, electronics) that transform our mundane object-centred sense of space and time. Equally the subject is transformed, being no longer defined by rigid opposition of self/not-self, but becoming part of this same flowing field of energy (POP93)».
In Barrons work the act of digital sampling of the «content» (the Ozone level, sky colour, UV levels, etc...) converts everything into the same form. Myriad O’s and 1’s are transported back and forth on the network then post-processed and reconstituted as sensory phenomena, as the actual artworks that we perceive installed in the gallery spaces. But these are merely the terminators of a network and process and their purpose is as a catalyst to connect the human participants into the project.
In this way the artwork becomes a gateway, or a portal, to a virtual space that exists as much in the participants head as in the frenetic binary signalling of the computational metamedium.

Paul Brown

BIBLIOGRAPHY :
BAR94 Barron, Stephan, Project notes for Le Bleu du Ciel, 1994.
BAR95 Barron, Stephan, Project notes for The Adelaide Festival show, 1995.
DOC94 Department of Communication and the Arts, Creative Nation,Commonwealth Cultural Policy, 1994.
GIB95 Cibson, Ross, Speaking at James Cook University September 1995.
LAU63 Lau, D. C. (translator), Lao Tzu’sTao Te Ching, Penguin Books, London 1 963
MIN87 Minsky, Marvin, The Society of Mind, Helnemann, l 987.
POP93 Popper, Frank, Art of the Electronic Age, Thames and Hudson 1993.