Invited curator |

The pieces featured on the LINK_AGE exhibition, curated by Claudia Giannetti, use digital media and digital support not only as tools or resources, but also as a conceptual foundation and intrinsic matter, linking audience and artwork, and tying together virtual phenomena, action, and creativity. Exhibited at Internet Livre (Free Internet), the exhibition featured nine pieces by artists from several different countries.

artists

Works

Curator's text Claudia Giannetti, 2001

Playful time_Critical gesture_Poetic space

Link.Bid.Bond.Anchor. This is, in an IT system, the function of hypermedia programmes that allow the association of information elements in order to inter-relate them, in such a way that a simple click of the mouse or another appropriate command takes the user from one point to another. Link_age proposes a pun (linkage or link age), charged with all the meanings one can attribute to the word “link”. The “link age”, is no doubt the age we are now living in, the digital era of interconnections, of the free access to any information bit through telematic and IT media. “Link age” points to the present day digital culture, characterised by the idea of hyperspace, in which is established a new space-time relationship inherent to virtuality; to the temporality and ubiquity of data; to the substitution of the relationship distance-time for instantaneity; to the link between the user and the technical universe. Among the many characteristics of this digital culture, one can highlight one aspect of communication that uses new interactive resources: human-machine interfaces. The human-machine interfaces - which in a metaphorical way we could call a "link" between subject and device - propitiates radical qualitative changes in communication forms based on digital media, among which one can stress a reassessment of the temporal factor (real time, simulated time, hybrid time, simultaneity); the emphasis on intuitive participation by means of visualisation and the sensorial perception of digital information; the generation of translocality effects (such as in the case of the internet) and immersion (as with Virtual Reality systems); and the access to information through systems of branch communication, of nexus and pluridimensional associations. On the one hand, the interface is witness to the transformation of culture based on writing, into the logocentric narrative structures and in “real” contexts of digital culture geared towards the visual, the retroactive, the non-linear and the virtual In the case of the LINK_AGE show, the works presented use different media or digital supports not only as tools or resources, but also as conceptual sources and intrinsic matter that allow the establishing of, through the interface between user and work or of “links” forged by the spectator in the context of the work, a close association between virtual phenomenon, action and creativity. The spectator is invited to take a preponderant role in the consummation of interaction. Playful_time The fact mentioned above is manifested in a tangible way in Natalie Bookchin's piece “The Intruder” and in Zush-MUBImedia's “Tecura-Itheals”. Both propose direct dialogical relationships between public and the piece of work. While the concept of “Tecura-Itheals” consists in offering the most diverse tools and materials so that the public can generate their own pieces of work, “The Intruder” tries to establish a link between the interactive iconographic language of video games and the hypertextual reconstruction of the literary work of Jorge Luis Borges (“The Intruder”). In both cases, the game is the strategic link uniting action and interface. The game has no other aim but itself. The fact that it happens in virtual terrain (“if...”) causes a rift with surrounding reality and, besides, allows the creation of its own reality (allows manipulation). The set of rules created for each game determines this symbolic (pseudo)reality, that is, its virtual context. Through action and the direct relationship by means of interface, the participants identify themselves with the (pseudo)reality of the game, they feel integrated to its universe. The images that compose this universe become part of this visual “vocabulary” of the user. The observer finds him or herself, thus, immersed in the visual playful. “O.V.E.R.F.L.O.W.”, by Brian Mackern and Alcides Martinez Portillo, transmit a similar feeling. In a labyrinth of possibilities, visual and sound games, the user is confronted with multiple perceptions, which can produce feelings both of disorientation or deviation and loss of control or a system and information overload. The work questions the illogical side of navigation in the incalculable data space (the “go with the flow” of the surfers), in which intuition about knowledge predominates. Critical_gesture “Gestures are bodily movements, in which existence is manifested”, (1) states Vilém Flusser in his phenomenological study about the actions and expressions of communication of the human being. “It is not, thus, the efficacy that distinguishes human gestures from other movements, but the fact that in them a decision is expressed; they are phenomena of the ethical level of reality and manifestation of existence. In a word, it is the fact that they are 'motivated'.” (2) As an example of such motivated gesture we can mention the critical gesture, one that seeks not only to understand and interpret, but, above all, to warn, expound and reveal the discourse corresponding to gestures. The critical gesture is the