• Intensive, an ultimate scene •

In 1995 I began to get connected to Internet, to attend discussion groups and to discuss on web. In many cases the quality of the exchange was inferior to the possibilities and innovation potential garanted by Internet. From a linguistical point of view Internet was under-exploited.

One got the impression that Internet definitely promoted a general collapse of the art system which was already worn out and useless; this, beyond the logic of a market, which stimulates and feeds the system itself. By reproposing traditional modules, contemporary art as far as we are still able to perceive it as a separate form, or perhaps just because we are unable to do it, is no more necessary. On the other hand, the sphere of the circulation of the sign more and more merges into that of its creation. Internet (but not only) strenghtened this concept, making impossible the consume, the transfer and above all the diffuse production of whole subjective worlds of images. Internet had the effect of completing and amplifying signals, known in our society since long these signals pointed for what we still could call, with an effort, artistic sphere of art, as a future trend, an anonymous collective dimension. Such geometries turned out to be already in dissolution, because "work at art" is presently a natural condition of living, spread in the shadows of daily expression, hidden in each of its folds with the ideal and phantastic effort it can express, Internet may open a deep and complex interaction with the facts of life, so effective that the habits and idiosynchratic behavior of the artist appear to us phatetic and unbearable.

And just now, when the artist is conscious of the unavoidable paralysis of his action, he plays all his cards on game of excess and overloading. He continuously doubles the stake in a spiral like drift toward darker and darker depths. A seduction by what we dislike, an overdose of sickness. The artist further strenghten this general destructive game, by giving his last card, meant to puzzle and sadly obvious: sex and death, strong emotions for weak minds. Contemporary art is not the only actor of such a spreading decay of visual reality. The great media are also a part of this process and Internet, too, is involved. All this, I think, promoted a kind of dictatoship of comunication forms, based upon a limited range of models which are continuously repeated and from which is hard to escape.

The fascination of the web, the collective dimension of working and of the work, impossible to be placed and to be searched for in a well defined site, has been the catalyzing element of the present project. Intensive, an ultimate scene, connects one to the other artists that, we different approaches, apply photography. Through their production these artists have stressed more than once their radical position for what the artwork and its collation are concerned. On an ideal framework they have singled out a common space that makes possible whatever in our reality became more and more difficult. Their attemptive is to build up a place for meetings and exchange of viewpoints, a shared workshop free from any mediation, where, for the first time, various experiences can be sistematically compared. Intensive the present stage, is aimed at providing space to, and rendering visible, the results and working hypotheses of a set personal project. It has also the purpose of overcoming the traditional obstacles which hinder and make expensive the diffusion of the work (control of exhibits system, high cost of editing, printing and distributing).

For the present project I selected a series of operators. They do not necessarily share the same goals. Somehow I feel close to them, I find myself thinking of them; the aims of their work in some cases seem to provide my own actions with a meaning and I also have a great estimate for what I still could call the quality of their work. Some authors, on the other hand, had an active role in designing this very enterprise, at any rate, I think that each of us shares a joint ground, a common condition, a humus out of which the same vital fluids are adsorbed. For the reasons, the "workshop Intensive" became a meaningful component of a reality which I perceive as not only mine, nor can be expressed in simple terms of ownership: a reality that, today, discovers new ways and forms for contradicting itself, in the great "amusement park" of heteronimics and heterogeneity represented by Internet.

In spite of the agreement by the authors in being involved, a part of works here presented were not born as aimed at the web or at hypertext. Nonetheless, they all have the intensity and the urgency of absolutely needful things.

Piero Delucca 

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