La verità mediata. Comunicazione politica e arte nell'era digitale

Since the 1960s, art has often addressed the ambiguous way the media interpret reality. However,\r\nartists have adopted different strategies, also determined by the technological changes in communication.\r\nDuring the 1960s and 1970s, artists linked with Visual Poetry declared a “semiotic war”\r\nagainst the language of mass communication, that aimed to “reveal” its forms of mystification. In\r\nthe post-media era, art’s relationship with society has changed: the very notion of public art (or\r\nsocial art) has evolved from that of a practice taking place in an actual space to a practice diffused\r\nthrough the simultaneous space of the media, where it can be experienced by many private\r\nviewers. Such new way of defining the public sphere, in the context Byung-Chul Han called “society\r\nof transparency”, is very similar to the way people today interact with ‘news’.\r\nThe very distinction of “true” and “plausible” has therefore changed. “Truth” is not in the\r\ncontent of an image, but rather in its power, since images, as Hito Steyerl puts it, are “poor” in\r\nthemselves, conveyed as they are through large-scale digital mediums. The forms of art which\r\nadopt these same mediums and their diffused strategies of communication provide us with interesting\r\ninsights on our current political, economic, and social circumstances. Moving from the\r\ndebate originated by the Documenta 10exhibit, aptly titled Politics Poetics, this essay analyzes the\r\nmain theoretical contributions and artistic responses (General Idea, Francesco Vezzoli, and many\r\nyoung new media artists) on this subject, showing how art addresses the notion of “truth” in the\r\npublic sphere, as well as language and media images used in political communication.