Sol negro

Black Sun is a work in which I try to poetically express perhaps a cliché aspect widely seen in artistic expressions with a strong emotional charge, it is my attempt to express something that several writers and philosophers inspired me, that I am passionate about and that treated loneliness in an existential and poetic way.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

For the development of Sol Negro, I followed a repetitive logic in the composition of the figures. When the user clicks, a “Black Sun” appears that begins to destroy the elements of the sketch. The idea for the sketch design was born from contemplating the work of Lillian Schwartz called “Night Scene”, in which I carried out such work through an iterative process that combines computer composition with manual manipulations after printing. This interaction, where one click unleashes destruction, reflects the dissolution of bonds and the city that consumes the soul. While developing Sol Negro, I read a phrase from José Luis Brea’s Brief (and messy) antiglossary, in his section on Pixel art that caught my attention that it says. “The true tool by which everything we call art in the 20th century has been produced is called: immanent self-criticism.” This led me to see the p5.js code not as a set of codes that generates an image, but as a means to question, to unravel what Sol Negro seeks to convey. Then, in his Redefinition of artistic practices, Brea says: “There are no works of art. There are work and practices that we can call artistic. They have to do with significant, affective and cultural production.” This gave meaning to my work. Sol Negro is not an object, but a practice that seeks to transmit an emotional and existential aspect that exists in society. It exposes, in itself, a raised city, almost ordered and symmetrical, representing the brilliance and the facts that humans build throughout our existence. Places where it does not illuminate the soul, but rather devours it. This sun represents the attractiveness of disappearance, the end of forced connections, broken ties and the fictional theater of others and oneself. For this I was mainly inspired by many philosophers and writers, but the root of this artistic and poetic reflection comes from my favorite writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in which he made me understand in his works that ties can be prison and that the soul in silence can be purer than in company. Therefore, with Sol Negro, I try to convey the loneliness imposed by those uprooted beings who live mixed in the city, beings who walk towards the threshold, some accepting it as the correct path and others suffering it in sadness.

Literature

BREA José Luis. (2002). “Breve (y desordenado)” antiglosario -o diccionario de tópicos- sobre el arte electrónico.

BREA, José Luis. (2008). “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas (s. 21)”