protonumerique

Transmediale is about to begin this weekend, and once again, I’m kind of not so well informed about it. I went then to give a rather fast look at the most promising events, hoping that the main exhibition would be a bit more complete and interesting than last year, when the main exhibition was a bit dissapointing, leaving aside a kind of astrophysical installation by Norimichi Hirakawa and the very intriguing book-Crime of Paolo Cirio and Alejandro Ludovico. That time, conferences and workshops became the real hotspots of the festival. For my surprise, the works that will be contesting this year seem a bit over-interesting and demand a further, attentive look.

Take a look at the “Tantalum memorial”, a critical installation-network project using phones to reproduce communication practices between people in Congo, a country swollen by dictatorships from 40 years ago and rich in Tantalum, a metal that is more valuable than gold for Mobile phone and Computer fabricators. This fact, as happens with the exploitation of other “valuable” resources, induced war and the violent death of more than 3 million people in the last decade. Apart from denouncing a problem that is almost unknown outside of africa and is called the “Coltan wars”, the installation goes into criticizing the addiction to permanent communication in contemporary society. The term used to describe the piece is also thrilling: “a Telephony based memorial”. More info.

stills Vertov

On another network approach to a more formal problem, I’m glad we’ll be able to see “The man with the movie Camera: the global remake”, a work made in 2007 by Perry Bard, a UK artist who works with video in Public contexts. The project is an ambitious approach to collective film-making, and the principles are basically simple and somewhat serendipitous, being composed of video shots by people from anywhere in the world, that are uploaded to a server and edited, mounted and printed by custom software into the form of the classical Dziga Vertov’s film. The final movie doesn´t exist. It could actually be an endless projection of the original film in the left side of the screen and a new set of shots ensambled randomly by the system on the right. Although random is not really the word to call the process. The shots are uploaded by people according to a rather complete taxonomization of the film into scenes and shots, so that, when you upload something, you specify exactly which shot of the original film will your material be representing. Haven´t found any specifications about the software, but it’s known that it produces one new version of the film every day trying new sets of clips extracted form the database, and that it causes severe space problems with the server, so the project is not running so smoothly. I’ll try to figure out more during the Transmediale days.

Check the movie

So far, if you’re in Berlin come along…

Posted under DOCUMENTATION, ENGLISH, HISTORY, NEWS

Soy yo el sleeping bag de mi alma? Es un trabajo en paralelo con Ana María Gómez, Psicóloga de la Universidad Javeriana e investigadora en la FU de Berlín. La obra parte de una idea personal que se divide en dos instancias: Primero, quería desarrollar una herramienta que me permitiera el juego con video en tiempo real, con herramientas bastante básicas pero con una metáfora bastante orgánica, como un cuerpo vivo que se taxonomiza.

Segundo, quería confrontar una relación amorosa fallida pero de bastante importancia, de la cual quedaban, sin ser vistos desde su grabación, algunos videos de un viaje a Italia, que en algún momento fueron grabados con cierta intencionalidad, pero que se fueron convirtiendo en evidencia de algo menos claro, de una forma de desear culturalmente insertada y a la que nos aproximamos de una forma casi que inconscientemente cinematográfica.

video disection from lebustamante on Vimeo.


Como software, el programa desarrollado en Processing presenta bastantes fallas debido a algunas dificultades técnicas que presenta la plataforma al importar video via Quicktime, por lo cual no fue presentado de manera pública. Aún más, el concepto específico que correspondía a éste trabajo, en especial el análisis realizado por Ana María, no exigía que el espectador se hiciera partícipe de la historia. Ésa sería otra fase del proyecto. En la exposición “El amor cómo va?” se presentó el resultado de la interacción con los videos y la mediación, análisis y diálogo con la contraparte científica que buscaba evidencias semánticas, clichés y patrones de comportamiento en las imágenes.

Posted under CODING, ESPAÑOL, NEWS, NUEVO MUNDO, PORTFOLIO

From the 18th of December, the exhibition “¿Y el amor cómo va?” (How’s love doing?), will open in Bogota, Colombia, at the Galeria Santa Fe (website in spanish). Presented as a “reprise” of another exhibition made in Paris in 2006 (L’amour, comment ça va?), this one expects to find different artistic views that reflect on how love is confronted and understood under the current social and cultural circumstances. As society is driven by uncertainty, individuality and imposed desire ideals, sexual complexity has been inserted in social schemes thanks to queer struggle and reinterpretation of genre, biochemistry and psychology have rendered it possible to understand the chemical reactions that lead humans to experiment that feeling. Is love possible at all? how do we approach this question? The change of cultural and Geographic Context, is expected to represent drastically different perspectives to those of the Parisian instance.

One of the differences that becomes apparent at a first sight, is that, while the French Version was almost completely photography-oriented, the Colombian one gets to show some Video and Installations, as I’ve heard from the curators. Furthermore, all artists are exclusively Colombian and the space is a rather important art center of the City.

More infos and Visual Material of my own’s and other’s contributions will be posted after the opening.

Posted under ENGLISH, NEWS, NUEVO MUNDO, PORTFOLIO