Obra en producción

Good morning, how are you? How are you doing? Could I ask you a question? Why did you stop at this work? As you can see, this work is still incomplete. Do you want to lend a hand to complete it? Press the “F” key to start.

The work “Work in production”, as its name indicates, is a work in progress, waiting for the interaction of each person to continue developing. Only when the user interacts with it, could progress be made in its construction, with unrepeatable, unique and permanent processes that evoke the changing nature of life itself. Or, for the user, the part may already be complete as it appears, and they decide to leave it as is.

This project invites you to reflect on the value of the creative process, questioning whether what is important is the final result or the act of creation itself. In the end, at what point do we consider something to be “finished”? What makes you decide? Would you like to contribute?

Instructions

• F key: take the photo and start
• Left and right arrow key: decrease or increase brush size
• Z key: zoom brush
• R/G/B/W/K keys: change brush colors to red, green, blue, white and black respectively
• E key: eraser
• P/I key: posterization and color inversion filters
• Key A: activate and deactivate the pointillism effect
• X key: pixelate the image
• S key: save the image
• N key: start over

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“Take your eyes off the television and look at yourself”¹. The art historian Wulf Herzogenrath summarized the work Felt TV by Joseph Beuys. Thus, the work “Work in production” is designed to be displayed somewhere with the camera on, therefore showing the people who pass in front of it and see themselves. The viewer will recognize your framed face, and may say to themselves, “Does that mean I am the work of art myself?” Only when you read the description attached to the side of the work will you understand that you can interact with it, and you may or may not finish producing it.

This work allows the user to save the produced image at the end or start a new one. It will depend on each person if they want to save their work to appreciate its production, or reset everything to continue playing. And this is where the true meaning of this work actually lies. As Arns explains well in Code as a performative speech act, generative art and software art are not the same. While the former is interested above all in the result created by a generative process, the latter pays attention to the process itself. It is worth clarifying here that it is not that generative art is not interested in the codified process that creates it. What the artist will define is, after an endless process of generation, at what point he will consider that work “finished.”

In the same way, “Work in production” will have a different appreciation depending on the person interacting. Those who consider that the most important thing about art is the final product, or prefer to choose a point to end the creative process, will want to save the image they created with so much love. On the other hand, those who give more weight to the creative act itself will prefer to continue producing, or will be satisfied with just leaving their mark on the work and leaving it there.

Aira says in his text On contemporary art that “If it is art, or for it to be art, it must create new values; it does not need to be good”². Likewise, the part produced by the user is probably not necessarily “good.” The work does not have commands to go back in the process, and the eraser is not a tool that reverses what has been done perfectly. With this, the work seeks to represent and communicate to the person what life itself is like: you work on yourself, you can try to amend things, but you can never go back as if that had not happened. You can screw up and make mistakes, but there will always be some way to improve it.

Thus, we return to the user’s initial question, “am I myself the work of art?” In effect, each person will be the author of their own work called life, which will always be in constant progress and production.

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.

FRICKE, Christiane. (1999). “Nuevos Medios”. En “AAVV. Arte de siglo XX. Vol. II. München: Taschen. pp.576-590.