The Peoples' Portrait, the author as a producer.

The Peoples' Portrait

On October 27, in New York, was opened The Peoples' Portrait , a multimedia project conceived by the Chinese artist Zhang Ga and commissioned by the Festival Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) and Duch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF04). The opera premiered simultaneously in various cities around the world, and is sponsored by Reuters, that for the entire month of November will provide its video screens located in the headquarters of Times Square. Five establishments, set in New York at the Times Square Alliance Information Center, in Singapore's Central Business District, in Rotterdam, in Brisbane, Australia and Linz in Austria, will be used for the recovery of digital passersby who wish to be photographed. Every twenty seconds, a central server, it will record the pictures in an archive, displaying them initially in sequential order and then randomly, both in the place where they were taken, and in other places that attend the event. Additionally, the project is structured on two levels: the projection of images on large screens will not only present in urban centers, but also on the websites of major museums, including the Whitney Artport and the Media Center for Art and Design in Barcelona. The work of conceptual multimedia Zang Ga, picking up the legacy of two previous experiences as Hole In Space (1980) and The World In 24 Hours (1982), is expressed through some symbolic pairs of opposites, such as male-female, space- time, real-virtual, local-transnational, which, through their metaphorical meaning, stimulate the public to take different points of view, suggesting a possible link between men and women of different races and cultures, on the basis of "cultural relativism" , epistemological trend on which is based the majority of contemporary multiculturalism, the project also explores the constitution of the social self, that is "the recognition that (a person) gets by his peers," so that there are "multiple social selves to the extent where there are individuals who recognize and construct an image of the subject in their head "(William James). Thanks to the work of Zang Ga, aimed at analyzing the concept of authorship and the interaction between the public and art, you can refer to the thought of Benjamin who argues that the author himself is the producer and not can be considered outside of the production process, nor with the task of reflecting the world (Lukacs), or with that of reject (Adorno). Benjamin considers the link between art and society on an equal footing, in the sense that it is important to establish what is the position of a work "_rispetto_ relations of production at the time," but to understand how it falls _nei_ relations of production. In the age of modern "Reproduction", Benjamin sees the emergence of the "exposure value", ie the possibility of a more widespread, free and critical artistic products; away from joining the myth of progress, Benjamin attributes a fundamental role technical innovations, but stressed the fact that they can be exploited in productive or destructive sense, and every historical moment is opposite to that crossroads, where it is crucial political choice. Considering that in the last analysis, following the affirmation of NetArt, the artistic flow has started to move in the direction of many-to-many, and thanks to the use of electronic media, people around the world can conceive identical thoughts and feelings in the same time, having nearly the perception of living in the same "global village" (McLuhan), you may notice that the introduction of a new technology or a new medium, in this case the simultaneous happenings photo on the Net and on-screen, not intervene as an agent outside, but emerges in the heart of the cultural contexts, cr
eating and shaping a network that can be expressed in terms of physical, social, aesthetic, economic and in which the public figure the same writer and producer.