Two incredible events transformed the nineties: the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the upsurge in electronic communications. An enormous and powerful regime, seemingly unassailable, suddenly collapsed in the early nineteen-nineties. An empire that had extended its tentacles into the everyday life of more than a billion people simply ceased to exist. Parallel to this event was a telecommunications and electronics upsurge that transformed the nature and habits of daily routines. From exploring the depths of the universe to operating the most humble household appliances, electronics became an integral, and indispensable, part of our lives.

    When the Soviet Empire crumbled an enormous reservoir of intellect was let loose. The rich ocean of intellectual discourse, whose contact with the outside world had been contained, and was often distorted and adulterated, finally flowed beyond the Empire’s borders.

    Throughout the Soviet period the arts and sciences had routinely been inhibited by ideological dogmas-or were stifled altogether. As a result some intellectuals instinctively turned to abstract and pure sciences that, at least at the outset, did not relate to “real” life. They now find themselves caught in a transition that does not bode well for them. Adjusting to the new conditions is a matter of survival.

    Artists, on the other hand, have moved on to new frontiers. They were not, and are not, hampered by limiting conditions of scientific thought or rules of conduct. Such limitations are deftly passed over by the arts community.

    Within the Newly Independent States a new generation of artists is emerging. Narek Avetissian, thirty, who alone represents Armenia at the Forty-eighth Venice Biennale, is in the forefront of this new generation. He, along with his contemporaries, does not carry the burden of the Soviet-era rules and mores. They look at their surroundings with an open mind and fresh vision. They are creating a New World in which the rules of aesthetics, social behavior and artistic expression have once again become malleable.

    Out of this new vision has grown an appreciation of the mysterious, the non-factual and the non-tangible. It is stimulation for their imagination rather than a forbidden boundary, a wellspring from which they create their art-their unconditional projections of what they discover in this zone. Intellectual discourse that is logically derived, deduced, and documented, has for the most part, been left behind.

    The new generation of artists are not dissidents. They are not revolting against organized tyranny of mind and paralyzing rules. These artists, unlike their predecessors, are free. They are the products of a new time. It is after the fact: Post Factum.

    With these artists we are introduced to a new age, a milieu when nothing seems impossible. The unobservable is observed. The inexplicable explained. Images of all dimensions, from the minutiae to the massive, are there to be discovered and explored. This is an age in which questions of reality; methods of understanding and means of conveying the human experience are being rewritten. What is critical for these artists are more the questions than the answers.

    Narek Avetissian’s installation is about the earth, space and his dream that “floats” in between. In a morsel of land called Armenia, he connects an eight millennia old stone observatory in the south-preceding the English Stonehenge by several millennia-with a state-of-the-art giant radio-observatory in the north, and from there to the unknown depths of the universe 50,000 light years away. And, for the duration of the Forty-eighth Venice Biennale, this network will pulsate from the City of Dreams. Here, boundaries delineating art and science are blurred. Disciplinary spheres of inquiry are blurred and intermingled so that one discipline can just as easily be the other.