Anybody who attended Don Foresta's lecture should be more or less able to figure out what our workshop is about.

Network – a common media term nowadays. The notion is «en vogue» and vague – as most modern terms are. Don Foresta spent part of his lifetime to put a meaning to this word. A bachelor in American History, a Master in International relationships, and a Doctor in Sciences and Arts made him on the one hand a man aware of history, living the present facing the future. On the other hand one of his major concern is about communication and human relationships.

Information Technologies have turned out to take a major place in our every day’s habits: Chatting, e-mail, file sharing, online shopping, online banking, online phone calls, online booking etc... So to him, high-tech broadband networks will be the communication channel of the future. But compared to older communication spaces as speech, dialogue, print-medias, radio, telephone, this new child of human imagination has the same major fault as other electronic media: a lack of complex human presence and of cultural content.

Commercial aims and purposes are threatening to create a vacuum of sense in this space. Selling and conning are the main “non-content” of today’s net spaces – as the examples pointed out already. Surfing the web one will find at least 90% of bullshit.

To Don Foresta, netspace should be an extension and broadening of the well-known communication spaces. To do so, they have to integrate human sensibility and meaning. The vaccum of non-content has to be filled.

As he points out, we are at a turning point of history – with impressive parralels to the renaissance, when old paradigms and models of perception of our world were torn down to be replaced by new ones. This resulting mechanical paradigm– which took 300 years to be generally accepted – is already fading and making place for another one: The network paradigm. People are becoming aware – little by little – that they are part of a bigger something. Connectivity, relational and dynamic aspects are being pointed out in nearly every domain.

How all this can be put into a workshop might seem quite hard to do. Don did.

If we are at a point where we have to fill an empty space with meaning, we are making something similar to what the first human artistic act and gesture might probably have been. So the approach was to get back to the roots of arts – which essence is mainly giving a meaning to something.

According to Don Foresta, the first human artistic gesture – which dates probably back to one million years ago – was picking an object out of its environment and to use it as a talisman, shrine or fetish .... And by that selection, give those objects a meaning.

In order to try to experience this process of giving meaning, we walked around different places, gathering – not only objects, but pictures, experiences, moments ... And we are trying to turn them into somethig else and by that way give them meaning.

Next step was to do so as well in the virtual space of the web. Surfing the web, picking up «objects», screenshots and use them to turn them into something else.

After the phase of gathering came the expression – a double step. We intended to work in two interacting realities: the «real» and the virtual. Our project had that in common: It's functionning and aim and it's form.

That has been described quite well by Duncan:

«(...) created the "samogor art gallery" as a centre point, hub, nucleus, heart of samogor where people could meet, communicate, do and see art, information could be exchanged, sunbrella articles read, a place to celebrate, have parties. and all else.

we have made a prototype website, a virtual "samogor art gallery". we hope it can do the same things as its real version. mainly allow for discussion, communication, interaction, a place to see and do.»

Personnally I see it more as one of several possible nodes in a network. But that doesn't matter – as it is my reality and everybody is free to have it's own – «we shape the world around us by looking at it».

Furthermore we wanted to leave an imprint of us on Vis:

«(...) about leaving an imprint, a positive trace of us, that we were here. We are experiencing something great - and perhaps it would be just as polite to give something in return. We all are going to go back home with some, adresses, icq numbers, experience, shared moments ... but perhaps a part of what we are bringing out into the world from this summerworkshop might as well be given to Vis itselfs.

That's what that art gallery might be about: a trace of our assembly. What we would like to do is to set up relations to the habitants of Vis - who often are wondering what the hell is going on here in Samogor. So that might be a start for something which is meant to stay longer than we do. » (sunbrella – workshop-report S18)

... and an imprint in the virtual world ... – something evolving in time, something living – let's make easa live (it already is!), let's make it last .

Hvala Dovidjenja

alx b.