plataformas de arte

“Art Platforms” is an interactive work developed in p5.js that invites you to take a tour of different moments in the history of art. The user controls a character who jumps between suspended platforms; Each platform represents an artistic style from Gothic to Romanticism. Upon landing on a platform, the environment changes: the background, the visual atmosphere and the descriptive texts are transformed to reflect the aesthetics and sensibility of the time. Thus, the game becomes a narrative and immersive experience, where each jump functions as a historical and conceptual transition. The work does not seek to teach chronologically, but rather to offer the user the freedom to explore how art changes, how language changes, and the vision of the world along with it. The character, below the platforms, can access any style without the obligation to follow a linear order, seeking an open and reflective experience.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The project was developed in p5.js, using interactive functions, arrays and sprite animation. The animated character responds to gravity, keystroke movement, and platform collision events. Each platform activates a state change that modifies the global aesthetics of the work: the background and the texts. The code is organized in simple and modular structures that associate a set of aesthetic and conceptual values ​​with each platform, allowing the experience to be dynamically transformed with the player’s action. The proposal is based on the idea of ​​the historical journey as a physical displacement: each jump represents a step in the history of art. The work becomes a visual metaphor for learning and a critical look at artistic history, showing that each artistic movement is connected to those before and after it. The work explores how digital technologies allow not only to generate new visual and interactive experiences, but also to reread, reinterpret and reactivate historical aesthetics within a contemporary environment. Each platform functions as a recontextualized quote: a surface that does not reproduce a style, but rather makes it habitable, transformable and available to be experienced bodily, through the player’s movement. By jumping between eras, the user is a spectator of how the styles dialogue with each other. Art Platforms can be read as a work that puts the performativity of the code into play, which is why it can be understood as software art for Inke Arns. In this work, the code is not only a technical mechanism that only seeks to produce a result, but a mechanism that shows conceptual and aesthetic transformations in real time, what it seeks is to generate an experience for the user. The work takes place within the world of the game, it is how the viewer interacts. In this way, the work does not hide the role of the software, but rather makes it the main mediator between user, art history and experience. Thus, Art Platforms aligns itself with the software art described by Arns, it already uses the code not only to generate images, but to reflect, through its performative action, the code not only does but speaks for “itself.”

Literature Arns, I. (2005). El código como acto de habla performativo. Artnodes, (5). Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.