¿De qué y quién le servimos?
The work is made up of textual quotes from the video-essay How to be happy (2025) by Ofelia Fernandez together with a blue background. The text emerges from the bottom of the screen alluding to the work Television Delivers People (1973) by Richard Serra and Carlota Schoolman.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
In my previous job (which I did not abandon, but rather re-thought) I used class conversations as a starting point, of which two points seemed key to me: doing something that I really want to express, and working with the resources that one has at hand. From there, I remembered a video that we saw during the course (and I was fascinated by it) called Television Delivers People (1973), made by Richard Serra together with Carlota Schoolman. This was “one of the first works to explore the relationship between the media and its audience” (Alemani, 2008). Moving forward in time, and placing us in 2025, Ofelia Fernandez appears with a video titled: How to be happy, where she explores the relationship between cell phone and the user. With this in mind, and since, apparently “Serra and Schoolman’s ideas did not change in the digital era” (Valladares, 2019), I would like to explore both audiovisual proposals in parallel through code.
In 1973, when televisions in American homes were already common, Serra said: “Probably, one of the few things that people can believe in is entertainment. If you give them political definitions, economic definitions, whatever, through entertainment, people are going to believe it. I don’t know why.” (Serra, 1973 cited in Valladares 2019). In November 2025, Ofelia Fernandez talks about the circulation of information and content through the cell phone as a physical and portable medium, and says that today “it is very common to hear: “How are people so idiots with all the possible information?"" and continues explaining that “the information is shown to each person in a personalized way. That is, the truth was decomposed into millions of parts.” (Fernández, 2025, 41:08), in this way, in my opinion, we find ourselves facing a parallel that is updated in the present: changing the television for the cell phone, and the audience for user. In this way, in my work I decided to preserve the aesthetic aspects of Serra’s work, but, on the one hand, modifying the aspect ratio, and on the other, keeping the user as a spectator: they will not be able to interact with the work but they will be able to read its content.
We cannot leave aside that this work is developed through the use of code, therefore, an important link is that of the concept of the performativity of the code, which, the writer Inke Arns, defines as something that “should not be understood as a purely technical performativity; that is, it not only happens in the context of a closed technical system, but also affects the field of the aesthetic, the political and the social.” (Arns, 2005, p. 7), referring to code as something capable of producing real effects in the world. Furthermore, another important decision was to use textual quotes in my work. Why quote Ofelia Fernández verbatim? César Aira speaks of the written word as something that “did not need technical advances to achieve the perfect reproduction of itself.” (Avira, 2010, p.1). So, in this case, in my opinion, the transcription of the word into text preserves its load of quality and information effectively.
Literature
Alemani, C. 2008. Television Delivers People. ARTFORUM. https://www.artforum.com/events/television-delivers-people-184889/ Valladares. C. 2019. The Art of Perception: Richard Serra’s Films. Gagosian Quarterly. https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2019/09/10/essay-art-perception-richard-serras-films/ Arns, I. 2005. El código como acto de habla performativo. Artnodes. UOC. Fernández, O. 2025. CÓMO SER FELIZ. Corta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2JHtBoSxBg Aira, C. 2010. Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Grijalbo-Mondadori