At the end of the twentieth-century we are facing a shift towards the proliferation of more interactive artforms. This is a reaction against the inter-passivity inherited from previous media and against passive use of potentially interactive media. Interactive video disc is moving video beyond its links with cinema, computer holography is pushing holography beyond the photographic frame, interactive computer installations, including Virtual Reality, are taking computer graphics beyond the Renaissance window. We can now talk of art as seeking a dialogical structure, in which dynamic exchanges and transformations of images, sounds and texts reflect the flux of data of the information age in a way that fixed forms can not. Telematic art takes on the exchange between two or more people, and finds a model in the unpredictable loop of ideas, gestures, words, gazes, sounds and reactions they perform in real time according to one's feedback to the other's utterances.
Dialogues can assume different shapes.
We are understanding that the mental association of images is capable of articulating complex structures in itself, and we seek to investigate how visual syntaxes work, whether in thought or exteriorized in visual syntagms. It is clear that if a capitalist television is replaced by a Marxist television, it is a mere substitution that takes place, and not a revolution, because the control and distribution of information would still remain centralized and unidirectional. In a smaller scale, to use a fax machine to send fragments of a picture to a gallery as an artistic activity is to disregard the real esthetic issues of two-way communication, because the picture could have been sent by mail with the same result. Only a transformation in the structure of communication ignites a real democratic change. Works of art created with telematic media are communication events in which information flows in multiple directions.