ARTCOM 86 ENSBA

This video was produced and presented at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris for the "ARTCOM" symposium organised by Natan Karczmar and Fred Forest.

In 1983, during a cultural video event organised by Mario Costa in Italy, he and Fred Forest launched the Aesthetics of Communication Movement at Mercato San Severino. Three years later, in 1986, two of the movement's most emblematic artist-theorists, Natan Karczmar and Fred Forest, decided to combine their efforts and organise a symposium at the ENSBA in Paris to reinforce the work Mario Costa had begun with Fred Forest at Mercato San Severino, when the Manifesto of the Aesthetics of Communication was signed. Under the name ARTCOM, they managed to convince the Director of ENSBA to host the event on his premises. With this backing, they launched this now historic conference without a specific budget. The participants (theoreticians and artists) agreed to attend at their own expense, in view of an initiative which responded, point by point, to their views on a forward-looking art using technologies. An art that no longer fitted in with the concepts of a commercial art market, now outdated for them and the only one still of interest to galleries and institutions at the time.

The symposium will be opened by Claude Mollard, who at the time was head of the DAP at the French Ministry of Culture. Other speakers will include Flor Bex, director of the ICC in Antwerp, Vilém Flusser, Mario Borillo, Claude Faure from the Cité des Sciences et de l'industrie, Bernard Teyssèdre, director of the UFR Saint Charles, Jean Duvignaud and artists such as Mitropoulos, Alain Snyers, Marc Denjean, Eric Samakh etc. will also be present.

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