Clic

Clic is an interactive work that tries to reflect the feeling of frustration that arises when facing barriers to achieving a goal. The piece consists of a screen that shows the message “Click to continue” every time the user interacts with it, repeating itself over and over again, generating a type of fatigue. The idea is to play with the viewer’s patience and sense of defeat. This interaction reflects the cycle of trying something repeatedly. The work creates an atmosphere of both visual and emotional fatigue. The click-to-continue interaction reinforces the feeling of being trapped in a cycle, reflecting everyday situations of the desire to move forward and bump into obstacles.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

From a technical point of view, the work was developed in p5.js, on a 400x500 canvas that allows an experience based on interaction. The code has been structured so that the “Do you want to continue?” is repeated. It is a very simple code, where a loop is used so that every time it is clicked, the image appears.

Relating the work to the text by César Aira. César Aira - “About contemporary art”: reflects on how contemporary art moves in a more conceptual and less tangible territory. Aira tells us - “The work of art does not stand without the discourse that surrounds and justifies it. It does not ‘speak for itself’ but needs seasoned ventriloquists, usually critics or curators”1. The work plays with repetition and frustration, where the viewer’s experiences are central. The fact that the piece takes the user to an emotional experience of fatigue and frustration reflects the tendency to use art as a means to generate sensations beyond the physical object, creating a work that activates the viewer.

Linking the work to Inke Arns’ text “Code as a Performative Speech Act,” code is not just a set of instructions; It is a speech act that conditions the user and drags him into a reflection on the use of interactive systems. - “The code as an effective speech act is not a description or representation of something, but, on the contrary, it directly affects, and literally becomes an action, and may even abort a process.”2 . Interaction is not a neutral medium, but an act that puts the user in a position facing a cycle that, in the end, asks them if they want to abandon. This connects with Arns’ idea that code can be an act of performativity. Arns suggests that the code not only describes, but also acts, the code generated by the repetition of the question provokes an emotional response from the viewer and alters their experience, building a metaphor of fatigue through interaction. The code not only presents an image, but acts on the viewer, forcing them to deal with repetition.

On the aesthetic side, an attempt is made to explore the current of glitch through this work of net art, where it is the creative practice that consists of taking advantage of or causing digital errors (glitches) for artistic and aesthetic purposes.

Literature

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

• ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes, Julio de 2005, ISSN 1695-5951