Representación del aura
The search for the image is to reproduce the aura, or what we culturally associate with the aura, to put into tension the concept developed by Walter Benjamin through a medium in which there would precisely be the loss of the aura. So, in the developed image, the aura is both deteriorated and represented.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
Water Benjamin comments that something is missing in the art of technical reproduction: “the here and now in the work of art.” This constitutes, says Benjamin, the concept of authenticity. Then, the work of art of technical reproduction loses the authority of its originality, its aura atrophies. However, in Aura Representation the use of the random() function, although it returns pseudo-random numbers, could lead us to assume that each reproduction of it will produce different results, that is, it will produce an original each time.
The code is the potential work, which is carried out when the code is executed. And when executed it produces this authenticity. The work is when it is. It sounds tautological, but I am referring to the passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics referred to by Agamben in Creation and Anarchy. The Greek philosopher differentiates between dýnamis and energeia. The first term refers to the power and the second to the act. Energeia refers to being-in-work. For Aristotle there are cases, those in which the act produces something more than just the use, in which the energeia resides in the thing made and not in the act of making it. So, we could think of the code as the activity and the images that produce its execution as its end, its telos. We see, then, the two moments (that of construction and that of the thing produced) together and at the same time. We could also think that the energeia, the work produced, is the code and its execution is a simple flick of the tail.
To get out of this confinement, I would like to propose Representación del aura as a work whose power lies in the passage itself, not as something finished, not even as something that ends, but as something that is continually being done. And I use an impersonal verb since a large part of the images produced by the code are generated autonomously and something new is generated every moment, something original. In this “self-generation” I was interested in the possibility of working with loops and repetitive structures and the possibility of producing a work that is only interrupted when the viewer decides, but that by itself could continue infinitely. Furthermore, the use of the alpha channel allowed me to show the changes that occur as the work happens. This gives a palimpsest effect, in which we see how one thing is “written” over the previous one, generating a kind of montage between the various layers. Camnitzer’s Conceptual Art and Conceptualism in Latin America encouraged me to work on the relationship between center and periphery, and to dirty the canvas to erase traces of forms that could lead to a relationship with minimalism or forms of mainstream conceptual art, as Camnitzer calls it.
The work of Jared Tarbell (*), especially the Binary Ring1 sketch, was taken as a reference. At the same time, the images generated by John Whitney (**) and his exploration of non-symmetrical and non-static graphics served as inspiration in the search.