MANIFESTOS

THE VERY SIMPLE PRINCIPLES OF AN ART PRACTICE

  • Art is a source of knowledge
  • Art is a collective endeavour.
  • Art is a conversation.

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A FOREST
On the representation of the Robotic Self

Infrastructures are the key technologies, assets, systems and physical conditions that support the circulation of meaning and power.

An algorithm is the infrastructure that enables the modification of the rhizomatic connections among the decision-making nodes of a neural network.

The algorithm is an empty platform, useless and meaningless without the flow of inputs through the network. The algorithm is the Sartrean ego.

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MATERIAL COMPOSITES
Some ideas regarding contemporary art composition

There is an increasing disconnect between language and emotion. Contemporary digital language promotes functionality at the expense of emotion, sympathy and affect as a result of the increasing acceleration of cyberspace and the mediation of social relations.

Franco Berardi’s latest book takes us through a formidable tour de force in analyzing contemporaneity from this perspective: “with the digital we have reached the end-point of the process of abstraction, and an apex in the increasing dissociation of understanding from empathy”

While resistance to technological innovation is futile and reactionary, by vindicating the figure of Malinche as a symbol of subjection but also of emergence of a new world, Berardi proposes that only by recognizing that our old world has collapsed and will never come back we can start imagining a new one.

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CYBORG ART: ART IN THE BIO-CYBERNETIC ERA

“The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks

Artist: The cyborg-artist is a technician by definition. It is the embodiment of three human cosmologies: A mind liberated from its biology, a mind as the creator of intelligible reality and a mind for which fiction is constitutive of truth.

Machine: Databases and algorithms that interact with the human through neural prostheses.

Authorship: The distinction between the artist and the tool becomes blurred. Absent of physical intervention, the artwork responds, on equal terms, both to human and machine’s potentialities and limitations. Being a hybrid artist/machine creation, will supersedes passion.

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ON PHOTOGRAPHY NOW

Five ideas on Documentary Photography

In a world invaded by mobile phones with camera and video, the “best” document it is considered to be anonymous and amateur. The here and now, by chance, unmediated, un-authored. A document with photographic quality produces suspicion. The lower the technical skill, the closer is perceived to “truth”. (1)

A professional photographer present in an event or a place is an interested tourist that either brings an imported ideology or a desire for recognition. Or both. Not an objective testimony. (2)

The artistic-political documental construct lost its moral strength time ago. It gave visibility to democratic movements but also to Fascists and Stalinists.(3)

Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper” by Walker Evans marked the social document aestheticization’s defunction. (4)

Discussions around Form vs. Content should not hide the untenable position of documentary referentiality and its relation to the “real”. (5)

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