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Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i'm going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona's International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What's left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition. Sonar's participants' fashion sense was tamer than i expected this year. Hop! Hop! Let's move on to the festival's advertising campaign which have, so far, shown an unconstrained taste for shocking, surprising and amazing. Taxidermied animals, Smiley, people with pee stains on their pants, creatures of worrying genetic heritage, notorious fraudsters and even Maradona have starred in Sonar's posters and promotional videos. Have a look at the photo set of Sonar's most provocative ad campaigns and at the video that the festival created back in 2001. That year, broadcasters refused to air the original video but didn't object to this ridiculously censored version.
This time, the Sónar image is on the safe side but it is nevertheless striking. The heroes of the posters and video are cute majorettes from the world of dreams, who have lost their bearings in the land of the living as a result of calls from a fiendish telephone booth. Follow their 14 minute long adventures: SonarMàtica is actually what usually brings me to Sonar. The title of the exhibition this year was Mecànics. It aimed to give a platform to some of the driving forces behind nowadays' artistic and mostly DIY creation: mostly centres of production based in Barcelona (with notable exceptions such as MediaLab Prado in Madrid) which were given the opportunity to showcase ongoing projects and postgraduate projects but also to organize workshops, tours and open rehearsals. Mecànics is the third and final exhibition in the SonarMàtica XIXth Century trilogy, a research project drawing comparisons between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. Unlike the two previous exhibitions, Et Voilà!, which highlighted the relationship between magic and technology, and Future Past Cinema, which looked at the recovery of pre-film formats in contemporary, Mecànics had a fairly diluted identity/ The reason for that lays probably in the fact that the exhibition was showcasing the best of what Barcelona makes in art production center rather than exploring with brilliance and cohesion a defined theme. The result is rolllercoaster that leads you from gems to strikingly weak pieces.
I caught myself thinking i shouldn't have bothered. This edition of SonarMàtica had decided to write off SonarCinema, Digital à La Carte and also the artists talks and debates i had enjoyed so much last time i was there (unless, damn! i've missed it). A few projects i've (re)discovered in the exhibition made it worth the trip though: The Sounds of Science (los sonidos de la ciencia), developed by Jay Barros during MediaLab Prado's Interactivos?'09: Garage Science workshop, uses off the shelf and mostly recycled equipment to create audio visual remixes of sounds and images captured from the urban micro-environment, to "lay-down" some beats and frequencies that serves as a musical score for a visual display of what exists beyond the realm of our everyday vision. At the heart of the project is a home-made microscope designed with a CCD sensor from a camera and the lens from a CD player. Image processing programs analyze various samples from protozoa gathered in urban environments and turn them into algorithms which provide the basis for visual and sound composition.
L'Orquestra dels Luthiers Drapaires (the Luthiers Drapaires Orchestra) is made of spectacular robotic instruments that have been created out of technological waste found on rubbish dumps and in the street. Telenoika has decorticated the waste and enhanced it with a little help from circuit prototyping and acoustic research. "Luthiers Drapaires" is proof that the waste we generate provides enough raw material to build sophisticated devices. Besides, the growing amount of tools and information available online provide everyone with the possibility to access the knowledge needed to turn rubbish into artworks.
For Sónar, the orchestra was composed of a percussion set made of electromagnetic pistons; a theremin made from two radios; an adapted television which works as an oscilloscope; a guitar made of string, a crate of wine and the engines from a hair removal machine; and a set of automated tubular bells.
Yuri Suzuki brought some much-needed poetry to the exhibition. He displayed some of his charming Physical Value of Sound pieces but also a 2004 piece called Jelly Fish Theremin. The movement of a fish in a horizontal bowl controls the sound, air- conditioning, the visual image and lighting. Small gold fish were swimming inside the instrument at Sonar but the original work used a jellyfish: I used jellyfish as the control center, since jellyfish are made up of 98% water, and I thought that the will of the water would be reflected in the movement of the jellyfish, if only a little. If we were able to create a space controlled by jellyfish, wouldn't it be the ultimate place of relaxation? And if you understand japanese...
Image on the homepage courtesy Yuri Suzuki. |
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Encastrable is a series of guerrilla art residencies held inside gardening and DIY megastores in the Paris area. The project, which i discovered it while i was visiting the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris a few weeks ago, was initiated by Paul Souviron and Antoine Lejolivet.
