Estelas del tiempo
Cubes, geometric figures rotating at a seemingly random pace on a black background. Left clicking will invert your colors, CTRL will return you to the starting point. Have you tried staring at its axes? It has a certain hypnotic quality, as if they were trying to swallow the small, stubborn sphere gravitating around them, or as if they had simply spit it out, only to return to the beginning. But after a while it starts to get a little messy. The work does not seek constant or forced interaction, but rather to be appreciated for its simplicity. It’s fun, following the movements while you wonder what the meaning of some cubes turning and turning is, the simplicity of it all, until your imagination does the rest.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
Starting from the saying of Nathalie Heinich, in her book ‘The work beyond the object’, where ”(…) Contemporary art has become, essentially, an art of ‘telling’: an art of narration, or even legend, an art of commentary and interpretation, or simply an art of anecdote.”
The process begins somewhat accidentally in front of a dark screen, and my brother there watching. I realize that time is ticking, but my mind doesn’t keep up. It had stopped. After a couple of blinks and a few lines of code, a medium-sized sphere perched in the lower left corner stands out on the screen, contrasting with the black background. I discovered that I had been trying to spin it, but of course, given its shape it was less than imperceptible. I got a little stubborn; I didn’t have clear ideas, I just knew - or felt - that I wanted to generate some kind of movement, nothing complex.
Hours after quite a lot of typing generated four empty squares that surrounded the first, solitary circle, but when they began to rotate they spread out all over the screen, escaping from the canvas and returning immediately afterwards. Actually that nonsense was quite funny, and in my opinion it had some charm.
In “Redefinition of artistic practices”, José Luis Brea mentions that “The work of art no longer has to do with representation. Would anyone think that the dream - that which induces an ‘apparent content’ in someone who revives the ‘latent’, and tells it in the morning - has to do with ‘representation’? Of what?” Maybe it was more like a dream.
Inspired by the works of Vera Molnár, mainly in “Hypertransformations (1975-1976)”, whose geometric figures were the protagonists, and the so-called “Free Works” by Nathalie Heinich, where the work can be enriched by comments and interpretations, the sphere emerged inside a pair of cubes, some static and others that rotate randomly about their center, needles rotating in opposite directions like the hands of a clock that mark the passage of time, forward but also backward, which was where my mind stopped then. All based on simple interactivity and low-brightness grayscale. It could well be the sun and, the very small sphere, the Earth gravitating around it as time passes.
It could be a sundial and the tiny round thing the lunar calendar. It could represent when we meet new people, and how certain people gravitate towards each other. A square wheel, a couple of loose nuts or simply just hubs spinning on a light-dark background.
Literature
BREA, José Luis. (2008). “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas (s.21)” en El tercer umbral. Estatuto de las prácticas artísticas en las era del capitalismo cultural. Murcia: CENDEAC, pp. 106-113.
HEINICH, Nathalie. ([2014], 2017). “La obra más allá del objeto” en El paradigma del arte contemporáneo: estructuras de una revolución artística. Madrid: Casimiro, pp. 95-119.