Ventanas

Link to the work: Windows - p5.js

Windows

“Windows” is a generative work inspired mainly by Duchamp’s Ready Made and its particularities, starring dark spaces illuminated with different objects; opening up to the view of a completely new space, this time dominated by light. Generating new images through the user’s interaction with the work, we present a contrast that projects the work beyond the object and the creation of a new reality. For its conceptualization, I was inspired by the works of Grace Hertlein, where the articulation of figures based on light and darkness predominates (highlighting the contrast and the formation of new realities).

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development:

The work “Windows” was developed on the p5.js platform, formed from combined primitive figures and tones ranging from white to black (through different shades of gray). To achieve interaction with the user, several if structures were used (which created the shapes that give light to the work), enabling different actions when pressing the keys from “A” to “F” (each letter affects one of the vignettes), in addition to global variables that defined the customization and easy access to its computer code.

The first facet of the work represents a vignette in the shape of a window that allows us to see different rooms, representing fragments or parts of reality (whose invention in art came about from Ready Made, created by Marcel Duchamp, completely changing the perception of the artistic phenomenon known until now), now dominated by a new conception of art. The rooms, detached from their context due to the lack of light, configure a “plastic” whole or a fantasy world where darkness reigns. Within what the ordinary world offers us, certain light-generating objects were selected that give life to the work as such, only in interaction. In this way, we contemplate a connection with the avant-garde of new realism, which is now making its way as a “happening” work, abandoning its status as a static work. Although we are talking about a work of art with instructions for its characterization, we can say that the essence of the work is revealed only if such interaction exists.

We can also link the work with the comments of Paul Válery, in “The conquest of ubiquity”, where the work can be presented simultaneously in different places at the same time. What we call “sensitive reality at home”; It allows its infinite reproduction and, in turn, its dissemination and circulation. Its presence is not limited to the walls of a museum, or the limits of an established framework, but to the creativity of the viewer.

Now, the conceptual instance of the work is inspired by the texts of Simon Marchán Fiz and Nathalie Heinich:

In the chapter “The collage principle and objectual art” by Marchán Fiz, we can analyze the recovery of objectual collage as fragments of our reality captured in art, completely decontextualized; connecting the overflow of limits in the empirical object, thus creating new concepts articulated by darkness and light, existing - in this case - through the window. Freed from all imposition, the light generators configure a new transformed reality, revealing the purest essence of the work, independently of the objects in their material reality.

On the other hand, in “The work beyond the object”, Nathalie Heinich proposes multiple ways of projecting the work (which does not suffer from material limits), where the importance of the object is in decline, thus highlighting the concept behind the whole in the work and not its concrete materiality. Its dematerialization allows new realities to be generated through interactive changes (in this case, the presence of light). He also mentions ideas as what makes the work, in turn all the choices that it entails, thus forming a creative act and the mark of the artist himself.

So, then; First we contemplate a rather simple image, which tends to lose importance compared to the developed concept; and a sequence of subsequent images where we can see a conception of figures that have greater complexity, showing something that was previously hidden.

Literature

Valéry, Paul. (1999). “La conquista de la ubicuidad”. Madrid: Visor.

Marchán Fiz, Simón. (2012). “El principio collage y el arte objetual”. Madrid: Akal.

Heinich, Nathalie. (2017). “La obra más allá del objeto”. Madrid: Casimiro.