...Is a project to create a global Internet Art Festival for the year 2001.

Artists who believe that art can be a positive evolutionary force have started to build a worldwide network of LightHomes across the Internet.

These pages will point to a future path for art in the new electronic era, and act as a forum in which RENAISSANCE 2001 will be developed. New members and collaborators in every country are sought.

During the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th Century, the rediscovery of perspective drawing techniques gave people a wider visual vocabulary, and established more self awareness or EGO in the human mind. At the same time, this advance created new perceptions of distance and difference for everybody.This wonderful evolution of the human mind created a totally new perspective in the Arts.

The Internet plays the same role as perspective drawing techniques within R2001, except more strongly. Having a global point of view within each self awareness became possible with the creation of the Internet.

Members of the R2001 project create LightHomes that are all connected, so that, as parts of the R2001 Webring and also as a whole, the many different parts of the project become a single polyphonic art piece. In order to see this enormous art piece for what it is, both its creators and their audience must have a global perspective. Eventually, beyond the computer world, everyone on the planet may share this experience through the opening of festive art exhibitions in each country.

The success of the R2001 project will be in showing these different points of view, and the way in which they are connected, as one huge work of art for all of us to feel. This will create a powerful new energy throughout all the ARTS.

A small international group of artists are using the Internet to create a new kind of artistic movement. Unlike other futuristic movements, it is not about technology, but about a new set of possibilities for artistic communication.

Because it brings people from very different cultures together across enormous distances, it creates a set of work that is visually diverse. It is the purpose that they share, not a superfical appearance in their work. The purpose is about: evolving a new relationship between art and science: a relationship where each supports the other and they grow together... integrating the new digital media with other, more traditional artistic media: we use the computer and the paintbrush with equal comfort... changing the role of art in society: instead of being there to make negative, critical comment (or to look backwards to a dead tradition so that art becomes a fantasy escape route from modern issues and problems), our purpose is to make art that has a positive contribution to the development of human values in a time of enormous change...

Do not underestimate the power and importance of the Internet: it is big news everywhere; it is the most important and powerful step forward in human communication since the invention of writing; it is already changing the world quite fundamentally.

Renaissance 2001 is the first Art Project to address this fact, and to try to do something that would have been completely impossible without the Internet. But, at the same time, this should not be seen as simply an Internet project. It is not about the Internet: it is about the relationship between Art and Human Values. It is just that the Internet has brought us together, and makes something like Renaissance 2001 possible for the very first time...

Some say that fairytales are always more miraculous than real life --but I have a different point of view:  Life, it seems to me, is always far more miraculous than any fairytale or story.

Think about this: I see some ruins, and there isn't much left there. But there was a day when those stones were not ruins; a day when people lived there, worked there; lived through their hopes and fears. Those times are gone beyond eternity and I may never reach them any more. And similarly, future generations will never reach our time --the images of our time are fading away too...

Sometimes the things we love the most we never understand, it says somewhere --but I would say that all the things I love I'll never understand. All I'm trying to say is that Life and the whole universe is so astonishing; that something astonishing, something that we feel deep in our souls but maybe can't explain, is what artists, musicians, writers, movies, whatever, have always tried to embrace and explain.

The Internet has offered us a new tool, and within those frames Renaissance 2001, by understanding the true deep purpose of art and without any suspicion joining forces with modern technology, is creating a global network of connected LightHomes. Those LightHomes are paving the way for real exhibitions in museums and galleries, and festivals of art, on and off internet, that will celebrate the year 2001 and maybe someday the year 3001 and...