desvirtual
About this Anthology of Spread Fragments Marcus Bastos, critic, artist and my friend, says that this retrospective exhibit should be called “Incomplete Map of Ongoing Shifts”. Maybe he is right. It is more a prospective exhibit than an assessment or conclusion exhibit. The cut established by curators, Lucas Bambozzi, Marcos Boffa and Rodrigo Minelli, favored vectors capable of drawing an unstable diagram that discusses an emerging transmission esthetics. Based on experiences that try to corrupt the limits of the spaces of art, information and communication, exploring cybrid contexts (with on and off line networks) the projects joined here put forth the following question: How should we think a form of art that can be read “in between”, among diverse and simultaneous but not synchronic acts and interfaces? Wop Art was the opening gesture of this reflection and showed the reader an imponderable situation: optic art (op art) accessible through the mobile Internet on cell phones. It may be said that the situation is imponderable not because of the remnants of the media at the time, mid 2001, but due to the incompatibility between what could be read and the reading context. This is because Op Art refers to a form of virtualization that depends on the level of concentration and introspection of readers, but images conceived for mobile devices do not refer to contemplation. They are made to be seen in the traffic, in a state of dispersion, according to a speeding up logic that makes introspection unfeasible. It was not a matter, therefore, of trying to adjust Op Art to cell phones, create an optic series that could work as a “tamagoshi” aimed at an erudite audience, fetishizing the device and opposing the object, but actually to propose an ironic situation in which the conflict between content and reception conditions sound as a defiance to face the new of another statute of fruition of art in entropic environments. Art not to be seen as art, confounding itself with communication devices and presenting itself to be read, broken up by countless other inputs, relationships that were intensely in Póetrica. The Project that began in São Paulo and ended in Berlin, carried out between October 2003 and April 2004, Poétrica involved a series of visual poems I wrote with non-phonetic typographic families and an urban tele-intervention mediated by creations by the audience with the same typographic repertoire. In the phase in São Paulo, images were produced anywhere, through SMS, fixed and mobile Internet and made available on electronic panels located on the urban spot of Vermelho Gallery, on Paulista, Consolação and Rebouças avenues. These images were also rebroadcast online by webcams and reproduced on different devices (cell phones, palm tops, computers) and, in some cases on plotters and other digital printing systems. Rebuilt and saved as something new, the images of Poétrica, produced by the interacting audience or by myself, always comprised the same information, but without a link to specific support, thus resulting in visual meanings independent of their context and unlinked to their place of production and transmission. In Berlin, the project integrated the p0es1s1 exhibit and was shown at the Kulturforum and in a public space. At the museum, Poétrica consisted of a series of large format prints, showing a DVD and a web site. In the public space, it occupied an electronic panel of the Kurfürstendamm and was presented at movie theaters in the format of trailers, announcing P0es1s through the "ad_oetries" series (ads + poetry)2 conceived especially for this occasion as an invitation by Friedrich Block, curator of P0es1s. Poétrica, in this sense, highlighted the logic of cloning that permeates the digital creation. Despite the identical format and information content, the messages produced in the scope of Poétrica are not so with respect to fruition and legibility, highlighting the most fascinating aspect of the logic of the clone: its ability to be identical being different. Everything that was created was seen and read in a completely unique way, and according to its reception context (museum, gallery, electronic panel, web or movies) this was not a consequence of the size of the screen or the type of surface to which the images and texts momentarily held on. It is the result of an esthetical phenomenon specific to this nomad scripture that, because it is clonable and unlinked from support, it engenders the second-generation original (as defined by Lunenfeld) and dematerializes the media to make the interface happen as a message. The phenomenon intrinsic to the dynamics of the esthetics of transmission brings about a spectrum of new variables in the creation and reception process that makes us think of strategies that allow us to become accomplices of the machine and give way to the logic of partnerships that play with the alterity of the roles of creator and creature, facing ambivalences between the visible and the invisible, the place of the code and the place of image. And it was exactly this line of unsettling circumstances that established the story of the action of a “trilogy” De Vez em Sempre, De Vez em Nunca, both created in 20053, and De Vez em Quando (2006)4, that is part of the present exhibit. In De Vez em Quando a situation of stagnation is defined as the starting point. Images that I taped from a car, with my cell phone, are made available to be deconstructed by the audience, by using only a mouse. The more the mouse moves, the more the images of the sequence of the original video weaken. The program developed for the project transforms the mouse into a magnet that takes the images to the points the cursor draws on the screen. Nothing is erased and everything accumulates, resulting in enigmatic compositions that sometimes surface a fugitive moment of the day, and sometimes erase, delete, turn into scrap everything that precedes them. In the midst of all this, desmemorias remained an interactive web clip that explores the strange paradox of cybrid spaces that are constructed from memory, but in which the architecture of forgetfulness prevails. desmemórias deals with the non-remnants of our recent past. A story made of hiatus, punctuated vision and communication machines that frame the present and disappear. Amiga Computers, Mac Classics, Ataris, 5 and ¼ disks, 486s, 386s, XTs, 500g cell phones, phosphorus monitors, old TV series and ads, are the characters of this almost-documentary of decomposed memories, in which mediatic refuge, technological garbage and electronic affection cross. Benjamin, looking at Paris in the 19th century, asked himself if modernity was our antiquity. In the 1960s, Robert Smithson would redirect the question remembering that “instead of remembering the past, the new monuments seem to make us forget the future”. desmemórias starts out from these matrixes. Images go by in a fast pace are, intentionally, worked at the limit of their erasing, by crossing and overlapping themselves with algorithmic scripts that confound the limits between texts and images, while soundtracks of several stages blur the chronological rationality, intoxicating them with the delirium of the permanent present of our mediatic ruins. Ruins that continue to hit us down and condition us to mobile spaces, such as trains, cars, buses and taxis, always glued to the third cyborg eye of the mobile camera. I spend so much time in the traffic and thinking of traffic scenarios that when I think about my fast/slow scapes series, they (the movies I produce) seem unavoidable to me. Always recorded from inside a vehicle (cars, taxis, boats, trains and buses), with different cell phone models, in São Paulo, BH, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, New York and in Greece, they are a set of unusual frames and points of view, particular to the ongoing nomadic status, that seems enclosed, as if “stills on the move”, disconnected and artificially realigned (although they are not). Last, or who knows at what point, the vlog that I have been making very intermittently, entered this anthology of spread fragments, leds are electronic eyes, a series of videos recorded and edited on cellular phones focusing only on leds. A diary of images that reveals the electronic eyes of machines, without trying to humanize them, but paying attention to their strange signs of life and nature. Fugitive signs whose particular photogenicity seem to be the common micro-minimum denominator of the experiences that comprise the incomplete map of ongoing shifts of this exhibit. Giselle Beiguelman September, 2006
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