Toward Technophagy: Trends in Digital Art Creation in Brazil *
Giselle Beiguelman, 2009
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The results of the eighth edition of the Sergio Motta Award reveal interesting ambivalences in Brazilian digital art, particularly in the contrast between the early-career and mid-career categories, as well as some shared traits. I will begin with the common issues, since they concern definitions of digital art and because this conceptual framework guided selection and awards in this edition.
Generally speaking, the common trait among the award winners and the vast majority of those shortlisted is that the scope of their work lies within technological aesthetics. In various ways, this group clearly addresses a recurring question in debates about digital art: the role of technology in the creative process and in the work itself.
Art and Technology
Some say that technology is merely a tool, a means of achieving desired results. I disagree. One of the main differences between digital arts and other arts is how they problematize technology within the aesthetic field.
These are neither artworks that use digital media in their production nor art that merely takes such media as its subject. They are creations possible only within current scientific research and information and communication technologies, offering transdisciplinary readings of contemporary life by playing with the hybridization of these forms of knowledge and concepts.
One might counter that problematizing technology within art was already an important Renaissance concern, as Brunelleschi’s systematization of perspective demonstrates. This is true, but in the specific context of digital arts, this process acquires particular political and institutional contours.
Following Bruno Latour’s reflection (2005) on the impact of digital media on state politics, which would force politics to incorporate new definitions and practices, we might say that the popularization of digital media in artistic production compels reflection on the need for new museum, exhibition, institutional, and even market formats.
These formats should be capable of teaching us to deal with the transience and temporary arrangements characteristic of the most radical digital arts, strategies of sharing, and the revalidation of programming languages and scientific paradigms within artistic experimentation.
Technophagy
All these issues are present in the production of the artists awarded in this eighth edition and are also essential to understanding the work of several nominees whom the jury did not select for an award.
These creators do not fit the term “new media.” Besides being imprecise, the term has the disadvantage of resurrecting an awkward paradigm of the so-called modernist avant-gardes: novelty as a criterion for analysis. From this perspective, people speak of “new media” as though the adjective “new” could define a repertoire or mode of creation.
Beyond this conceptual impasse, “new media” reveals another problem that troubles me more than its mere imprecision. Its recurring use seems to reveal the contemporary art system’s difficulty absorbing network culture and the digitalization of everyday life in their most radical expressions. It is certainly more practical and easier to speak of new media, lumping works and artists indiscriminately under a label, than to face the challenge of creating concepts adequate to an emerging production in diverse formats.
It should also be emphasized that every medium is new when it appears, and novelty itself does not entail cultural, epistemological, or aesthetic change. What matters from a critical perspective, therefore, is the degree of complexity and symbolic plurality that works involving digital media bring to human-machine relations, following the path opened by Guattari in Caosmose (1992: 45–71).
I believe the degree of complexity and symbolic plurality activated by the projects of the artists discussed here relates to their ability to resist technoparnassian charms—the use of technology for technology’s sake—one of the most common problems in creative work with digital media.
The undeniable spread and welcome improvement and falling cost of software and technological devices have been accompanied not only by new spheres of experimentation but also by a commodification of marketing discourse. This demonstrates the success of the visual rhetoric of what I have been calling “the age of cute capitalism”: a capitalism in which everything sounds onomatopoeic, happy, and rounded, like the logos and names of Web 2.0’s main social networks.
It is precisely their “defetishized” character and relative resistance to domestication by the directives of the art and technology markets that stand out most among the artists selected and awarded in this eighth edition. This is more explicit among the early-career artists and also in this year’s hors concours award, given to Carlos Fadon Vicente.
I do not believe this relative lack of domestication results from the fact that almost none of the selected artists are represented by galleries or work for technology companies. I presume this points much more to those institutions’ critical immaturity in dealing with the emerging formats these artists express than to some natural, atavistic resistance.
This is an interesting topic that deserves more careful reflection. Rather than lose myself in intuitions, I prefer to use this space to identify some demonstrable differences between the mid-career and early-career categories. I emphasize that the group analyzed here consists of the thirty-four artists selected from almost three hundred applicants.
Although generally ten to twenty years younger than the mid-career artists, the early-career artists paradoxically display greater maturity and conceptual precision in describing their work. This probably relates to their familiarity with programming languages, evident in their concise credits—basically themselves, without teams.
While the small number of participants in early-career artists’ projects reinforces the self-sufficiency of an already digitally literate generation, it may also indicate a loss of the transdisciplinary outlook characteristic of production related to science and telecommunications, which predominates among the mid-career artists.
Among early-career artists there is also an encouraging geographic decentralization away from the São Paulo–Belo Horizonte axis that dominated Brazil’s digital art scene exclusively for many years. Above all, this group shows a tendency toward critical uses of media that seems to announce a technophagic current, or technological anthropophagy. This tendency may be an initial outline of a new aesthetic practice operating through the combination of high- and low-tech devices, circuit bending, equipment remodeling, and the integration of media of different ages.
This is not another retro slip expressing merely cosmetic notions of recycling old equipment, the keynote of industries producing consumer goods from refrigerators to cars. As T. J. Clark has noted, this kind of merchandise styled after the past creates pseudo-memories bordering on the nostalgia for the present discussed by Jameson, serving to “invent a history, a lost time of intimacy and stability, which everyone claims to remember, but which no one had.” (2007:332)
The work these early-career artists venture to produce does not engage with this sanitized “revival.” More promisingly, it seems to incorporate anthropophagic traditions of Brazilian art—including older media artists—to question the limits of the interface, tactical strategies, practices of sharing, and the challenges of relationships between art and science.
REFERENCES
GUATTARI, F. (1992). Caosmose – Um Novo Paradigma Estético. Translated by Ana Lúcia Oliveira and Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34.
LATOUR, B. (2005). “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – Or How to Make Things Public.” In: Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy. ZKM/MIT Press, pp. 4–32.
CLARK, T.J. (2007). “O Estado do Espetáculo”. In: Modernismos. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, pp. 302-329.
* Text forming the basis of the lecture delivered at the International Art and Technology Forum organized by the Sergio Motta Institute. São Paulo, British Council, November 3–4, 2009.
PowerPoint — here