Los condenados de la pantalla

Description of the Work

My piece, “The damned of the screen”, arises based on the reinterpretation of garbage on the digital plane after seeing “trash art” works by Antonio Berni. In addition to Berni, the work “Public Bathrooms” by Roberto Plate was the trigger that helped me think about the object of my work.

The work renders words belonging to real Twitter phrases and these phrases are saved with their respective properties (the user who published it and if the user is anonymous). What all the selected phrases have in common is that they denigrate and discriminate against people with low resources.

When rendered, the words begin to compose the work “Juanito Dormo” by Antonio Berni over time. When you press the bar, the names of the users who published the phrases will begin to be rendered. If the user is anonymous their name will be displayed with a black border, otherwise it will be displayed with a light gray border.

Development of the Work

The pillar of the work is a real data set with tweets, usernames and real information that is rendered depending on the user’s interactions. Additionally, certain information is rendered depending on its properties. The work mainly seeks to convey the aggressiveness and disorganized impact of online communication. Also, in a more indirect way, it seeks to show the personal frustration of users and how they displace their frustrations on the digital level.

The work addresses the continuity of precariousness and social exclusion, transferring the character of Juanito Laguna to the toxic reality of the web. The work seeks to expose this new form of marginalization in digital media and show the harassers as personally frustrated subjects.

Beyond the technical components of the work, it is relevant to quote César Aira: “The object becomes secondary to the story from which it emerges.” From this premise, I propose to differentiate the generative image (object) of my work from the story it produces. This separation reveals that the true work is the contextual frame that surrounds the rendered image and that this object serves as a container for the story.

Conceptually, I was interested in exploring some aspects within Inke Arns’ theory about how the programming language itself is not only an operator of actions since the concept of illocutionary acts is introduced. “Inlocutionary acts are carried out thanks to the words emitted. These “realizations” (which create or do what they designate) are defined as acts in which a person who says something also does something…”. This concept gives a performative dimension to the code, which I sought to take advantage of through the conditional rendering of usernames. Rendering of these names is done based on their anonymity status; If the name border is gray, the viewer can find the commenter’s real name by searching for the username on the web. In this scenario, the code itself exposes the identity of the users and becomes a sentencing within the work.

Literature

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

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