EN BLANCO

The white noise from your grandmother’s television floods your ears: you are at home, but the only thing you can discern is the outline of your hands above your feet.

Inspired by the generative art productions of German professor Frieder Nake, this work aims to simulate a feeling of panic and disconnection. That is, through the generation of lines by user interaction within a plane that simulates static with the use of random lines.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

Frieder Nake is a German interactive computing professor and mathematics graduate. Nake was one of the first to take an approach to digital art, what was then called computer-art. For reference, this term was named by José Luis Brea as “already dead” in one of his works.

“Computer art can be said with certainty that it has already been abandoned (…) since the territories of the synthetic image and the art of programming that were its own have revealed total impotence to contribute real discoveries to the tradition of immanent self-criticism that characterizes the development of 20th century art.”

At the beginning of the course, I found myself with a blank canvas in a way that I had never done before, since my knowledge in illustration was barely useful to me. I had studied anatomy and perspective, but it was the first time I had to deal with abstract thinking.

In 1964, Nake was given the task of creating software capable of drawing, to which he had a similar approach to mine:

“I decided that I would do everything randomly and not consciously check if it was right. This is a moment in art where I leave open the mathematical question, is it correct or not? I trust that if I do it long enough, it will be correct. So I gave up a little of my ethics of mathematics in favor of, let me say, aesthetics (…)”

Just as in a moment I lost the rigidity of my hand when holding a pencil, I did so with the development and significance of the much feared abstract art. This was through colors and sensations that also went hand in hand with randomness. The feeling of no control and experiencing something new for the first time; and if this work is based on anything, it is on that.

However, my work was not solely based on randomness, but on what it often evokes: uncertainty.

We could agree that, without the context of the work, this work would be an interactive square. We could thus speak of an “aesthetic justification of existence”, the need to prioritize significance and exchange over the representation of past art. About this, Brea also comments:

“If the effect of industrial capitalism on the system of objects (…) was its generalized transformation to the form of the commodity, it could be said that the most characteristic effect of postindustrial capitalism is the generalized aestheticization of such a commodity (…) What in effect presides over the current social circulation of objects, goods and relationships, is no longer the use value that we can associate with them or even the exchange value: but, and above all, its aesthetic value, the promise it contains of a more intense, more internally rich life.”

This work is one of many attempts to aestheticize the feeling of pause and disconnection that Anxiety causes, it is the narrative of the experiences of someone who suffers from it.

Literature

Brea, José Luis (2002), “Breve (y desordenado) antiglosario -o diccionario de tópicos- sobre el arte electrónico.” Página 1, párrafos 1 y 2.

Wolf Lieser (2001), ”Frieder Nake on the beginnings of digital art.” Artículo digital: https://dam.org/museum/nake-interview/

Brea, José Luis (2008), “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas.” Página 112, apartado 32 y 33.