The conference featured Arlindo Machado, critic, scholar and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (Brazil); Hervé Fischer, multimedia artist, philosopher, cofounder and co-chairman of Cité des Arts et Nouvelles Technologies de Montreal (Canada); Jill Scott, Australian artist and curator; Yoichiro Kawaguchi, artist and professor at the Osaka University (Japan); and Ricardo Nauenberg, video director for TV Globo (Brazil).
Essay Arlindo Machado, 1990
The Art of The Simulacra
Just try to imagine the following scene: a flock of birds appears in the sky. Despite their metalic appereance, the birds fly with a certain elegance, describing a complex trajectory in the space towards some determined objective. The birds separate upon encountering obstacles in their path and then join up again further on to avoid becoming easy prey to predators, as lone birds are. Now imagine that all this is happening on the screen of a computer and that it is all simply a simulation of the gregarious behavior of a flock, with imaginary birds in an imaginary sky.
Simulation is not exactly the same thing as animation. The team in charge of a simulation project actually creates an artificial universe and a behavior model, with its own general operating rules. Once this model is set in motion and the simulation process is begun, the actors and objects of the artificial universe seem to have an intelligence to their own and to decide for themselves what they are going to do. It is as though our imaginary birds had been “taught” how to fly and how to behave in space and, from there on, they could evolve trajectories not previously specified.
The Techniques of simulation constitute only one of the numerous possibilities currently opened up by digital image synthesis. This is an intelectual odyssey aimed at the mathematical generation of immaterial beings and landscapes of the so-called “real” world. Increasingly sophisticated graphic programs are capable of givind life to these creatures of a camera, and often without even having recourse to the imagination of an artist`s paintbrush, but simply applying the laws of physics and of mathematical equations pertaining to the theme represented. Based on the assumption that there must be some sort of isomorphism between the logic of the thought and the structures of the universe, the “Leonardos” of the computer era want to explore the frontiers of the simulatable, create experimental territoires in which the concept can materalize in imaginart figures of a parallel world.
An art of constructive severity, in the final analysis, computer graphics is limited by the excessive sterility of its products. Much has been said about the “prophylactic” nature of the synthetic images: everything about them is purified, imune to the the contamitation of any noise, any disorder, any irony. But one does not fight the sterelity of the synthetic images by the introduction of unsettling noises or gestures. Rather, to recert the stylized and geometrical tendency, it is necerrary to know how to construct algorithmins that are more and more complex, more “intelligent”, and incresingly similar to the organic process of live forms.
Yoichiro Kawaguchi, one of the most original figures of computer art, seems to be heading in a very singular direction. The artist is working with algorithms capable of giving encreasingly complex forms to computer generated curved surfaces. This technique makes it possible to create forms that seem to obey certain natural laws governing the birth and growth of live beings, like poetic metaphors of an organic world in evolution. It is an eloquent example of what may come to be an art of digital simulacra in the near future.
8th Fotoptica Internacional Video Festival. 09 a 15 de Novembro de 1990. p. 74 a p. 75. e p. 76.