Paris may be a world art center, but does France give digital art the respect -- or funding – it is due? Ask Isabelle Arvers and she lets out a sigh.
"When you say 'new media' in France, nobody understands what you're talking about."
To raise awareness of digital art in France -- and grease the wheels for funding -- Arvers organized the six-day digital art festival Villette Numérique, which debuts in Paris Tuesday. The biennial event features art installations, an audio art jury competition, concerts, club shows, cinema and video game "rooms."
Nine live electronic music performances are scheduled, including three sets by the pioneering German techno group Kraftwerk. More than two dozen DJs will spin sessions in a 10,000-square-meter venue that organizers say is bigger than the largest club in Paris.
In selecting the 20 competitors for the online audio art competition, Arvers had a specific agenda in mind. "I wanted to help the French audience understand what art on the Internet is all about, and that there is a new generation of creators that merge cinema, music, gaming and visual art," she said.
The jury awarded first-place honors to Web Wuerfel Werkstatt (Web Cube) by Akuvido, the nom de Net art of Ukranian-born, Berlin-based artists Victor Dovhalyuk and Hanna Kuts. The artists created their two-dimensional work in Macromedia Flash to suggest an alternate way of perceiving 3-D space: A deconstructed cube "wired" with sound cues spreads out on a single flat plane.
New York-based artists Inbar Barak and Ruth Ron devised second-place winner Volume using Flash MX ActionScript. The artists’ "game" depicts a minimalist interactive 3-D environment built from five thin lines and five background sounds representing everyday urban life.
Nicolas Clauss built third-place winner One Day on the Air in Shockwave using 16 found-audio samples recorded from radio stations in France on a single day. Users navigate through what Clauss describes as "a photograph of the French radiophonic landscape at a given moment."
While the event's goal is to showcase French digital art, less than 10 percent of the audio art competition artists claim France as their mother country. It's a situation festival organizers are hoping to change.
Jury member Guillaume Sorge, whose website Dirty examines all aspects of digital culture, said economic challenges to French Net art may have resulted in the inadvertent exclusion of some of the country's best talent.
"Doing digital art in France is difficult because there is no more money in the new media field, so the best works are made in schools," he said. "The French art market is not really into this type of expression."
And what exactly is good digital art?
Jury member, self-styled "digital provocateur" and Neen art movement founder Miltos Manetas says he evaluates online art the same way he would conventional fine art or fashion.
"Within 30 seconds of navigating into (an artwork) -- or into a gallery, museum, boutique or party -- you know if it's any good, or if it's crap. Crap can also be interesting, and because websites are the most amazing thing happening today in visual art, you can tolerate bad websites more than bad paintings or clothes," Manetas said.
"We must not try to understand good art. It must take us by surprise."