gesture of “taking off the mask” and examining the internal part, not forgetting that political, cultural and aesthetics aspects of the mask are to be found in its external face, that, with this gesture, they become invisible. This internal side is considered “false”, negative and illegitimate. The act of “taking off the mask” means also understanding the false side as authentic, that which manifests the mistake and causes us to reflect about the distinct roles we usually play, or about the different strategies of discourse modelled on the external face of the mask. The gesture of “taking the mask off” allows one to recognise, underneath, the gesture of giving meaning. The three works that make up the “critical gesture” propose, from different points of view, this possibility of “taking the mask off”. “Wartwar”, by Francesc Abad, uses the plan of a Nazi concentration camp and the minimal space of the cells to "people" them with (original) oral discourses by different philosophers, thinkers and writers of the Twentieth-Century. The cells - spaces designed for the privation of freedom and the exercise of power - are transformed into environments for reflection (free-thinking). In each of three wings, and in different ways, can be heard, respectively, the voices of culture, of the social and of ideology. “Jacks in Slow Motion”, by Kiko Goifman, analyses today's prison spaces as centres in which power games and disputes take place on different levels: between the institution and population; between dominators and dominated; between oppressors and oppressed; between prison guards (subjects) and inmates (objects); between inmates and inmates; between system (panoptical) and surveillance object (inmate) etc. The so-called felon assumes, in today's society, the category of an individual who, by definition, must be excluded. Exclusion can happen by means of the death penalty, in countries where it is allowed, or reclusion in prisons, in which physical and mental torture are justified as enforcement of discipline. Jeremy Bentham's “Panoptic” and its invisible surveillance system is subtly present in the context of the whole piece. The “Marea Negra” project, by Gabriel Corchero, equally deals with the invisibility of catastrophes, an invisibility originating from the inability to see (to be conscious of) the dimension of the disasters in our environment, caused by the human being itself. At first, the human being engaged in a struggle against nature as a means of preserving its existence, and thus provoked a catalysis not only with the environment, but also with itself. The subject was transformed into object, territories into properties, and nature into a mere source of raw materials. The present ecological catastrophes, fruit of neoliberal fanaticism and of socio-cultural irresponsibility, are not only destroying earthly vital essence as is transforming people into hostages of the consequences being produced now and that will be produced in our environment. Corchero induces a poetic immersion in this vast (and metaphorical) black tide, travelling visually and sonorously through the hypertextual space of interaction, and proposing to us an submerged navigation that, notwithstanding, includes moments of respiration (images and concepts), in such a way that we are capable of surfacing into our conscience. Poetic_space The virtual construction of the body in “Epithelia” by Mariela Yeregui; a geographical experimentation of a web artificial space in “Desertesejo” by Gilbertto Prado; and the (re)building of language in Agnés de Cayeux's “Douze Notes” are samples of different ways of integrating random processes of navigation and participation of the user in the data spaces laid down by the pieces of work. The belief that creativity or creative thinking is, by nature, random, needed, is common. Multimedia digital or telematic systems seem to be in such moments the par excellence field of random experimentation. In the case of the works here presented, random links play that role. The intuitive living of virtual spaces, its progressive exploration and its formation are essential aspects common to the three net art projects. Resorting to different metaphors - skin in “Epithelia”; perception or territory from the point of view of the panther, the serpent or the eagle in “Desertesejo”; synthetic composition in “Douze Notes” - transforms proposals in poetic moments based on participation, in mediations (links) and on hybridisms that users may produce. The principle of navigation in potential space intends to provide the observer with the knowledge of the possible. To use Flusser's words, the “gesture of searching”, or the fumbling, in which one does not know beforehand what is being sought or what the final destination is, stands as the paradigm of all our gestures. And it is the common trait to all of the works in LINK_AGE. (3) 2001, Claudia Giannetti Notes: 1. Vilém Flusser. Los gestos. Fenomenología y comunicación [Gestures. Phenomenology and Communication]. Barcelona, Herder, 1994, p. 77. 2. Ibidem, p. 78. 3. Link_Age - On-line and Off-line Participative Art Internacional Show, curated by Claudia Giannetti, was produced and presented by Centro Cultural CajAstur during the 48th International Photography Show, at Palacio Revillagigedo, in Gijón, Spain, from March 15 to May 20 2001.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, " 13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil" [13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival]:19 to 23 September 2001, pp.147-148, São Paulo, SP, 2001.