Al borde

“On the Edge” is an interactive work that narrates, through the passage of seasons and time, the inner journey of a person who contemplates the possibility of disappearing. Each climate and each transformation of the tree reflects its emotional state, from the initial brightness of a full day to the deepest silence of the night. The tree works as his mirror. Grow, lose and resist. But right at its most fragile moment, it remains standing.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

One of my inspirations was contemplating the life and works of Caspar David Friedrich, with his paintings and life stories. Precisely in line with what César Aira points out at the beginning of his book “On contemporary art.” Stating that “the first poem, the first story, is born as a fabulous description or interpretation of a drawing or a statue”, this work also arises from contemplating Friedrich’s work “the walker on the sea of ​​clouds”. A landscape that allows us to think about emotions that cannot always be expressed so simply.

César Aira also exposes himself by reflecting on artistic creation as an intimate gesture that often arises from a difficult state of life. Aira describes this practice in some way, naming Kafka, as “the secret, individual, ascetic creation, carried out in order to alleviate in some way the maladjustment or difficulty of living.” In that sense, my work is not born from spectacle or from a merely technical intention, but from an internal process that needed to become an image. In the context of digital art, Inke Arns points out how “experimental software” is closely related to artistic subjectivity, stating that “code can be daily, poetic, dark, ironic or annoying, inert or impossible, it can simulate and disguise itself, it has rhetoric and style, it can be an attitude.” In this way, the p5.js code functions in this work as the digital canvas where the emotional seasons of the character are captured, transforming the rules of programming into a personal language. To conclude, “On the Verge” does not represent the end, nor a negative message, quite the opposite, but rather the representation of the moment of a soul that reveals itself, the moment in which the impulse to want to disappear is transformed into the will to continue existing.

Literature

-AIRA, César. (2013). . “Sobre el arte contemporáneo”

-ARNS, Inke. (2005). . “El código como acto de habla performativo ”.