Stéphan Barron : Le Bleu du Ciel is a telematic installation linking two computers, one in Tourcoing and another in Toulon, that communicate with each other to average out the color of the skies in the North and South of France. In each city a sensor has been placed on the roof of the buildings that house the exhibitions.
The computer has been places inside a wooden parallelepiped 1.6 meters high ; cut into the top end of this box is a hole 15 centimeters square. People are invited to step up onto a small stool and to look up at this square fragment of the computer screen showing the average color of the skies of Toulon and Tourcoing, a color that varies between blue and gray. Eight meters above this installation, a square window in the roof of the atrium allows the viewer to see the actual Tourcoing sky.
In comparing these two squares, the real sky and the average of the two skies, the viewer is invited to imagine the sky one thousand kilometers away. It is this imaginary connection between the place where the people are and the place situated one thousand kilometers away that is important. An emotional link is created in this perception of distance. Important for the people in the North, the people who live in Lille, is the fantasy about the color of the southern sky ; the Lille sky is often gray and people often fantasize about the bright sunny sky one thousand kilometers to the souht. There is also the interaction between the clouds over Tourcoing and those that pass over far-off Toulon. It is therefore also a project about the planet, about the cloud cover above these

Derrick de Kerckhove : As an artist doing this type of work, what is it that you expect ? If you spend two years on a project, it’s because you definitely want to achieve something.

Stéphan Barron : What I expect ? I’m waiting, I believe, for an intense moment to happen, for an emotion to be created in the distance. There are people living simultaneously in different places and I create the conditions that lead them towards what is happening in the distance. This touches our desire for ubiquity on an emotional level, yet we must go farther : this installation is above all a call for the redimensionizing of our consciences, for a reaching out with our sensibilities to the entire surface of the globe.

Derrick de Kerckhove : Would you agree with the idea that the art of new technologies is a homeopathic art ?

Stéphan Barron : Completely. But, art is always homeopathic and you, as a spectator of this project, what touched you? Is it the aspect of interactivity or the aspect of distance ?

Derrick de Kerckhove : One of the most beautiful thing I saw at Imagina was a simulation of climate in accelerated time with a three-dimensional model of the planet ; it gave the impression of there being a kind of extraordinarily fluid envelope around the Earth which was placed in some sort of cylinder. The vision was vast for me. Le Bleu du Ciel fits in with this type of vision, i.e. a collective vision of the planet that is essential to me, not one that displays a totalitarian sensibility of the past, on the political level, which is terrifying, not an electronic fascism, but a collective vision in which each person feels implicated and responsible thus giving a larger dimension to the psyche and conscience ; all spatial work that originates from the Earth, from a point of view that brings together two regions, is of equal importance to me, because each is an invitation for people to expand their mental horizon, to give it a concrete sense. I see Le Bleu du Ciel as being this type of work. In fact, its a climatological work and there is climatological art being developped, even a climatological philosophy. I know that certain theorists are looking closely at this particular approach and I myself am sensitive to these new theories. Climate serves as a metaphor for our unification : climate varies from one region to the other and thus is united around the planet. These local and global qualities of climate seem to me to be one the fundamental metaphors of how we should live in today’s world.

Stéphan Barron : You speak of an exterior relationship, one between the local point and the distant point, and of global consciousness, a sort of backward zoom ; but if you do a forward zoom, you have the possibility of getting close to the interior of the conscience, to the relationship between the conscience of the sky’s blue and your interior.

Derrick de Kerckhove : That’s part of what I wanted to say, but I haven’t got to the end of the second part of the question that looks at the reason for this relationship between the global and the local, which is a concrete one ; it is not for the simple pleasure of putting things together that are already there, but rather that they might be put together at the heart of the perception of a consciousness, of a psyche, a psyche that is, in effect, rather limited in scope. The heritage of the Renaissance and the approach of a man like Leonardo da Vinci suggest rather limited variants of the human psyche : such minds limit themselves to what is in actual fact a narrow type of consciousness. I find it important  to create metaphors that open up a larger space inside such a small and rather confined consciousness. The human brain is basically an incredibly flexible organ : with its powers of representation and imagination, we can make it do almost anything. But precisely because we can make it do anything, we must make it to do things which are meaningful, things like Le Bleu du ciel.
In other of your works that you have shown us, there is an insistence on sound. The visual is something always cold and distant from the self, whereas sound searches, digs into sensibility and emotion, making it something very intimate.  The visual is fine and dandy and we need it, even more of it, but it should be supported by sound and by touch as well. Curiously, it seems to me that your sensibility is less tactile than mine or Rokeby’s or even Forest’s. It is interesting to see which artists bring together all three senses. I wonder if you are planning any work that might feature the tactile aspect.

