Berrinche #0.3
Berrinche #0.3 is a short video game about the discourses that grow around artistic creations. In it the player is invited to make decisions about a piece and in that process explore their own criteria/affections about artistic creation, the Art institution and the seriousness/arbitrariness of this whole matter. For this, variations are generated on a parody image with different degrees of interactivity.
I chose the parody game format with the intention of reestablishing a certain lightness in the way I approach thoughts/affections about art without this implying trivialization. I believe that it is possible to create joyful arts without necessarily falling into banality or cynicism.
The visual proposal is aimed at emulating old analog vector graphics devices (such as those that can be seen in Mujer con Mariposa by Berni or Colibrí by Charles Csuri) in dialogue with retro-gaming elements.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
Someone once told me this anecdote about Pablo Picasso: when the painter publicly presented his painting Dove of Peace (an image created with a few strokes on a plain background) a member of the audience rebuked him, telling them that this work could have been done by a five-year-old child. The painter, known for his short temper, responded “it is possible, but it took me 40 years to be Pablo Picasso.” I don’t know if the story is apocryphal.
Looking at the first digital images I can’t help but feel a certain sympathy. The sketches look innocent and precarious to today’s eyes. They remind me of the anecdote about the dove. Images like those mentioned by Berni and Csuri awaken my interest and imaginary nostalgia. They speak of a time when the capabilities of technology generated a fascination inversely proportional to those capabilities. As can be seen in Paul Valery’s poetic-technological enthusiasm in The conquest of ubiquity where there is little room for materialization, there is much room for imagination.
When we talk about electronic arts, we are referring to a branch of the arts that was born after the avant-garde, that is, it was born conscious of itself. It did not have a previous period in which the work imagines being only what it is, without having to be about what it is. Having bitten the apple of self-knowledge and carrying that original sin we are part not only of the Art market, but of the What is Art market.
Tantrum #0.3 is, for me, a way of reminding myself that this question only really matters if new pieces emerge from its (always provisional) answers. After all, we don’t seem to have much problem maintaining that everything has the potential to be art, and at the same time accepting that Art is dead.
If for Picasso’s Paloma it was the name of the artist, for Duchamp the gallery, and for Csuri the novelty, we could say that the leap from “art” to Art is made by the investment of some form of capital, whether material or symbolic, or the repetition of signs of belonging to the European tradition of gallery and elite. This explanation leaves me unsatisfied. I preferred to let the player (each player with the tools they have) decide, reserving the malice of knowing that their incentive is probably more to see content than to find a truth. Furthermore, Tantrum #0.3 only talks about ART (not art, nor Art) so any relationship with reality is pure coincidence.
If the first version was a reaction from the affections to the aesthetic commandments of José Luis Brea and the second a verbose waste of words on little matter, Berrinche #0.3 is a first attempt to give shape to those affections. The materials present (and those that were not present) were born from a disorder of capricious impulses and over time sedimented into this prototype of an organized Tantrum.
Literature
-BREA, José Luis-LSA47. (2008). Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas.
-VALÉRY, Paul. (1928). La conquista de la ubicuidad.