Entrar al flujo

“Enter the Flow” is a generative piece that brings together on the same canvas two works produced by members of the Fluxus group at two different times: on the one hand, a sound work - Omnia Gallia by Dick Higgins (1980) - and a film without sound, Shout by Jeff Perkins (1966). Also, it places an audience in the presence, as a participant in the performance act, extracted from the video record of the Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden in 1962.

The first contact upon entering the room is the sound and its amplitude wave. The viewer-participant-user can interact with their speed by moving the mouse over the white circle from left to right. Pressing any key brings up the Perkins video. By pressing the ◀︎ or ▶ keys, the spectator-participant interacts with the sound playback time. When you press the mouse, the audience appears. In this way, the user can modify the piece and generate their own work in the present.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“Fluxus-art-fun must be simple, entertaining and unpretentious, dealing with trivial topics, without the need to master special techniques or carry out countless tests without aspiring to have any type of commercial or institutional value.” George Maciunas

When reading this quote from George Maciunas, founder and coordinator of Fluxus, I was very attracted to delve deeper into the field of such a “phenomenon” inscribed in the history of art, which could never “be reduced to a common denominator.” In Fluxus, music, plastic arts, theater and performance intersect and merge, under the prism of the abolition of the elitist border between art and life. The title of the piece “Enter the Flow” refers to the first chapter of the book “Art in Flow” by Boris Groys, but also to the origin of the word Fluxus: flow in Latin.

In this context, the choice of the sound piece Omnia Gallia by Dick Higgins is not due to chance: it proposes a succession of seemingly contradictory adjectives, but that generate an existential dialectic: the subject is not one thing or the other, it cannot be limited to a single categorization, as is the art (or anti-art) of Fluxus. Nor is the choice of the film “Shout” by Jeff Perkins, in which two men seem to fight, a coincidence, as is the presence on the canvas of an audience that at the same time laughs, is bored, and questions itself. The piece “Enter Flux” was conceived in black and white, to respect the fact that the audiovisual records of Fluxus works, which were mostly produced in the 60s and 70s, are in black and white. The canvas measures 600x400 pixels, that is, a 3x2 proportion that corresponds to the most widespread photographic format in its social and commercial use. In short, the piece “Entra un Flow” attempts to put into a generative group a sharing of works of the same artistic phenomenon from different space-times, a confrontation, a dialectic.

This conception is also based on the artist/public dialectic and their intrinsic roles as presented by Diana Taylor in “Performance”, one of the central practices of the Fluxus phenomenon: “The relationship between the artist and the public is often complicated. The artist has many ways of being present/absent, and the public also has several possible positions, evident in the words that exist to designate it: participant, witness, audience (a term originally used to designate those who listen), spectator, voyeur, voyeur.” I let them choose the dimension in which they want to place themselves when interacting with this work.

Biography

• FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “New Media”. In “AAVV. Art of the 20th century. Vol. II. München: Taschen.
• GROYS, Boris. (2016). “Art in flow. Essays on the evanescy of the present.” Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.
• TAYLOR, Diana. (2012). “What are the backgrounds of performance art?” in Performance. Buenos Aires: Printed Matter.

Used works

• Sound: Dick Higgins - Omnia Gallia (1980).
• Video art: Jeff Perkins - Shout (1966).
• Audience video: extraction from FLuXuS Internationale FesTsPiELe NEUEsTER MUSiK” (Wiesbaden, 1962).