User:Zigbe/GradProposal

Older Drafts

Sistema Operacional: The Invisible Power Structure of things (working title)

{intro}

It's the invisible power structures behind what we consume that scares me the most. How we are constantly being shaped by the tools available to us, by the media we consume or by the spaces we navigate through unaware of its influences. Tools are designed to help making our lives “easier”, but at the same time they educate us. Tools are developed in accordance to social and economical needs and are embedded with the political interests. For example the limited speeds of upload in comparison to the download speed delivered by our ISP shows clearly that the net is not intended for sharing but downloading. Its limited bidirectional exchange makes of it an extension of cable TV with the difference that we are able to interact with the content mainly by providing our personal information. Another example is how Urban planing is used to manipulate citizens relationship with each other and with the city. Its invisible powers educates our relations in social conditions. Train stations are constantly changing, a eternal feedback of improvement and systematization of movement. {add relation between host and guest by Michel Serres???}

{project}

Sistema Operacional is a technological Opera, an inter-media audio/visual installation making use of space interferences juxtaposed by sound and moving image to create a sensory experience for the viewer. Somatosensory System. The Opera is an abstract/satyric/dramatic/horrific tale of the political powers of design. The opera is performed by machines and conducted by an Apple computer. It highlights the invisible oppressive power of those systems in a charismatic glossy (Cocoa) form.

{Relation to previous practice}

One element which I consider to be important in my works is the experience of the moment, while the objects are laid on the space in order to support an abstract relation between the viewers and the moment. The works require some sort of openness and engagement of the viewer. It tends to exclude the ones with predefined idea of how they should experience the work. This selection is build on a complex and unpredictable relation which isn't relate to age, level of education, class, gender or race, but openness and interest. A second element often present in my installations is some sort of temporary social structures construct. Or as Helio Oiticica describes: “Active creleisure – creative leisure, which differs from passive leisure - manifestation with collective participation”... the “manifestation proposing totally new elements differing from the concept of “happening”, for the absence of what Guy Brett would call 'intelectual slapstickness' or pre-parated ideas. The elements flow-float in the search of significations that grow from themselves, not as something 'happening' but as something growing.”

Radical Software (2014), was an exhibition designed by me. With this exhibition I imagined to create a perfect environment for learning inspired by TV as a source of education. The exhibition was an HDADD manifestation of information within the space. The exhibition included a series of videos, sound and objects composed inside the space. Despite the space could be experienced as a whole, the individual works offered entrance to be experienced individually as well. The whole cacophonic spectacle of sounds and moving images were generating the noise which I believed to be necessary to support a series of lectures which were followed by music performances. Apart from organizing and designing the show my participation was in composing the space. Few elements were added which were perceived as individual works but I still rather see them as supportive devices to the whole.

On Redroom (2010), was part of an art residency together with other twenty artists. Everyday I constructed a new big sculptural project without any clear intentions, eventually provoked planed “spontaneous” performances inside the space. The overworked time spent in the room creates a confusing tension on where to look at to see art, but at the same time expressing the presence of the artistic intentions inside the space. By the end of the residency the room is cleaned and the electric system of the room is fixed, leaving only essential traces of the presence, a light switch and a lamp.

{Relation to a larger context}

Helio Oiticica is a name that echoes frequently in Brazilian Art Story but only recently I've got acquainted with his writings. On his writings about APOCALIPOPOTESIS, an event which included several other artists he mentions his work process “I would rather concentrate the creative process into what in Portuguese I call “vivencias”, and that I translate sometimes as “feelings”, but that is not an exact term, unless some explanation were made along with its quotation: they are very specific feelings, that rise with the ideas themselves and the participation in those ideas as they are communicated into propositions : they would be open feelings, that flow-float into the succession of ideas, related intimately to life processes themselves : they would be the counterpart to all oppressive structure, in the contrary : the free-felt sensations, thoughts, the profound human aspirations in their internal field of action, the feelings that are opposed to any kind of oppressive system, even those that bear in themselves diverted desublimative forms, I mean mainly to those, to which many art products are wrongly directed, or transformed into their representative way of manifestation or objectivation.”

Other two works important to mention is QUASI-CINEMA, again by Helio Oiticica and Hotel Palenque by Robert Smithson.

References:
APOCALIPOPOTESIS (APOCALIPOPOTESE) – Helio Oitica
Cybernetic Hipothesis – Tiqqun
Cypherpunks: Freedom & the Future of the Internet – Julian Assange
Neuromancer – William Gibson
The Parasite – Michel Serres
Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization – Alexander Galloway
T.A.Z. - Hakim Bay