[-empyre-] The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That

["arteonline" <arteonline@arteonline.arq.br>]

Dear all,

I am sending my last message about my work. However I will be available to
answer any question you have. Tomorrow night I will send my good-bye
message. That is it! Thanks for your attention and feedback.

I also would like to correct a link I sent yesterday, the restaurant:
http://arteonline.arq.br/museu/restaurante )

Best whishes,

Regina


The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That  (http://arteonline.arq.br)

1- Background:

The electronic magazine Arte on Line was first published in September 2000
in an almost amateur effort by its editor, the researcher and visual artist
Regina Célia Pinto. Despite that, however, it has been very successful - the
site has received numerous visitors and several favorable emails,
demonstrating that its contents are being well received.

Therefore, we published a proposal for producing a total of five issues in
the second edition, launched in January 2001. As a result, the magazine
became more professional and two more editors from Rio de Janeiro came on
board - Marcelo Frazão and Paulo Villela - as well as countless
collaborators from several parts of Brazil and the world. One of them was
Jorge Luiz Antonio, from São Paulo, who always showed a keen interest and
made excellent suggestions, and became a publications consultant to the
magazine.

Reiner Strasser and Jorge Luiz Antonio publicized our publication in the
Webartery list compiled by Jim Andrews, from Canada, who later on honored us
with a link in his well-known site http://www.vispo.com . In
Spanish-speaking countries, much of our success was due to the sensitive and
amiable Uruguayan poet Clemente Padim. He was introduced to us by Neide Dias
de Sá and Álvaro de Sá, from Rio de Janeiro, who also helped us with their
knowledge of experimental poetry and artist's book.

In 2002,   we  decided to transform the magazine  into the "Museum of the
essential and beyond that," a "work in progress" that would contain the
essential features of the four issues of Arte on Line (which now  are
available only on CD-ROM) and go beyond that to include new contributions
received henceforward. It is convenient to say that nowadays Paulo Villela
and Marcelo Frazão are only eventual collaborators. So that I am the
responsible for the museum.

2-Museum of the Essential and Beyond That / Architecture of Information or
Creative Interface?

"We believe that within the creation of a new style there lurks the sublime
possibility of making life bearable."[1]

In the modern city, the value of the individual is constantly falling. The
city that was once essentially a safe haven has become a place of despair,
loneliness, the struggle for survival. The city as a cultural hub has become
a privilege of few.

The metropolis is found throughout the world, an economically passive and
politically ungovernable organism, dangerous to the physical and mental
health of its inhabitants. The great disparity between the standard of
living of the economic classes has come to exclude the underprivileged from
the enjoyment of the cultural asset the city represents.[2]

Sociologists such as Michel Maffesoli [3] have studied the phenomenon of
tribalism in contemporary societies as a possible response to the experience
of loss and loneliness that people undergo in large cities, where mass
culture and individualism predominate. "From more than one point of view,
social existence is alienated, subjected to the injunctions of a
multifarious Power. However, it is also true that there is an affirmative
Potency that, in spite of everything, (always) plays the game over,
beginning with solidarity and reciprocity." [4]

The emergence of virtual communities is reaffirming that potency. In them,
as the great French thinker Marcel Mauss [5] has stated, everyone seems to
be interested in an alternatively shared and solitary project; in
accumulated and redistributed knowledge; in the mutual respect and
reciprocal generosity taught by good breeding. Therefore, it is easy to
understand the success of a project like the "Museum of the Essential and
Beyond That," which is not connected to an institution and does not rely on
any kind of financial support or sponsorship. It is being undertaken on a
home computer in the city of Rio de Janeiro but has a dynamic digital model,
a constant state of becoming, and for that reason receives contributions
from different latitudes and longitudes of this geography without borders
created by information technologies. A world that seems to be turning to
virtual communities as a way of building a better future.

Cyberspace can eliminate distances between its occupants, although it is
merely canceling out a symbolic distance through digital communication. What
does cyberspace look like? What does a museum with all its galleries and
libraries look like out in cyberspace? A "cyber-museum" is a
spatial-temporal shape built up through movement: transportation and
communication. During the process of creating a virtual museum, we cannot
overlook the paths people follow through information and that this must be a
place where information is shared intensively by all its visitors and
participants.

3- What exactly is the "Museum of the Essential and Beyond That"?

This project consists of the creation of virtual architectures: a museum
with its libraries and galleries that have no brick-and-mortar counterparts.
It is common for real museums and libraries to have websites, but the
process underway in our "museum" is rather uncommon. A museum that does not
exist in the real world, and whose architecture and collections are formed
by a string of digits: 01010101. Is it just an electronic clearinghouse for
bits and bytes?

The museum started out as a "work in progress": so is it information
architecture? But it is also an imaginary two-story pixel-building with a
basement. The building's architectural design can be changed at any time,
whether by constructing another story or changing part of its shape - a
Niemeyer design [6], constellation, space station, Piranesi engraving [7]:
creative interface?. This museum was conceived as an open structure in which
information is spread out in a number of spaces; a machine that can travel
infinitely in all directions.