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures. Authorization of the manager of the establishment is obviously never requested. |
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Anyone who ever asked me what to do in Paris has heard me rave endlessly about the Palais de Tokyo. That place makes other contemporary art museums and galleries look 'ringard', outdated and out of touch. The Palais is open from noon to midnight. An entrance won't entitled you to a 2 euros discount on a hefty glossy catalog. No, Sir, when you buy your ticket you are handed out a magazine with all the info you need to visit the exhibition and go further in the discovery once you're back home.
The ongoing exhibition, GAKONA, is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There's a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
The researchers at the HAARP are studying the transmission of electricity in the uppermost portion of the atmosphere. But because of its military funding and the fears associated with electromagnetism, HAARP is surrounded by a cloud of controversy. Its forest of antennas has been accused of beaming electromagnetic waves that are extremely hazardous to human health, of disrupting climate, of having all sorts of influence on human behaviour and of being weapons able to disrupt communications over large portions of the planet. Made up of 4 solo exhibition (but only 6 artworks) by Micol Assaël, Ceal Floyer, Laurent Grasso and Roman Signer, GAKONA oscillates between fact and rumors, science and imagination.
The icon of the show is Parapluies (umbrellas) by Roman Signer. Two Tesla coils charge up, approx. 5 minutes later an alarm sounds and a blast of electricity spectacularly lights up between the extremities of the umbrellas. I'm not going to delve on this one, have a look at this video or this one instead.
Now Haarp, by Laurent Grasso, is a sculpture clearly inspired by the aforementioned program, not only does it look like its model but its potential effects are invisible as well: are there waves passing through the antennas? Are they harmful? Should we be worried? How real is this?
Chizhevsky Lessons, by Micol Assaël, is a gigantic generator of static electricity. The name of the artwork refers to Alexander Chizhevsky, a scientist who explored the correlation between solar activity and historical events such as wars and revolutions. Right before being allowed to approach the installation, you are warned that people wearing pacemakers or hearing aid and pregnant women should not go any further, advised that you should "avoid touching other visitors' faces, especially the eyes" and promised that the work would "load the body with static electricity." Thank you very much! What visitors experience is the unpleasantness of static electricity re-created artificially with a cascade generator, a transformer, copper plates, and wires that fill the space with negatively charged ions. The discharge only occurs when touching an object or person oppositely charged. Although the installation is not dangerous it definitely invites visitors to step out of their safety zone and explore uncontrollable physical, emotional and psychological experiences.
GAKONA is on view until May 3 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. |
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Postopolis Day 5 was the day i realized once more that many people in the audience should have been on the programme too. It was the day i fell in love with stripped trousers and the day i decided all those hours spent on the roof of The Standard had not been that cold after all. Dan Hill has a much wider and smarter coverage of Postopolis than i, Bryan Finocki has started posting bits and pieces of it, archdaily went for a best of, gods know where Geoff found the time and energy to feed such a fascinating twitter coverage, and Jayce Clayton might come up with more.
So, day 5, right? Dan posted an extensive eulogy to Benjamin Bratton's talk. So let's skip to the next speaker: Christian Moeller. He was wearing the most magnificent trousers and kept joking about Germany the way Germans always do (i suspect they are quite proud of the cliches they seemingly make fun of.) He showed some works you have probably already heard about and sparkled them with anecdotes. In particular what he calls "technical fuck-ups."
The day of the opening, people were touching different poles with both arms. That had not been anticipated so the installation didn't react as it should have. To fix the problem on the spot, the staff rushed to the offices and printed a series of rules on how to use the installation and that was it: people had one of their hands busy holding the sheet of paper. Video of the installation. Unlike the previous days, day 5 of Postopolis had very few solo presentations but a series of panels. The first one was a bit of a wild mix-match gathering some 'new media art-y' and very talented people: Sean Dockray, Dan Goods, Daniel Rehn and Jay Yan. Sean Dockray is co-directing the TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown. The space used to be a gallery exhibiting mostly new media art installations but Dockray turned it into a series of platforms that, each in its own way, foster social exchange, public participation to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture.
TELIC now takes in The Public School, The Distributed Gallery (a video exhibition project made of televisions and video monitors in various semi-private locations), the Berlin Telic Art Exchange (a gallery that doesn't exist on Brunnenstrasse and is currently showing two spectacular sculptures by Nick Ervinck.)
