Artilugio

“Artilugio” is an artistic application that explores the possibilities of a recursive movement and reflects on the concepts of art and work in two possible instances of meaning: aesthetic and poetic. The work proposes the development of a series composed of three acts. This tour is developed by combining abstract and concrete audiovisual elements in a digital framework that seeks to represent a creative passage. The work exhibits its own gear: the programming language becomes a vehicle for sensitive elements as it manages and conditions the reproduction of the elements and becomes poetry as it fictionalizes its own reproduction.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“Artilugio”, or the language of what is discovered as movement, is a work framed in the reflections on contemporary art in the texts of Groys Boris. ([2010], 2014) in his book Becoming public: the transformations of art in the contemporary agora. And from the author César Aira ([2013], 2016). in “On contemporary art”.. Boris Groys proposes to write outside the historical parameters that place art in an aesthetic tradition since he finds this concept problematic when defining contemporary art. As the author explains, in modernity and since Kant’s The Critique of Judgment in 1790, art will be related to an aesthetic experience, that is, in its affirmative meaning as an experimentation of the beautiful and the sublime or, on the contrary, “anti-aesthetics” as an experimentation of displeasure or frustration. Following this line and in the words of Groys, the aesthetic attitude is the attitude of the viewer, and artistic production is subordinated to artistic consumption. We will find, in turn, in this tradition the valuation of the real world as a legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude, where the figure of creative genius or natural force appears as the only possible author. In this way, artistic disciplines are relegated to being tools for the education of good taste and aesthetic judgment.

Stopping at this point we will find in “Artilugio” the capture and audiovisual representation of a sunrise. The viewer witnesses with a camera in the first person, the video recording of that natural, visual and sound spectacle that is said to be the legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude. We see a particular cut of this mutation, of the passage from night to day, which means the radical change of light of everything that is perceived. We can sense the mist dispersing only to be suspended in time by the pale blue, golden hues that will then let in the red and its sparkling orange. The sun peeks over the horizon of the sea and monopolizes all surfaces, at its leisure it dyes the world with new colors. The birds become obstacles with wing shapes that play by moving their shadows, the water continues to return firmly to the shore in the static comings and goings of the sea. Faced with this aesthetic experimentation, a text is interpolated that, like a poem, speaks of a representation. We see superimposed a writing in programming language that exposes the outline of its own medium and fictionalizes a possible functional containing structure. As Groys will explain, the relationship between artists, who were a minority, and viewers who were a majority, will begin to change. With the development of visual media and the advance of new technologies, especially since the 20th century, the borders between one and the other begin to become more complex. Nowadays we can see more people interested in producing images than in looking at them. This corresponds only to an example established by the author, which implies that contemporary art must be analyzed not in aesthetic terms but in poetic terms. Thus, it will take up another traditional perspective of art such as - in ancient Greek - techné, production or fabrication, or poesis, the passage from non-being to presence. The perspective of the producer, technology and the figure of the artisan appears, and not only as production registered in the art market of our capitalist society. With the poetic perspective we can introduce Cesar Aira’s reflections in “On contemporary art” (2013) on the discourse of the work and artistic creation. Quoting the author “the mediation of images imposes a distance, and the distance creates a space, in which words can resonate and multiply their expression beyond the utilitarian” (pp.1). In turn, the dimension of knowing how to produce and be the creative cause of that which was not appears and he will continue saying “Literature, or literature as I understand and practice it, could be the silver bridge laid between what is done and what is not done, which establishes between them a mysterious and suggestive asymmetry.”(pp.5). Aira will then mention Duchamp as the inventor of a work of art that It came in two inseparable parts: work and discourse about the work. In “Artilugio” we can find an instance called “0”, and a development that culminates in acts “1” and “2”. This tour has the intention of showing an aesthetic disposition and at the same time a poetic dimension, in a digital context that has made the possibility of meanings more complex. Abstract visual elements suggest or imitate concrete elements, and those concrete ones turn on themselves to abstract a poetic essence. The work does not escape its discourse, it returns the idea of ​​a language that plays at being movement and resonates visually in a pulse of images, figures, lines and points that are called recursively.

Literature

AIRA, César. ([2013], 2016). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo” en Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, pp. 11-56;

GROYS, Boris. ([2010], 2014) “Introducción: Poética vs. Estética” en Volverse público: las transformaciones del arte en el ágora contemporánea. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, pp 9-19.

GROYS, Boris. ([2010], 2014) “Política de la instalación” en Volverse público: las transformaciones del arte en el ágora contemporánea. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, pp 49-68.