CODE PUBLIC was the live performance group for the activities of FRIGO:  music, performance, theater.  It was a mobile group , able to perfom quickly on a given situation and to reflect, to permanently reactualize the general concept of the show.  CODE PUBLIC appeared as the reflexion space, the centralizing structure, the"quintessence" of the research undertaken by FRIGO.  Human and philosophical base, the first spot of CODE PUBLIC  was to consider and arrange the future of the group. 
During the 70s and 80s, the artists who created the UniversCity TV network, had developed a laboratory of forms, FRIGO, based in Lyon (France) at the forefront of current researchs in art practices and digital media.

Under the generic names of Frigo, Minus Delta T, Code Public, Radio Bellevue, Van Gogh TV, they launched into action, and physically involved theirs art practices in the world. For them, reflection and action are two complementary aspects of the same approach. They were convinced that to engage in an action of any kind whatsoever, he must have acquired a certain degree of autonomy of philosophy, both as individuals and as members of a group.

 

http://www.unitvnetwork.org/?q=en/codepublic_en

 

Interview with Karel Dudesek (Van Gogh TV)
February 28th, 2008 · No Comments
Van Gogh TV - “Piazza Virtuale”, The audience is the artist.

Q: How has Interactive TV changed since your first television experiments as Van Gogh TV, and especially Piazza Virtuale in 1992? What do you think is the significance of your early pioneering work?

A: Interactive TV, like we introduced working as Van Gogh TV, has not been adopted by mainstream television. The iTV projects of the entertainment industry are torn between viewer numbers, production costs, legal obstacles, and therefore commercial viability. In my view, iTV lost out on the potential to give a whole new role to TV
audiences, to participate and contribute to an ongoing process of developing the media, and to create real community media. Today iTV is more or less video and advertising on demand, and appears to be waiting for the next technological generation of the internet(iptv), as well as hoping for significant hardware and software developments.

The project “Piazza Virtuale” exhausted the technical and experimental interactive media possibilities which existed in 1992, and which have not changed much even now. Yes, one huge advance is that we now have mobile phones which can create video sequences, and they can be sent directly to a broadcaster and seen immediately on TV. But, the variety of modules which Van Gogh TV developed, like chat systems, video and ISDN phones, and cameras in public entry points have only partially found their way into commercial broadcasting shows of today.

Van Gogh TV ‘s most important development was its radical multi-framing of images, and the multi-layering of inputs (including sound and text) which is a significant marker historically, and the inspiration for research and understanding about how multiple screen information can be read and consumed by viewers. The Piazza Virtuale broadcast was a patchwork of incoming information: faxes, text messages, videos, pictures, sounds, noises and voices which created a vivid surface, one that clearly visualized an invisible cloud of information and the massive amount of content and information which surrounds us all, permanently. Someone referred to this broadcast cacophony as electronic wallpaper. The segmented screen design made only a slight impact on broadcast formats, but was quickly absorbed by early internet applications, in the 1990s....

Karel Dudesek
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