Abstract. The study considers an art-object as a specific message. It investigates three types of communicative spaces initiated by different kinds of complex art-objects depending on the belonging of the participants and components of the communicative act to the “real” and/or virtual reality.

Any art-object, including digital ones, is a “text” (in J.Derrida’s meaning) coded in a specific way or a message with a multiple addressee, and thus it can be described with the communication act formula by R. Jacobson. A traditional artwork causes image mediated communication, all participants and components (code, channel, etc.) belonging to the common “real” reality and homogenous communicative space (which we call the first order homogeneous communicative space).
 
Contemporary art projects often initiate besides the traditional vector of communication (“author-artwork-viewer”) a viewer-object interaction (e.g. video installations “Metropolis” by S.Biggs, 2005; “Digital Water Pavilion” by Smart Cities Group; 2008 “Dramhouse” by A.Dementeva, 2009, etc.). Such art objects create a kind of communication space where the communicants are located in different realities (real and virtual) and the interaction vector repeatedly crosses the borders of the realities in both directions. The addressee involved into communication physically passes from one reality to another and consciously or in a random manner affects the events in the virtual reality and the “text” of the art message. The genuine author (addresser) is absent existing beyond/above the communication space like a demiurge who has created the laws of a virtual world. It is also possible when the art object can only exist as such entirely in virtual reality like the Brahms symphony in Hamburg (4.03.2009) with different instrumental parts being performed separately in different sites of real space and the fragments only assembled into the whole in the virtual space of the Internet. Another example of this kind is the hyper-project “The Life Phantasmagoria” of paintings by I. Kamenev (Russia). In all cases mentioned above one faces mixed (augmented) reality and gets into the first order heterogeneous communicative space.
 
Virtual space (first of all, the Internet) can serve as a kind of media-environment where virtual copies/originals are located (e.g. SecondLife galleries). Thus a virtual context emerges and both the author and the audience have to incarnate into avatar personalities to exhibit and to perceive art objects. There are some artists like Gazira Babeli who only exist in virtual reality. Art communication spaces of such kind constitute the second order homogeneous communicative space. Finally, a virtual art object may come back into the first order communicative space – as an exhibit item in real life art galleries (e.g.“Virtual Renaissance, Florence, October 2008 – January 2009) – to loop communicative chains of different types in the integrated hyper-space of art communication.
 
Key words: art object, art communication, communicational space, media art, virtual reality