Bugeado

To execute this work, in the first instance I created a background of three squares of different shades of gray, and I played with the rotate and translate functions, to create an optical illusion in the background. Then, with the primitive figures, I made a person standing almost in the center of the image, which has two interactions, that, when I press the left click on the screen, the skeleton of the subject appears with a slight tremor. Finally, the work has a frame that surrounds it where below it has an analogy made with the figure of a butterfly and the name of the work itself.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

For the first background I was inspired by Herbert Franke, specifically oscillograms and a series of works called “Drakula”, made between 1970 and 1971 in which he played with geometric figures and their twists; I was specifically inspired by how he made them, not by the works themselves. I find it interesting the effect that one can generate by combining the figures and how the background constantly changes, leaving many options to appreciate and choose the one you like the most. Beyond that, there is also the proposal that there be a white background to give greater importance and/or appreciation to the central figure, as Charles Csuri did in a series of his works, called “Random Wars”, where humanoid figures can be observed in action. I was particularly inspired by one in which dancing figures can be interpreted, but it is not totally safe.

Like him, I wanted that beyond the background and the illusion it gives, the central character can be appreciated in some instance, hence the proposal of the quasi-white background.

For the character, I also took references from Rebecca Allen in her work “Catherine Wheel” from 1982, where it is not a possible interpretation that the character is dancing, but rather she really needed a dancer to be able to imitate her physical body when dancing. I couldn’t ignore that both Csuri and Allen made the subject with lines, and that’s why I decided to make the skeleton of the character as also part of the inspiring source. Linking this with the texts read, on the one hand, Agamben Giorgio, insists a lot on the investigation or confrontation of the past to understand the present, when making the work I basically considered how to break with the structure and modify its meaning.

I agree with the relationship that the artist can have with the work, in the number of meanings that each one can give it and the problem that this can become.

On the other hand, I am also going to mention Peter Bürger, because of the general idea he mentions about the work of art. Linking it more specifically to the concept of the organic work, in order to continue going deeper, I am going to take an essay by Jochen Schulte-Sasse where he talks about the aesthetic limits of the organic work, as a totality simultaneously united with the ideological limits of the observer. Within these limits, it constitutes art as an “infinite continuum of reflection” (pg. 37). Said colloquially, every artistic text contains a variety of “connotated” meanings that observers can give it, such as: a political, social, religious sense. And, it lacks the “denoted” meaning that the artist seeks to give it.

According to W.K Wimsatt: “Each reader will experience the poem at his own level of experience or at several. A good narrative poem is like a stone thrown into a pond, in our minds, from which increasingly wider circles of meaning come out, and this is due to the structure of the story”, seems to me the best analogy I can use to explain what was said above.

Making reflective memory from what I was working on and reading throughout this work, what interpretation do I want to give it? What interpretation do I want you to take? Did you notice the details that the work has? Will they notice? Did I manage to break the tradition of art? I am not sure if they are rhetorical questions or not, Sander Cohen, a character in a game, has as one of his phrases “The artist has the duty to seduce the ear and delight the spirit”, and I want to reveal what this was thinking when creating this work, doubting until the last minute if I managed to delight any spirit or seduce any ear.

Literature

BÜRGER, Peter. (1974, 2010). “III. La obra de arte vanguardista”, en Teoría de la vanguardia.

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. (2017, 2019). “I. Arqueología de la obra de arte” en Creación y anarquía.

Jochen Schulte-Sasse. (1984). “Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-garde. Foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse”- Theory and History of Literature, Volume 4.

Inspiración

Cohen, Sander (2007), Bioshock. (Juego)

William Kurtz Wimsatt (1947). “The Structure of the “Concrete Universal” in Literature”