User:Zigbe/writingTriester3-2

The exhibition.

Untitled (Electronic Gate)... 2014 (as it was exhibited at “Artista Como” in Sao Paulo)

The installation exists out of the need to document an action which is manifested as a visual work in the exhibition space. The action is lost in its objectification, leaving its invisible remains: GPS data, and found objects placed on a grid. The installation was divided in two works, a light/sound installation and a series of objects placed on a grid drew on the floor.

The light installation used all the available lamps (TL lights) of the space controlling their on/off state by a circuit. The circuit used the GPS data from a series of organized walks in the surrounding areas of the space together with a binary calculator to decide which and when the lamps should go on. After using the binary calculation to transcribe the GPS coordinates to ones and zeros, I wrote a series of codes which would control the on/off sate of the lights of the space. One code for each walk. The non-efficient coded composition generated from circle walks outside the space. At the change of each sequence one could hear the sounds of the relays echoing in the space followed by the TL lights in the ceiling. The visual of the installation was made wires taped on the ceiling traveling from each lamp to the central point where the circuit was installed giving an uncanny feeling of a non-safe electrical installation. In Brazil we call it Gato.

As I walked around I collected a few specific objects which had interesting qualities to me, made notes of its geographical positioning and placed on the grid on the floor. The spot occupied by the object on the grid was a referent to its original Geo-position in a smaller scale. Creating an outside cartography inside. Also during this movements around the neighborhood I convinced people to come and stand on the grid following the same rules set for the objects, but for this group I offered an exchange of money. Here I faced an ethical problem which I was not ready to deal with at the given moment. Despite my interest was to establish a working relationship with those people in the space, I felt the need to dismiss them from their duty to stand as my art objects.

My intention with these two actions was to illustrate my dissatisfaction as a young professional artist with the framework of the so called white cubes. Eliminating any kind of personal energetic outburst from the inside space. Avoiding transforming the documentation of my actions in a object, video or document, instead using the data loss of the GPS as a documenting tool and transforming this data back in a programed technological performance. As if the media player becomes a performer. This performer then, the circuit board with all its wires, tapes, relays and sounds, worked as a virus-like machine which generated interference on how the space and therefore the other works should be perceived fed by the invisible strokes of my actions. Limiting from time to time the visibility of those works. As for the grid and its objects I intended to criticize my own practice of research. Looking outside for exotic influences, freezing and transforming it into art as “stills of life”. Its a reaction against using the exotic aesthetics outside of its context as material to give political value to the work. Pose both objects and people inside as raw matter. The failure of dealing with the people becomes important when it shows my nativity towards “in the name of art” and raises new questions to be explored.

Technoprimitivism and so on.

It has been a couple of years since I heard terms like Technoprimitivismo, techno-shamanism. It feels like I can barely explain it myself, nor fully understand my own interest. I see it as a creative use of technologies combined in order to create an identity, or to avoid alienation. I see it very present in Southern American culture, where I believe it starts with our own creative solutions to reproduce tools we have no access to. And finally I understand it as a continuation of Marshall McLuhan's “The Medium is the Massage”. Technoprimitivismo is also part in the revival of DIY culture as a reaction to the pasteurized “good quality“ outcome from tools such as music production softwares, or the trend of Canon cameras. Great tools that open great possibilities for the public giving quite professional results with the minimum amount of knowledge on technique. It gives to lamers the possibility to produce something good, raising the quality level of what's ordinary. Than what's supposed to be “bad” becomes good by its uniqueness, rich by its flaws. People who look for uniqueness start to explore analogue photography while the most of us explore Instagram a algorithm mimic of the earlier.

It is important to define (or remember) the difference between technology and gadgetry. For the past years we've been believing that technology is something related to a computer (or to a smart phone). And only after a small effort we remember technology as a set of tools. Early this year I thought was funny and interesting to read ANT FARM define weed and video art as a mind software. Or a hack for the brain. But only later I start to understand the development of drugs as mind technologies, from MK-ultra – the cocktail developed by American Army to make people tell the truth – to amphetamines, the 24/7 post industrial revolution drug for De Perfekte Menneske.

And by primitivism, I understand not only a need to mention other tools than the ones based on ones and zeros. But attached to Techno ( - primitivismo), it seems to raise instantly a critical understand of its first half of the word. At first glimpsing a feeling that the two words cannot exist together, but slowly clarifying in the mind the broader understanding of technology again. With all those broken glimpses of ideas written I want to describe my interests in broadening up the term technology once again and understand how combining technologies no longer talk only about the contrasts between nostalgia and modernity, but compose a bricolage of political ideas. Each technology carries is own politics behind.