Glitch en la ciudad

This work, produced using the p5js editor, presents us with a digital collage in which different types of distortions and glitch effects are presented, on images of a van that transports people and tacuaras (canes with which flags are carried in mobilizations), while in the background a popular mobilization is observed. The context in which this distortion is observed is within a TV, to view the work you must change the channels by clicking on the channel button. It is intended to represent how the mass media distort popular claims and actions to divert the focus of attention, and how instead of discussing the content, the form is discussed when it is a social or political act.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The starting point of this work is to read popular mobilization, social/political acts, as a type of spontaneous, even unconscious, performance. The participants in an act involuntarily become artists, to the extent that the act becomes an artistic fact. Some mobilizations, such as the 8M International Women’s Strike, or the Pride March, have clearly performative elements and are very easy to interpret as art. But even the other mobilizations, those that only seek to focus on political content, such as those of March 24 or the Peronist Loyalty Day, can also be perceived as an involuntary artistic event, which will never be repeated twice in the same way, and which only happens in collective action. All these mobilizations have a call mainly from popular classes and minorities.

As Taylor (2012) tells us, speaking about performance: “For too many people, doing nothing is preferable: there are many reasons not to act. Some say why do something that is not going to change either the world or the immediate situation. Better to do nothing. […] But, for people who feel the need to intervene (and not just talk about intervening) these excuses have no merit.”

We see that performance shares some root elements with collective and popular political action. It is because they have these popular components that the media always portrays the acts and mobilizations as an inconvenience, a traffic problem and street closures, a disturbance in the daily life of the city. Just as at the time the written media were, now TV is the main influence on general opinion, and in the context of a political act it is always in charge of leaving the popular classes and minorities who take to the streets in a bad light, who make their own a space not reserved for them.

Mobilization is, in its own way, a distortion, a glitch, an interruption of a few hours of the reality drawn by the media; an irruption of the popular classes in a context that is not their own, in neighborhoods that close the doors and lower the blinds, while they turn on the TV. It is impossible not to evoke the image of the last mobilizations of 24M, a crowd marching from the former ESMA to Plaza de Mayo, through the most upper-class neighborhoods of CABA, passing through the very door of the Rural Society, while the news broadcast talks about the traffic chaos, and not the reason why they are mobilizing. We could ask ourselves if the distortion is the popular irruption into reality, or reality itself. Digital collage seems particularly suitable to represent this glitch because “Collage has been the tool through which the artist incorporates reality into painting without imitating it.” (Seitz, 1965:6, as cited in Simó Mullet, 2004), and few things are more representative of reality than popular sentiment and the claims of minorities.

Biography

• SIMÓ MULET, Toni. (2004). The visual languages ​​of modernity: collage, assemblage and montage.
• TAYLOR, Diana. (2012). “Artivists (artists/activists)” in Performance.