Stéphan Barron : For me, Le Bleu du Ciel is not a visual work. In any case, I would say to be found beneath the surface, and that the image is just a pretext for reaching these hidden dimensions.

Derrick de Kerckhove : In Le Bleu du Ciel touch is not a critical question in any case, neither is sound, because we can’t hear up ther ; but one needs to set up some sort of mental scenery and Le Bleu du Ciel is just that scenery. At the same time, one of the questions that for me is a real problem, a psychological problem, one I ask myself without always finding an answer  : « Is the perception - this touches upon the tactile in some manner - is the perception of the planet as a whole, from the global to the local, to be experienced from a certain point (in which case we remain in a two-dimensional image because even if there is a three-dimensional aspect, we remain within a classic perspective, the point of view of God, instead of the Earth’s) or must we not go beyond this and rejoin with this whole in a totally different way.
Yesterday, I don’t remember where, I saw some statistics, it was not the first time, since we are all in statistics. In general, real numbers serve as the basis for statistical analysis or sampling. I don’t think we can avoid sampling in any mental or physical operation of the body, or in the obtaining of information, because in the future there will be many more people with less room for display. You are therefore obliged to statistify a little bit of your relation to the world.
Statistics is tactile. It’s as if we were being constantly x-rayed, as if, from the body, the being, the mind, was projected a kind of permanent scanner that records useful information based on numbers. These numbers draw a contour and give texture, a texture of reality, whether it’s political polls or economic surveys, whether it’s the statistics on the number of Internet users in a certain sector, or on the number of people who use a specific data bank on any given day: all these statistics draw a collective profile, all this comes to us not in visual form, which detaches man from the world, but as a translation of the tactile, - as a numeric translation, of the sense of touch.
In Le Bleu du Ciel you have this calling, you have the calling in the manner you bring together. You bring together the local and global to the heart of consciousness, yes! But your do it no longer from a point of view, but from a point of being. What makes Le Bleu du Ciel interesting is that there is a complete break between the space on the little square of the global, the big square of the local sky, and the on-screen combination of the two, which is really the desired mental image. A break, a real cutting off from the subject, makes the experience, and his cutting off precludes vision from a traditional point of view and suppresses the experience space needed for that point of view to emerge.
It is therefore already tactile in itself and is the product of numerization. You have already given us the representation of the statistics I mentioned above by « statistifying » the two images. You have reassembled them. You literally make them touch, and you give them a value, an average, this according to the variables. It is perhaps this aspect that must also come out in Le Bleu du Ciel, the one where you provide people with concrete instruments for transforming their psyches.

Stéphan Barron : Yes, people have often asked me why I didn’t give Tourcoing the sky of Toulon. My goal is to provide the average color, this way people are obliged to reconstruct mentally, but not precisely. It’s a kind of intentional blurring of the technical precision available that leads to a more imaginary dimension, a call to more participation and greater responsibility.

Derrick de Kerckhove : The indistinct is necessary in such cases, the blurred contours ; I don’t know their work but I like the name of a group from Marseilles : « Brouillard précis » (precise fog). I like the name because as a theme it is poetically correct. The indistinct is necessary because first of all it is part of the blurred, part of the tangibleness of the world. The defined edges are those of the visual ; what is inviting is this associative side of the indistinct, the flexibility in which the different zones and substances can meet and interact. In this sense it becomes clear that thought cannot become a mechanized process : it needs room for interpenetration and echoes.

Stéphan Barron : What is your point of view on the ecological relationship contained in works such as Le Bleu du Ciel and on planetary consciousness and the awareness of the globality of the world ?

Derrick de Kerckhove : In my opinion, this is the crux of the art of communication. If there is an art of communication - it should be said that one has been developing for about the past two decades - it is to this that it should be applied. Put very simply, the role of art in a technologically accelerated world is to adapt psychology to the impact of technology.
I am presently exploring this question in depth with a critical sense that itself is developing because I’m very interested in the work of my friends in Plan K, Frédéric Flamand and Fabbrizio Plessi, who are working on the Icarus Project that looks at the fall of Icarus, the sinking of the Titanic, and similar technological failures. As such, I have put myself to the challenge and am intrigued by this divine judgement on technology. By examining the artist’s role as interpreter  of technology, am I not adopting the direction of the Icarus Project in coopting art with my views, with my manner of approaching the question, with the Icarus and Titanic projects. I have yet no answer to this question but the day I respond to it, I will act accordingly. That is to say that either I’ll completely change direction on a technological level or I’ll advance faster because I will have understood a certain number of things to add. For the moment, however, I don’t know ; for the moment, I seek the knowledge.
II already know one important thing : the artist allows more and more people to know how psychology can integrate technology : this much I know.
The second question is : must it be this way, and does art add to technology on a metaphoric level, does it legitimize technology more than just from a legal standpoint ? I don’t like to the use the word « humanist » so I ask the question does it legitimize it on a human level ? I would like to avoid confusing « humanist » and « human » because humanism for me is obsolete whereas the term human has remained pertinent. Maybe we should find another word.
All this work is therefore profoundly spiritual as well.

