Living between reality and virtuality – on the work of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss

It becomes clear that new media begin to function as multiplicators of new worlds, creating numerous virtual environments. This diversified, compound reality in many ways takes a shape of a network. New media art in this field of events has various functions. From one hand, it is one of the most refined instruments in the process of networkisation. From the other hand, it is also the tool of verification for these processes, critically but without prejudice evaluating its development, attentively observing what shapes do they took, as well as their real or possible results. In each case, new media art is an active participant of these processes, making full use of possibilities provided by the network system. Frequently while performing its activities it is intersected or linked with the processes which are a part of the world of science, creating together with them new cultural paradigm. Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss undertook their joint, creative actions in combined fields of art and science in late 1980s. It was a special moment of a breakthrough for the formation of the character of modern civilization. Events taking place back then, as being a part of a sphere of phenomena generated by communication and information sciences, had enormous influence on the process of shaping a new cultural formation – cyber culture, and because of this, at the same time, had enormous influence on our ways of reality perception. From the beginning of their cooperation, Fleischmann and Strauss have found the tools appropriate for the realization of their works in the environemt of the internet. Their’s art has developed in parallel to the development of computer and internet environment, depicting dynamics of this network and inscribing, with the undertaken issues, in the circle of problems generated through out a development and transformations of accompanied cyber-cultural concepts