emoção art.ficial

by Carlos Cos, July 5th 2004

photos by Rubens Chiri

Mexican artist Fran Ilich, wearing jeans and a t-shirt closed the Emoção Art.ficial 2.0 symposium by presenting the acts of rebellion and vandalism he committed with a group of other artists at the border of Mexico and the US to protest against the strict immigration ban.

Social resistance, good humor and creativity turned telephone thefts, food distribution, lies and riots into efficient artistic interventions which, for using advanced technologies and new forms of media, such as laptops, the language of games and e-mail, closed the discussion by showing that the paths to art are vast and unpredictable.

For almost three years, Ilich has been leading constant interventions on the border of Mexico/US, especially in Tijuana. Among the actions, he handed out immigrant-kits (food and water) in the American desert, promoted parties at border areas, disturbed the police, robbed public payphones and even forged an e-mail from an American official agency opening the borders for three days and sent it as an official communication to the Mexican press. He was lucky to have escaped any punishment. The experiences, duly recorded in state-of-the-art media, were remembered and told, to the enjoyment of the audience. Ilich, as expected is on the web.

Before the Mexican, the roundtable received contributions from four other artists who also presented and explained their own works. A common point among those who preferred to use theory, as Cristina Costa, from USP, and José-Carlos Mariategui, from Alta Tecnologia Andina, ATA, was the statement that, it is necessary to recreate. However, new technologies will not give meaning to the revolution, but ideas will.

Sharing the cake – Mariategui commented on his work, E-Tester, which offers a new use of the web based on connections through people. He finalized the lecture showing a video by Diego Lima that mixed Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather II) and Carmen Miranda (South American Way) to propose more equality in the world by using the metaphor of sharing the birthday cake.

After that, Cristina Costa showed her research on interactivity with the website Narrativas, which has stories to be completed by Internet users. Among her conclusions is the certainty that interactivity needs to be induced to produce great effects. In her case, by means of open-structured texts that invite participation with suggestions. “Interactivity is not a technological resource.”

Names without translation – With a simple performance, the pair of artists Maurício Dias (Brazilian) and Walter Riedweg (Swiss) transformed the environment by simultaneously reading names of people, many of whom artists and employees of Itaú Cultural involved in the production of the symposium, and names of several places worldwide. At the end, together they said: “not every name is translated.”

The performance is connected to the work of the artists that criticizes issues related to nationality, borders and migration. Always sharing what was said, playing on words, they talked about eroticism, humanity and presented two works: Inside & Outside the Tube (1999) and Voracidade Máxima (2003), developed and presented in Europe.

The first was an intervention in the outskirts of Zurich (Switzerland), which reproduced audios of excerpts of testimonies from illegal immigrants, in approximately 20 different languages, through heating pipes spread around the area.

The second one, created for the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid (Spain), was composed of a room of mirrors where they showed excerpts of testimonies from male prostitutes, also illegal immigrants, who appeared in the images using masks with the faces of the two artists.

Tags: interactivity, intervenção, Mexico, social issues, Switzerland
Posted in Simposyum 2004 | No Comments »