Tabula Rasa

Brief description (150–200 words)

Tabula Rasa is an interactive work that reinterprets the spirit of Jean Tinguely from our time, where the machines that govern daily life are no longer motors or pulleys, but cell phones, screens and algorithms. The piece invites the viewer to blow on the microphone to activate a machine that appears and that blow (a simple and vital gesture) turns wheels, moves arms and turns on sounds of notifications and calls, as if phones had a life of their own.

A child appears in the landscape who observes the scene with curiosity, creating a contrast between the human and the technological. The work proposes a moment of pause: to breathe, look and reflect on how we interact today with the devices that surround us, and how they also seem to “breathe” through us.

Inspired by the phrase from the Tinguely Manifesto: “Breathe deeply, live in the present” this piece transfers that idea to the digital present. Tabula Rasa reminds us that we continue to give life to machines, even though they are now digital and feed on our gestures, our attention and our time.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

This work is born from the desire to imagine what a child Tinguely would be like, in a universe typical of Tabula Rasa, but located in the present. Not between rusty gears or engines of the industrial revolution, but surrounded by cell phones, screens, notifications and algorithms. I thought about the text New Worlds, Art of the 20th Century (Münchenesa), and especially about two points that are mentioned, one is the movement of futurists who sought to combat the transformation of the real world that was advancing, leaving the past behind, and raised this idea of ​​a “tabula rasa.” They were looking in this past/future, for the idea of ​​reconstructing the past in a futuristic universe. On the other hand, another point that inspired me was a phrase from Tinguely’s 1959 Manifesto for Statism: “Breathe deeply, live in the present.” I wanted to transfer that idea to the contemporary world, where breathing becomes almost an act of resistance against digital noise.

The machine I build here is not mechanical, but it maintains the same intention: to move, to fail a little, to depend on whoever looks at it. That gesture of blowing (or any sign of movement that gives it “life”) to activate it mixes the human and the fragile, as if the air gave meaning back to an object that seemed to have a life of its own. When you wake up, you don’t make metal sounds: notifications, calls, and a voice asking you to “answer your phones” ring, small interruptions that today shape our daily lives.

The boy in the foreground represents a small Tinguely, in his childhood in Basel, where he begins to imagine his first machines.

The child in turn represents the clean look, prior to technological fatigue: a reminder of how we observed the world before screens structured every daily gesture. Its presence generates a contrast between the human and the mechanical, between stillness and movement. The violet sky and its reflection build a suspended space, a possible memory of the past, almost a refuge. Everything coexists in a landscape that proposes a slower pace, as if the work itself were a pause within the movement of the world.

The large central eye synthesizes the idea of ​​contemporary surveillance: that which always observes, records and organizes information. It is not a human eye, nor completely mechanical; It is a hybrid, a symbol of the constant presence of devices that shape our perception of the world. Its combination with digital gears builds a bridge between the analog past and the algorithmic present.

I also relied on the text On Contemporary Art, by César Aira, and his phrase: “reproduction becomes a work and the work becomes a reproduction.” Here, each breath generates a new little story: the machine activates differently, sounds different, spins differently. The work is not fixed; It changes according to the breathing of the person participating.

Tabula Rasa proposes a moment of calm and play. A little fable where the human and the digital meet, and where air—so simple and so essential—is once again the force that animates the world, even if only for a moment. It invites us to stop, take a deep breath and look: to ask ourselves who encourages whom, if we are the ones who give life to the machines, or if they end up guiding our rhythm without us noticing.

Literature

Munchenesa, 1914-1945. Nuevos Mundos, Artes del siglo XX

Arias, C. (2010). Sobre el Arte Contemporáneo

Tinguely, J. Vida y obras