Nowadays the Museum's building has:

I- A BASEMENT with the galleries Esthetic of Tragedy, Tragicomedy and
Special Room

II- THE FIRST FLOOR, where are placed the library. The library includes: the
Digital Poetry Gallery, the Virtual Book Object or Virtual Artists' Book
Gallery, the Library of Marvels,  the Section of Books, the Section of
Articles and Essays, The Section of magazines, The Section of CD ROMs ,
the Section Contemporary Memories which includes the Interviews and some
Artists' depositions about Art and Identity.

III- THE SECOND FLOOR, where are placed the following galleries: Cloning and
Web, Concept of Borders Today, Cartographies and Globalization, Borders of
Net.Art / Web.Art and Art Today and the Spams'.Room.

IV- THE THIRD FLOOR, where is placed Paris Connection. There are links to
the the Urls of the French Artists of this Projec and there is a link to
Paris - Rio de Janeiro Gallery (that work I sent yesterday to Empire).

V- THE ATTIC, a collaborative work with Reiner Strasser. This work denotes
our preoccupation with the preservation of our digital culture. It is just
to call attention for it.

VI- THE TERRACE WITH PANORAMIC ELEVATOR. There you find: the administration,
the restaurant, the garden and the restrooms. The garden is not ready, there
we  will place some attractions, including the Art Games Room and the
Aquarium. We think that all this stuff  is completely new. We do not have
notice of other virtual museum which has these spaces.

To navigate through the museum's spaces and galleries, the most easy way is
to use the building map.

We have ideas to build other spaces and perhaps to create a kind of
franchises of the museum. However our project never will be commercial. We
have not against commercial Art sites, but we are interested "in an
alternatively shared and solitary project; in accumulated and redistributed
knowledge; in the mutual respect and reciprocal generosity taught by good
breeding". For us it should be the essence of Internet. We have dreamed of
this Internet. You will say: -You are a dreamer!, perhaps. ( I was born in
the same day of Miguel de Cervantes. ;-)

The museum's contents were selected on the basis of the essential criteria
of contemporaneousness and quality. The line of Contemporary Art that
specifically interests us is Art and Technology. Yet today some artists and
members of the public are unaware that the computer is much more than a tool
and that it is giving rise to new artistic languages. And the "Museum of the
Essential and Beyond That" is investing precisely it is in these languages
and the contemporaneity of this proposition. We are a virtual community, we
have contributors for all over world, but we are not interested in repeat
the same divisions that we meet out of line. Inside the museum the artist is
placed according with his/her work and not because of his/her world region.


Everything is always perfect in the virtual museums found on the Internet,
but the Museum's space does not work that way. Instead, its operations aim
at fulfilling the dictates of the principle of reality. For example, tragedy
and its esthetic or things we really do not want to think about, have been
shifted (with a touch of morbid humor) to the basement. Bit by bit, we
intend to place some problems in the Museum building (last year, for
example,  we have a flood in the restaurant), because we do not intent it to
become an aseptic parody of a real museum. We predict the need to restore
this cultural machine once it has become the victim of its own success and
the enormous number of visitors it attracts. Every once in a while, a room
or gallery could be shut down for repairs. Last year we had a flood in our
restaurant kitchen! The Museum's order could also be disturbed by power
struggles involving both political power and that of feudal corporations, so
common in institutions of this kind.

3 - Beyond that

The fact is that this project, justifying the beyond that in its name, is
fast becoming a cultural center where a mouse click offers both a museum and
a place for creation and communication where the visual arts are joined by
music, filmmaking (animation), poetry, books and audiovisual research. "This
characteristic is related to the aim of modern-day art, which is to embody
in its works certain new forms of beauty that could only emerge through the
reconvergence of all techniques" [8] and technologies... Since its
inception, at the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, this
reconvergence has been present in its watchwords: communication,
information, multidisciplinarity, multiculturalism and mobility. Science and
technology embracing art to protect it and give it the necessary conditions
for life and growth.

4- References:

[1] In MAFFESOLLI, Michel (1995). A contemplação do mundo. Porto Alegre:
Artes e Ofícios.
[2] ARGAN, Giulio Carlo. História da arte como história da cidade. São
Paulo: Martins Fontes, p. 258.
[3] Michel Maffesolli , a contemporary French sociologist, analyzes this
subject in his book The Time of the Tribes, Sage, 1996.
[4] MAFFESOLLI, Michel. The Time of the Tribes. Op cit.
[5] MAUSS, Marcel. Ensaio sobre a dádiva. Lisbon: Edições 70, 1988.
[6] Oscar Niemeyer: contemporary Brazilian architect and creator of
Brasilia, a monument-city and treasure of humanity.
(http://www.niemeyer.org.br/)
[7] Piranesi: eighteenth-century architect,, artist and engraver, in
FICACCI, Luigi. Giovanni Battista PIRANESI. Germany: Taschen, 2001.
[8 MALLARMÉ, Stéphane. Un coup de dés .
(http://www.poetes.com/mallarme/coup_de.htm)
[9] FRANCASTEL, Pierre. Art et technique aux XIX et XX siècles. Paris:
Éditions Minuit, 1956