Non-show art and remnants scattered
in small, medium and large screens

by Marcus Bastos*

One of the striking features of digital language is the capability of being alike and different at the same time. The binary code multiplies itself through clone sequences. But each one of the latter works in its own way, because it responds to the several systems in which it circulates.

An example is Wopart. It is a project on images identical in what differentiates them. Poems that shift from visual to verbal and from phonetic to non-phonetic, in times in which everything flows weightless, in a random exchange of 'zeros' and ‘ones’  through all kinds of  networks. The repeated code makes it impossible to distinguish the binary clusters that circulate, wireless, from one set to another. But each time that the interface relays the code image, it changes the experience of whoever is looking.

            2BeinCode39: Wopart, one of the projects included in [re]distributions, explores
            traffic between networks, making wap poems unplugged from their support circulate
            among cell phones.

In Did you redad the east?, web and cell phone interfaces allow the audience to interfere on urban electronic panels, like choosing a cable TV channel with the remote control pointing to the set in front of the sofa.

            Map of Radial Leste, on which 165 thousand people a day circulate.
                        http://www.pucsp.br/artecidade/novo/giselle/gb_urb.htm

The teleintervention dialogues with the urban language that prevails in the surroundings of where it was created. In the project, the audience is invited to send digital graphite through the internet to spread to one of the electronic panels located there. The objective is to stimulate an inversion in the curatorial logic, by making the audience take part in the selection of the art exhibited.
Technical resources are the tools that operate the mediation between the horizon of creation and the possibilities of accomplishment. Technology is the production of knowledge resulting from this process, the operation of subverting technical paradigms and investing on cognitive, perceptive, and institutional arrangements as an alternative to the scientific, corporate models of galleries and museums. In this sense, technological research is that which goes beyond these projects.

In egoscope, the practice is more eloquent, as the project explores the flow of information on the internet itself. In the project, participants are responsible for de/organizing the material that comprises the collective autobiography of the title-character. The process occurs through sending URLs which indicate egoscope preferences (What kind of music does he listen to? What perfume does he use? What chocolate does he eat?).

The site addresses sent were projected, at pre-defined schedules, on an electronic panel on Brigadeiro Faria Lima Avenue, in São Paulo. The sites sent could be seen from the return image relayed by a webcam to the project site (http://www.desvirtual.com/egoscopio/english/tec.htm), and are stored in its database. Click for who saw I want to be John Malkovic and did not know how to dive in.
The Internet, or better yet, the experience of being online, despite having marked the return to the written text, gave us a first-time dimension of image. We learned on the web environment that images have weight, and this measure makes us decide on the feasibility of a project, because any excess may mean it will be impossible to receive it online.

In Poetrica, the procedure gains emphasis. The essential of the project is the code relayed which temporarily sticks to it or to that interface. Moreover, Poetrica appropriates the publicity space, and inverts the logic of the show, by allowing that poems-not-to be-read fill in the gaps of the program schedule of the three electronic panels of São Paulo (http://www.poetrica.net/portugues/mapa.htm). Thus, the project investigates the way in which reading occurs in entropic environments, and in traffic.

ReadMe: Poetrica also is a network comprised of nomad poems and web ad-oetries, in addition to sources and mp3s available for download

One of the protocols that links the work of Giselle Beiguelman is the research of “a reading context mediated by interfaces connected in Network”, as she explains in the beginning of the printed half of The book after the book (http://www.desvirtual.com/thebook/ebook.htm), an essay that touches, totals and makes intersections between paper and screen.

//**Code_UP is a summary of how these networks allow new arrangements of their languages, as the binary code becomes more complex. On the internet, the flow of data improves swiftly, which makes it possible to relay videos in increasingly larger amounts, and program images with the same easiness restricted to text until recently.

The project explores exactly this image of programmability. In its first implementation in the Life Goes Mobile exhibit, of 2004, the audience was invited to insert images on the three screens in front of it using a Bluetooth cell. Then it was possible to navigate through three-dimensional compositions generated by processing (program utilized for the development of //**Code_UP), expanding and turning indefinitely floating compositions, in a process in which images revealed their width when the vectors that were perforating it were projected in space.

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In the web version of //**Code_UP, when users move the mouse, they also navigate the reverse of images that dissolve in their own geometry as they enlarge.

But this is not the most important part. By establishing an analogy between the expanded zoom that the user pilots and the quixotic enlargement process in which photographer Thomas (character from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up) engages, the project reveals the abyss that separates analogical and digital images: photography is a light tattoo injected in the film; the digital image is an addition of pixels, ejected as metal beams on a screen.

It is this ability of indicating through small at distance detours that goes from the technique to technology that approximates Beiguelman’s denser projects of essayistic accent, the case of this //**Code_UP and of the already mentioned The book after the book. To extract the complex sense of technological operations with which her work deal is another trademark of the artist’s projects. A good example is a series Sometimes Always / Sometimes Never. They are interactive installations in which videos sent by cell to the screen compose and decompose through the audience’s action.

Both explore the different phase between space and time that emerges at the overlapping of the fragments of the decomposed video, afterwards juxtaposed. The video spreads all the way through the frozen screen. It spreads in space. And this movement makes time. The procedure relates to a distorted version of frames in cinematographic succession. But, ironically, shifting from one frame and another prevents the realistic desire that rules in a significant part of (good and bad) movies made to become concrete.
Any content produced for mobile phones implies the acceptance of rules pre-defined by operators (as the maximum weight in Kbytes) and by devices themselves that somehow hinder the freedom of other forms of art in which the artist defines the rules for his/her work to perform.

Sometimes always is an exercise reminding volatile. Thinking is an exercise of decomposing the world in vestiges of perception reordered in the memory. The project makes this process visible. The result is nearer to the mental functioning understood by psychoanalysis as metaphorical models of neural networks and other neurological juggling. Always the same, but different.

Sometime never addresses the impossibility of forgetting (despite the will of being able to do it) and reverses the logic of the previous project. The explanatory text itself published on Beiguelman’s site makes it clear: “Sometimes always and Sometimes never have distinct cognitive and perceptive horizons. Unlike the former, in which image handling generated a situation marked by differences and repetitions, in an entropic mosaic, here, results points toward an unstable palimpsest”. The project explores saturation, through the use of colors that can be controlled at the keyboard. Always different, but the same.

Originally published at : http://www.artemov.net/page/revista03_p1.php, revista art.mov, number 03, 09/19/2006