The “video Esperanto” presented at the Venice Biennale in the 1980s identified the emergence of universally understandable global ideograms. The “video Esperanto” research sought to codify “planetary denominators,” signs emerging from the “melting pot” cauldron of the media’s collective imagination where signs from different peoples and cultures merge. The first core of planetary denominators was presented at the Corderie dell’Arsenale of the 1986 Venice Bienniale. In a way, the symbols exhibited by Gualtiero and Roberto Carraro alluded to the global media imaginary of pop art and street art, following a line that leads from Warhol to Haring, but with the purpose of identifying and organizing in a systematic way the language of the community of the “global village” that we can compare today to the environment of the World Wide Web.
First television, then the web, with their homogenizing force, continuously produced visual common denominators on a planetary scale: scenes, gestures, buildings, products, objects, brands, figures. Significantly, these symbols were associated, or rather, labeled by words, as is the case today in the training of artificial intelligence models.
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