Review of Don Foresta's Lecture

A Review of Don Foresta’s lecture on the new renaissance of the interactive network by Tori Purcell

Don Foresta spoke on Friday, April 14, 2006 at the biennial Art History Symposium presented by Savannah College of Art and Design. The title for this year’s symposium was, “The New Renaissance- An Interactive Paradigm.” Foresta, a professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts in Paris and an associate academic at the London School of Economics, opened the symposium with a lecture on what he calls the evolutionary mechanism of a global interactive network. Art and science have blended together to create a space that both defines modern society and replaces the industrial machine that used to define society. Foresta says, “It is a visual space, a communication space, an organizational space, a philosophical space, a psychological space, and the space of our imagination where reality and our interaction with it are seen and defined.” The role of art in this schema is to test the extent of a tool’s communication potential. Let’s examine the contemporary art project, "Harvey Loves Harvey."

"Harvey Loves Harvey" refers to the collaboration art works created by artists in different physical locations. This project originated with Jason Dean of Brooklyn and Matthew Nash of Boston collaborating from a distance on creative projects via a virtual communication space. They refer to themselves as “concept artists, media lovers, and pseudo-scientists,” and the web acts as their collective studio. This constant exchange of ideas through an interactive network is precisely what Foresta was talking about as the evolutionary product defining current generations. Another example to consider, this communication space has become the norm for many musical groups. Members of a band may live in various locations and use a network to rehearse, co-write songs, plan tours, or construct set lists. The communication potentials are mind-blowing.
To sum up the key notes of Don Foresta’s talk last Friday, the interactive network has evolved into a “metaphor of our civilization… [and] the geometry of our imagination.”