Otra

Conceptual work/software art that consists of a contradictory protagonist in a space that we believe is known. Reflection on the comfort that the binary of things gives us and how this is represented in the modern universal language: the programmatic code.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

Technical and aesthetic:

“This smells intensely of Contemporary Art […] because of that migration of media.” -Cesar Aira

The work visually uses the WEBGL engine to be able to navigate in a 3-dimensional space. It is a 700 x 700 pixel canvas that consists of a 3D model that recreates the body of a Golem with the cranial graft of the famous “Bonzi Buddy” virus from the early 2000s, deposited in a room covered by image captures from the p5js console where you can read the constitutive code of the work. We can see through the eye of a virtual camera how the body of the Golem is revealed very little by little until the camera moves away enough to see our monster in full body while the camera moves further and further away from the figure, thus showing the room where our protagonist is rotating on its own axis. A light is also installed on the canvas that helps us better perceive the depth of both the 3D model and the room.

You must blindly believe all this since what is seen in this work is only a video capture embedded in another project that automates both the reproduction of the work and the movement of light, preventing direct access to the original conforming code.

Conceptual:

This work inspires its intention in that “Software Art” that Inke Arns tells us in his text “The code as a performative act”. This deliberate use of the code lattice has the intention of giving another type of non-technical significance to the code that makes up the work, but other types of uses: aesthetic by taking it to the visual and poetic by subjectivizing a tool that is usually pigeonholed as a cold method and executor of non-lingual language. There resides our friend’s home decoration? in visual work. He also finds in this attempt a new nature of software art that Arns tells us: that of making code as a purpose, stripping it of that linguistic management for which code is considered the hegemonic medium of our contemporaneity. This is based on what Arns describes about the performativity of the code, that is, I quote: “(according to other writers)…understood as the ability to perform and execute according to the terms of the theory of speech acts […] when I refer to the code of performativity, I mean that this performativity should not be understood as a purely technical performativity; that is, it not only happens in the context of a closed technical system, but affects the field of the aesthetic, the political and the social. The program code is characterized by the fact that here “what is said” coincides with “what is done.””

From here on I could only think about that idea of ​​“art without a work” that Cesar Aira mentions in “On Contemporary Art”, that idea that a contemporary work is only the model for its next reproduction, this powerful idea that this space between the work and its reception is an irreproducible secret, which cries out to be found out, thus suggesting an infinite possibility of reproductions, which coincidentally has a lot to do with the potentiality of the code that Arns talks about! That is, that creative intention of a code that places its value in the executable potential of the code and not in technical perfection, so as to always be received as an infinite challenge to correct. This ambiguity (work and reproduction) is what led me to make a reproduction of my own creation, as evidence of self-awareness that our environment is completely dependent on code as a medium, which I believe Guattari diagnoses in “Refoundation of social practices” as an irony that passive role that the screen viewer plays while enjoying watching technology advance at the expense of the degradation of its nature when speaking of the reductionist approach of scientism associated with the media.

Now, on the other hand, we have our protagonist, half Golem, half Bonzi Buddy. What do they mean? The Golem refers to Jewish mythology. In this story, a rabbi gives life to an artificial human made of clay to function as a protector of the Jewish people, fulfilling the tasks asked of him, systematically and literally. The idea of ​​a human creation as a processor and executor of instructions at the disposal of its creator has everything to be understood as a computer, I believe. But on the other hand, we have Bonzy Buddy’s simioform skull embedded in our golem. Who was Bonzy Buddy once? This was one of the most famous malware (computer viruses) of the 2000s, a fake virtual assistant that interacted with the user and had a cartoonish morphology. This left consequences in its installation such as theft of user data, slow system performance, system crashes, commercial advertisements, changing the browser home page, and so on. That is why it seems to me that it is the banner of a culture that represents the war against the code. As Aira mentions, contemporary art is contemporaneity itself and depends on all the factors of a constant present, the first of these being the enemy of the work. The enemy as a fundamental gear that encourages the work to improve, to look for new arguments.

So he came to find a point of conciliation between a slave and victim of illocutionary language (according to Arns: the word as an executing act) and his greatest nemesis, seeking to find a balance between that binomial that means a new identity of this postmodernity sunk in the binary code. Because the idea of ​​playing god in search of omnipresence like the rabbi who gave life to the golem is going to end up killing it due to its literalness, while attacking a work as human and contemporary as language will only result in its reinforcement, like a hydra with infinite heads.

So here we are…

At this point I feel I am enabled to develop a hypothesis. There is a common factor in each element of the work that can be summarized in the dialogue between opposing points, with a logic that could be explained as binary: code versus visuals (image versus text), work and copy, golem versus Bonzi (server versus enemy) and so on. This common factor made me understand that the collective conscious characteristic of contemporary society has a matrix of thought that uses binarity as a method of perception. What am I going for? Because it is much more relieving for contemporary humans to pigeonhole our ideas at one extreme or another, because thinking about the infinity of intermediate intervals is incommensurable and exhausting for us. And the best example may be the medium on which all civilizations depend, a medium whose technique is based on a binary code of on and off.

Mark Fisher speaks in his book “capitalist realism” of a postmodern impotence guilty of a “fungible reality” to which we are subordinated. This concept of “fungible reality” assumes that being “realistic” in the present is accepting the condition of constant updating of what we experience every day. This reality that is consumed like fast-food is synonymous with a reality constructed by an incommensurability of culture and history to process, this, as Aira describes when speaking of contemporary art as an eternal present that is not contaminated by antiquated values. That is why the only way to confront this postmodern impotence is to forget it, covering ourselves with a collective forgetfulness induced by a capitalist system that makes us believe that it is part of our identity so that we perceive a relaxed, senseless, paradoxical and volatile reality. Live like a dream so as not to despair, to feel that omnipotence that gives us the strength to ignore an abyss of inheritance. The code also translates this dream interpretation where everything is intangible, where I can do Ctrl+Z, where our memory does not work in a narrative way, but rather the information is randomly accessed, like a large solid state disk that promotes this eternal continuous present that Aira speaks of.

That’s why my anger with the code, because I feel that it is a regime that represents the standardization of everything, including speech, and for that I believe that contemporary art has to be our Dr. Manhattan, the one who sees everything all the time, to diagnose how submissive we are to pretending that the code will always be there for us solving our problems. Don’t think badly, I’m not against the code, but I reflect on the comfort of being on the other side that digitality gives us. This was my intention when I mentioned what Aira says about contemporary art smacking of a multiplicity of media. Multimedia as a response to binarism, where we are neither text nor image, neither old nor new.

Artistic references:

Software art, conceptual art, I think J. L. Borges, Fiodor Dostoyevski, Dreamworks? ha ha

Literature

AIRA, César. (2013). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo”.

ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”.

GUATTARI, Felix. (1992). “Una refundación de las prácticas sociales”.

FISHER, Mark (2009). “Realismo capitalista: ¿No hay alternativa? ”.