Stéphan Barron : Could we return to the problem of point of being and point of view?

Derrick de Kerckhove : Deep down I believe that I am a neo-idealist and a neo-romantic in relation to these questions. That’s because harsh reality slaps me around all the time. I believe, however, that our classical point of view and the heritage of the Renaissance are completely obsolete for the purpose of dealing with the modern world as they do not take into account the acces of the body to the global and to metaphor.
It’s absolutely literal. When we telephone, a simple act performed by millions of people every day, we cannot be reduced to the dimension of a Leonardo, this makes no sense : this is even more true if we consider videoconferencing, live television or of the Internet, which multiply the individual and represent him in collective form. The global is today all around us and I feel terribly naive to have taken so much time to discover something so obvious ; when I look around, however, and realize the number of people who aren’t aware of the obvious, I can’t help but feel a little less out of touch.
Therefore the point of view remains the subject’s condition i.e. the Western man who buys art, who has the means to allow himself an artistic role oblivious to economic industrial and social necessity ; he retains this point of view and this guarantee of his identity, of his quality as independent  subject, democratic subject, psychological subject, etc. There is therefore a secret interest, there is a secret agenda, in a « weighing down » of reality that we find in our perspectivist interpretations, in our relation to supposedly unified and fixed space, fixed because the space of perspective is a fixed space ; The allusion to the mirror-stronger than Lacan’s mirror stage - the mirror that is reflected is the mirror of space as an occupied thing, not merely our identily.
Above all, the identity that Lacan proposes is not purely visual as Lacan himself would have had it but rather multisensory ; Lacan continued in the Renaissance tradition, however, just as Sartre did and everyone goofed on that which had to be said on man in the making, on contemporay man. Neither in L’Etre et le Néant, Les Mouches, La Nausée,  nor in existentialism itself did he understand at all what was happening. He was defending and old image of the world. He was defending the point of view of the Renaissance.
But let’s forget this and return to the question : what will happen with this displacement between a point of view and a point of  being ? The point of being is the proprioceptive, it is the point from point from which you know that you are somewhere ; you have a body, you feel your body, you feel it from the inside, and whatever extension you give this body, by whatever type of machine, you will always be in proprioceptive contact with the point farthest away from your action and it’s point of origin which is your body. Whatever the image sent back from the object or from the instrument that you use for this communication, or this type of probing, it will come back, not as a point, but as a surface, a slap, a caress, as physical stress, but it will always be a tactile response to the world, and this is where I return to numbers because it is the only way the world as an extension of the skin is more interesting than the world as an extension of sight. It is romantic, idealistic, even Christian in a certain way because you want to absorb and eliminate by the flesh the sufferings of the world. This is an interpretation that shocks and disturbs people. People don’t want to hear about this.
As far as Le Bleu du Ciel is concerned, it is an invitation to increase the space one occupies and to manage this new dimension. And in relation to the point of being, one might add something in Le Bleu du Ciel that sends back to the viewer a sense of his position. For Le Bleu du Ciel to work even more, the viewer should be invited to put on shoes firmly anchored to the ground in a kind of variation on the pont of view. There was a time, I believe in early Baroque art, when people were able to stand in a precise place in a chapel and see an infinitely receding point of view. It would be amusing to make a reference to art history by standing someone in a particular spot, anchoring his feet to the ground and telling him to look at Le Bleu du Ciel. This would be an example of a point of view becoming a point of being ; you could even call it and sign’it point of being. I don’t give very good advice to artists because I’m always nosing about where I shouldn’t be.

Stéphan Barron : I like this idea of the baroque chapel, the precise spot from which to look. I’ve spent hours looking at this square fragment of sky cut out by the window in the roof of the Tourcoing Atrium. The clouds going by, the birds, a plane hey that’s Derrick going by ! In my view, the baroque chapel represents the world and Le Bleu du Ciel is only a pretext to be present in the eyes of the world.
 

Published in the CDROM Earth Art, Edition Rien de Spécial, Secqueville-en-Bessin, France, 2000