The exhibition A Arte na Trama Eletrônica (Art in the Electronic Grid) featured five teletext graphists. The show featured and was organized by Rodolfo Cittadino – an Egyptian-born, Brazilian-based artist of Italian descent, and one of the pioneers in researching the potentialities and the development of art through teletext.
In addition to his own works, Cittadino has brought productions by four “grid art” forerunners: Benjamin Marques (Portuguese-born, French-based), Lie Liong Khing (Indonesian-born, Brazilian-based), Nelson das Neves (Brazilian) and Verginio Zaniboni Netto (Brazilian).
Photographic panels and spreadsheets covered the event’s didactic part, providing a step-by-step demonstration of the entire creative process leading up to the end product, shown in teletext.
artists
Critical text Lino H.
Traduzindo computerese
1. Making computer art means using historically available materials, trying to combine productive forces and relations of production.
2. In order to achieve this combination, one must dive deep into the material to extract knowledge from it. In the computer, it means to create using the commands it offers, thorugh its logical structure, using a software program.
3. Upon being created as a software program, computer art partakes of two moments at once: the moment of its autonomy and oneness in the face of other artistic creations (since only computer artworks are created using software), and the moment of its assimilation in the real world, because being a software is a characteristic of all things a computer uses as a mediation between itself and production.
4. Being a program, computer art takes on its own features: the images it generates are always different from one another and different in the sequence in which they appear. This is so because the data that compose image are processed differently each moment, by using a command only the computer has, which manipulates images in their own way. Like the results from a dice roll. Like what happens with every software.
5. Thus, computer art reflects an aspect of belated capitalism: looking to diversify, it presents itself differently each moment. Like capitalism, it pursues integral, infinite production, its total, interference-free self-reproduction. Even though it is different each time, its structure, its intent, is always the same.
6. Looking to join productive forces and relations of production, seeking its autonomy, computer art, by trying to extract new knowledge from itself and from the world around it, discovers that it reflects the current stage of division of this connection, which is and remains separate. This is its moment of truth.
7. Culpo de dido/mea culpa: upon discovering itself to be a reflection of this situation, computer art does not resist its own denunciation, takes shame in being a reflection when it wanted to be autonomous, and then succumbs. This is why the images are fleeting, vanishing, eluding when we want to fixate them, to hoard them. They can only be observed as process, production process, work in progress. Unpredictable in their appearance, like a dice roll. And this is how they seek to escape the managed world’s control. But this very world controls them as software programs. They are programmed to be unpredictable. However, the fact that they are thus is the only thing that warrants them that moment of truth.
8. In spite of everything, computer art insists in fixating itself in the world that engenders it and at the same time causes it to succumb. This is why even though it disappears, it seems to establish itself again, and thus new images are produced, as if seeking a new synthesis of productive forces and relations of production. Only we know this synthesis will not come to pass, and hence the cycle does not end.
9. Each moment that the programs appear on the screen is a fragment from the image production process. Its differentiated reproduction is one of the ways in which computer art attempts to make up for this fragmentation, either by itself or with help from the medium. Hence the kaleidoscope: images equal amongst themselves, even though they are oriented differently and reproduced in the same space-time. Valueless commodities, made available either through the division of productive forces and relations of production, or through their infinite reproduction; this reproduction is the only thing that endows them with meaning, i.e. with value.
10. If every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism, then I prefer the barbarism of computer art.