Arte. BR: Tecnofágica, adhocrática e radicante
[English version: Download catalog]
Technophagy is neither a trend nor a movement, but a personal concept developed to account for distinctive operations in Brazilian media art production.
What stands out is its emphasis on processes combining tradition and innovation, unusual arrangements between age-old and cutting-edge knowledge, and the revalidation of notions of high and low tech. In a sentence, technophagy is the meeting of cutting-edge science and garage science.
This approach outlines an aesthetic that operates by combining and reshaping equipment and producing devices capable of enabling other forms of creation and micropolitical actions for appropriating technologies.
But these relationships never converge into a stable definition. It is dynamic and mutable, the product of temporary, unexpected strategies and methods that respond to the age of mutable and transient power (-cracy): ad hoc (here and now). It therefore belongs to the realm of adhocracy.
More a roadmap than an organization, a porous state of mind that permeates everything, a new recipe for remixed knowledge, a new framework for coexistence between disciplines, as Bernardo Gutierrez (2012) states, adhocracy is at the vertex and in the vortex of the creative processes of the artists gathered here.
They are all Brazilian. Including Rafael Marchetti, an Argentine partly raised in Uruguay who has lived and worked here for quite some time.
They are all radicant, a concept Nicolas Bourriaud imported from biology to characterize the aesthetics of globalization. Radicant “designates an organism capable of putting out roots and adding to them as it moves along.” Like ivy. Like these artists, who produce their roots in the process of moving. (Bourriaud 2011, 20; 50)
There is a little and a lot of Brazil in all of this. Because only Brazilianness divides us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
I explicitly remix Oswald de Andrade and the Manifesto Antropofágico. Several interlocutors associate it with the idea of Technophagy, central to this exhibition. In some respects, these associations are appropriate. But regarding how the artists gathered here define their relationship with Brazil, it (the idea of Technophagy) proves closer to Mário de Andrade and his idea that we are three hundred, three hundred and fifty.
The multiplicity of visions of and relationships with Brazil defined by the artists participating in the Third 3M Digital Art Show exponentially multiplies this beautiful equation by one of our most versatile artist-intellectuals. These visions and perceptions vary almost as much as the new coaches for our national soccer team proliferate with every match, as their personal pages in the exhibition catalog attest.
“Joy is the proof of nine,” as Oswald de Andrade taught us back in 1928 in the famous Manifesto Antropofágico. A manual method of checking calculations from before calculators were common, it means finding the remainder when a number is divided by nine. Simply add the digits and subtract the largest multiple of nine contained in the result.
Here the result of this rule, popularly called “casting out nines,” is seven, the number of creation. After all, this is an exhibition of artists who devour technologies and media, grind them up, and return them to the collective as aesthetic proposals enabling plural readings of the contemporary world. Technophagic, adhocratic, and radicant.
Giselle Beiguelman
Curator of the Third 3M Digital Art Show
2012
References:
Andrade, Mário de. “Eu sou trezentos.” In Poesias completas, critical edition by Diléa Zanotto Manfio. São Paulo: EDUSP/Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1987, p. 211.
Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto Antropófago.” In: A utopia antropofágica. 3rd ed., São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2001, p. 47-52.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Radicante: por uma estética da globalização. Translated by Dorothée de Bruchard. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2011.
Gutierrez, Bernardo. “A era adhocrata .” seLecT, August/September 2012: 48–49.
Album: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCfncAj