Se nos limita al margen infinito

“We are limited to the infinite margin” is a work in which we try to capture the feeling of the unknown that outer space generates, how it acts as a “margin” in the sense that it separates us from what we do not understand, but we can interpret, and how the possibilities of what could happen outside of our experience drive us to illustrate images through thoughts about potential entities, facts, forms of existence that surround us outside the atmosphere and apart from what we do know and sometimes do not interpret on our own.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The infinite margin is a limit composed of infinite space that, like everything we do not know exactly, invites us to understand it with our own human experience, completely unknown contexts. We humans fear these new spaces, not so much because of their characteristics but because of what we cannot yet understand; the unknown. But how can we face it?

The first step is to leave the comfort zone, identify it and break that barrier that makes us accumulate anxiety. Once we leave, we expose ourselves to the new. Which is equally surprising and terrifying, in this moment of exploration and discovery we begin to build an idea of ​​the new panorama through perception and our interpretation of space. From this situation, we can establish a relationship with the text “Happenings in the New York Scene” by Allan Kaprov, who in the fragment cited below, writes about the place where the happenings come to light and the pure and genuine reaction of the people who are in front of them due to their context at the moment they occur:

<< ‘First of all, there is a context, the place where the work is conceived and performed. The most intense and essential happenings have seen the light in dilapidated lofts, basements, abandoned shops, natural environments and on the street, where very small audiences or groups of visitors are confused in one way or another with the event, flowing between its different parts. Thus, there is no separation between the public and the work (as there is even in circular theaters or in rooms without stalls)…’ >>

I think that is the type of sensitivity that we maintain when faced with this situation of novelty and spatial uncertainty. What happenings achieve is very important when we refer to the fact that there is no separation of work/public because in this way the perception is raw without any predisposition or proposal to change our point of view through an introduction to the ideology or the so-called “message” of the production.

Furthermore, I also believe that the departure from the previously mentioned comfort zone is also strongly related to another text called “New Media” by Christiane Fricke, in the fragment which says the following:

<< ‘In the second half of the last century, the development of media derived from the industrial revolution hinted at the enormous repercussions that it would undoubtedly have on traditional artistic production. Still, most art fans are unaware of the extent of such transformations. We are sitting on a mountain of artifacts accumulated over millennia, and we continue to be absorbed in the work of evaluating, arranging and understanding them.’ >>

Clearly the comfort zone goes beyond personal experience alone, it is also a construction of society that tries to lock us into certain types of art and ways of doing it which remain tied to the traditional and do not allow the advancement of art over the new media that give us a range of possibilities for artistic creation. And technology also limited art to a certain point in the sense that we can no longer safely identify and call a work “art”, due to the number of variants that exist between the productions created and shared through new media. We can observe here how the duality between the surprising and the terrifying persists in new media as in space, starting from the unknown or the not understood.

I want to make a couple of quotes from a text that seems consistent with the proposal of the work, the text is “The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell” by Aldous Huxley, and it says the following:

“We must learn to handle words effectively, but at the same time, we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the semi-opaque medium of concepts, which deforms any given fact by giving it the all-too-familiar appearance of some generic label or some explanatory abstraction.”

“The function of the brain, the nervous system and the sense organs is primarily eliminative, not productive. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us, to prevent us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and unimportant knowledge (…) admitting only the very small and special selection that is likely to be practically useful to us.”

This duality still stands when we talk about the phenomenology of perception, the non-verbal/conceptual and what a work transmits to us, compared to what is useful in the universe, or rather, what our brain considers useful and important to us, what we consider surprising and terrifying at the same time.

To create the work, primitive 3D figures were used: Spheres and Boxes, whose texture was made from the feedback technique produced by a web camera and an IPS panel monitor, projecting masks of archive images in the feedback and intervening in the process with color and focus filters. For the background or the details that remain in the background due to the lack of mobility they have compared to 3D figures, points made in gray scales were used that are saved in an array and then painted over and over again in the same initial position. All this accompanied in sound with a fragment of a musical piece that was composed for the work.

Literature

FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “Nuevos Medios” en AAVV. Arte de siglo XX. Vol. II. München: Taschen.

KAPROV, Allan. (1961). “Happenings en la escena newyorkina”.

HUXLEY, Aldous. (1956) “Las puertas de la percepción, Cielo e Infierno”.