Compromisos

The Internet alters us. The times that virtuality proposes to us, its immediacy, have been transferred to all spheres of our lives and art, of course, does not escape the maelstrom to which the times made possible by new communication technologies subject us. In this context, how much time are we willing to give a message to develop? What if we knew that that message, no matter how long it took, would not be repeated? In that case, what is our disposition, what is our waiting margin?

This work offers us the possibility of testing ourselves, of choosing the time we are willing to give the work to develop, with the condition that, by the time we choose to end the work, it will be gone and will never be exactly the same again. The sequences of colors, the order of the sounds and the exact point of the movements will have departed and it is practically impossible for the probability to coincide again in such a way that the same work is repeated.

Thus, our commitment to the experience of the work, with its development, will be its life and death, at least, in its uniqueness.

The work begins its proposal with a completely black image and completely silent. The work begins in a vacuum. Through the -intuitive- exploration on the part of the user/viewer and their sustained commitment over time, the work will be revealed. Curved lines with delicate, oscillating and asymmetrical movements, totally out of synchrony, at least at first glance. Commitments is a work that, although we cannot see it, never stops and that in its eternal movement, fights against its own repetition. The sequences of colors, the combinations of sounds that may challenge us in our passage through the work will restart once we finish it and, since they arise from chance, the possibilities of passing through the same work twice will be, at least, few. This, then, works as a double invitation: On the one hand, the invitation to put aside the infinite possibilities of distraction that the simple fact of finding ourselves in front of a device connected to the Internet and concentrating all our attention on a single tab offers us. On the other hand we have the question of temporality, which is, ultimately, the central concept of the work. The time our attention remains on the work will be rewarded. As we already mentioned, every time the work begins, we experience a combination of unique factors, so the real bet is that this unique work will live as long as we allow it to live, and then remain nothing more than our memory.

It is because of what was said then that we speak in terms of the transit of the work. We understand this work as an installation, an installation from virtuality, due to the way in which it seeks to challenge the user/viewer, in Bishop’s words:

“Everything about the structure and modus operandi of the installations persistently values the first-hand presence of the viewer, an insistence that ultimately restores the subject – as a unified entity – regardless of how fragmented or dispersed our encounter with the art has turned out to be.” (Bishop, Claire. “The Art of Installation and Its Heritage”).

To achieve this objective, the code of the work triggers, every time it is started (through the active participation of the user/viewer, holding down the right button of their mouse), a new sequence of colors, which will determine how the bezier curves will look in constant movement. That is, the curves will continue moving even when the program appears to be off, guaranteeing randomness in their position at the moment the user/viewer decides to start their experience. Then we will have a new sequence of colors, a random position and also the sound to start with will be chosen randomly. As long as the button is held down, the work will continue to develop, thus, a concatenation of sounds will occur (always random), which, again, guarantees the randomness of the events to happen. It is because of what has just been mentioned that we can link the development of this work with the postulates of Inke Arns, when he refers to software art:

“Software art does not refer to software merely as a pragmatic and invisible tool that generates certain visible results, but, on the contrary, focuses on the code of the program itself – even when this code is not explicitly left open or foregrounded.”

The code is, ultimately, the work, since all the decisions made for aesthetic purposes are contained within the limits and possibilities of, firstly, the language on which we are developing, and secondly the specific medium on which the work is installed, which is an internet browser. The entire concept on which the work is constituted is conditioned by the very materiality of the environment in which it occurs and, in the same way, it is taken as an excuse to reflect on it.