| Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers. |
enter its domain of reality and take an interest in its view of the world. If one viewer, or a group of viewers, is led to new consensual domains by a work of art, and hence to new cognition, then not only the creative act has been accomplished successfully, but communication has been, too: the spreading of a world-view to a community. Although art-works and communication are separate domains, neither works of art nor systems of art can exist without communication, no more so than art-communication is possible without art; accordingly, art-works serve the coupling of cognition and communication. [12] This amounts to a new theoretical position that deviates from the cybernetic model. Communication is no longer understood to mean the transmission of information, and nor is it seen as the transmission of knowledge from one system to another. It replaces the information-technical principle of communication with the model of the construction process within the cognitive systems and between systems. [13] This process-oriented perspective is observer-dependent, i.e. as part of a network of social systems, every observer or observer community co-constitutes
systems, and these naturally include art systems among others. Orientation has shifted from information objectivity to intersubjective interactivity.
One consequence is that art is becoming a kind of «catalyst of society’s cultural reflection.» [14] Proposals representing a threat to the existence of a consensus-based cognitive domain can meet with strong emotional rejection within the cultural community. By contrast, twentieth-century art offers countless examples of cases in which with the aid of intentional polemics cognition domains were expanded through the institution of ‹art› being forced to criticize itself.
The meaning of art and its aesthetics is to be sought in the function it exercises within the given observer communities, as well as in its ability to bring about by means of a language of its own an emotional and conceptual dialogue with the observer and the community.
Just as people need the media for communication,
