Medialab Prado

Round table directed by José Manuel Costa, Javier Duero and Francisco López.

José Manuel Costa:

Paradigm shifts in communication modes should necessarily influence the specialized communication form of the arts. Long ago, the Web stopped being merely a simple receptacle or exhibition space for creations. It has become the place where those creations can find new channels for creation, distribution, and consumption, based on the characteristic principles of the Web and all things digital: perfect copies, manipulating "objects" on an unspecified apparatus, cheap instant audio-visual communication, and interactivity. ( see pdf)

Javier Duero:

The Internet became accessible in 1995, although only for a very small minority of the world population. Since then, the possibilities for creating communities and expanding creation freely through structures that grow rhizomatically led to a new revolution where artist-activists became its creators and transmitters. Influenced by the futurist and anarchist manifestos of the early 20th century, a new type of social utopia was meant to turn art into an accessible place for all, offering a new democratic political vision as an alternative to other dominant powers concerning the use of information. But that is not what happened. We have learned about the prosaic virtues of the Web and found out that information superhighways have allowed the spontaneous appearance in recent years of thousands of labels, artistic communities, and professional organizations working on sound and audiovisual creation. Meanwhile, electronic art has begun to arouse an interest in the general public and contemporary art followers.

As a consequence of the access to digital technologies that almost everyone in artistic communities has today, a revolution has occurred in procedures used in these fields. It has brought creation to new, heretofore unknown levels of technical sophistication and potential narrative richness, creating endless means of production and distribution (the Internet, platforms, online radio, pod casts, etc.).

Therefore, it has become necessary to generate physical spaces to host activities where the exchange of information and teaching inherent to all developed societies may take place. Other issues include the changing, revolutionary context related to copyright and exploitation rights to a creator's work, the newly arisen ethical and legal conflicts, and different possibilities for licensing artistic work in the future.

Francisco López:

In the last twenty years, the socialization and atomization of technologies used for production, distribution, and communication has given rise to an unprecedented situation where creative and aesthetic networks have become decentralized and individualized, separate from traditional institutional and academic networks.

Bibliography that Jose Manuel Costa recommends:

Kleiner, Markus S. Soundcultures. Über Elektronische und Digitale Musik. Achim Szepanski Shurkamp Vergla, 2003.

V.V.A.A. Engineering Culture. Data Browser 2. Geoff Cox & Joasia Krysa, New York, 2005.

Gelernter, D. The Muse In The Machine, Computers and Creative Thought. Fourth State, London, 1994.

V.V.A.A. Multimedia. From Wagner to Vitual Reality. WW Norton, Londres-New York, 2001.

Kahn, D. Noise Water Meat. A Hitory of Sounds in The Arts. MIT Press, 1999.

Spiller, N. Cyber Reader. Critical Writings for the Digital Era. Phaidon, London, 2002.

Costa, J.M. "La Creación y la Red". En El provenir del español en la sociedad del conocimiento. Fundación Caja de Burgos, Burgos, 2006.

Bibliography that Francisco López recommends:

Grau, O.Virtual art. From illusion to immersion. MIT Press,Massachusetts, 2003.

Pattison, R. The triumph of vulgarity. Rock music in the mirror of Romanticism. Oxford University Press, New York, 1987.

Weschler, L. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. A life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin. University of California Press, 1992.

Cd's

Los recopilatorios de historia de la musica experimental de SubRosa
www.subrosa.net

Francisco López's "Absolute Noise Ensemble" (with contributions from 50 international sound artists) (2xCD Blossoming Noise, USA).