Dan Goods is an artist with an unusual job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He helps researchers communicate their work to the general public. He talked mostly of eCloud, a data driven sculpture he's developing together with Nik Hafermaas and Aaron Koblin for San Jose International Airport.
Hundreds of hanging square panels of electrically switchable laminated plexiglass act as pixels. This material has the ability to graduate opacities with the transmission of an electrical charge: when in neutral, the panel is opaque and when sent an electronic charge the material transitions to visually transparent. The animations that move through eCloud are based on a live feed of weather and wind conditions data. By replaying data through time, abstract imagery moves from one panel to the next, creating visualizations that traverse the concourse space. An additional display signage communicates the current dataset to the viewers. See movie. Daniel Rehn mentioned most of the projects he's involved in from a $10 computer already available in India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere to Rabbitat v1.0, an installation that uses web cameras to capture and illuminate rabbit behavior. Jay Yan went quickly through a series of his works but i'll be even faster and point you to aninterview i made with him last month. What i should add is that he showed us a new installation called Turbulence, video.
One of the most interesting panels for me was the one dedicated to photography. Photographers Catherine Ledner, Misha Gravenor, Dave Lauridsen and Tom Fowlks. The issues raised: do you feel that bloggers steal your pictures when they use them, give credit but do not email you to get permission to publish your images? How do you react if they crop your pictures? Should images be treated as text quotations and as such be free to use? What should be the legal implications of using a photography that has been commissioned and paid by a magazine? The feeling i had from the discussion is that bloggers are not super popular among photographers. Catherine Ledner, had a very open attitude "As long as they give credit, that's free publicity for me." Others really insisted on being warned about the use of their images "I like to know where my images are going," said Dave Lauridsen. Ledner immediately answered "Just get a google alert on your name and you'll know where your photos are." Geoff, who was moderating the discussion, had a few pertinent points to share on the subject.
We didn't really have a closing party that night but the breakfast of the following morning was quite a party. We went to a rather unbelievable place called Clifton's Cafeteria. Everything was faux-forest. From the moose head to the fridge wrapped in fake logs, people drank Lemon Olé or Mango Olé but the food was brilliant. Not particularly sophisticated, rather heart-warming and arteries-clogging. Loved it! Once again a huge thank you to Storefront for Art and Architecture for their brilliant work of production and organization, to Geoff from BLDGBLG for imagining all this and to ForYourArt who made our life in LA so pleasant and exciting. |
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I am born chinese, raised american, and now because chinese art is so hot, chinese once more. That's the bio, the very concise bio of Jay Yan.
A couple of years ago, Jiacong "jay" Yan completed his degree at the cradle of young talents that is UCLA Design|Media Arts Department. He lives in Los Angeles where he works as a media artist and designer. Fresh from UCLA, Jay started exhibiting his installations and videos in galleries in the U.S., in Asia and in Europe as well. Let's see if i manage to get a few words from the most laconic artists i've ever come upon:
I decided to interview you for two reason. The obvious one is that i like your work. Thank you. Stealing Art, to put it simply, is my chinese cultural take on John Baltessari's famous piece, Singing Sol LeWitt I was in Shanghai buying bootleg DVDs from a street vendor and noticed an unpopular movie had pictures of Angelina Jolie on the cover even though she was not in the movie. I asked the mechant why this was there if she was not in the movie, and he said, because her face sells more DVDs. I thought this was hilarious! Not only are they selling bootlegs, but they modify the cover art to popularize the movie. When I got back to the US, the latest issue then of Art Forum featured a big article on the art market and predictions of the future. One article complained about artists, whose work can easily be duplicated, still limiting their editions to 3 in order to drive up individual prices but this prevents everyone except the economically wealthy to buy such works. Now I'm not trying to destroy the value of these video art pieces, it's more along the lines of how Murakami works. He produces so much toys and t-shirts that he makes very little on (apparently one painting sale is a match to his merchandising profits according to the MOCA curator) but they are still important to popularize his work. So I think of Stealing Art in much the same way. Collectors who always want the original with proof of authenticity will always buy the real work, why would a badly recorded dvd be as interesting to them as a collectable? I actually intentionally tried to make it as bad as I can. It is the BADNESS of it that makes it something. I've seen projects by others who try to sell bootleg art, either downloaded from the internet or photographs of art, but they all try to pass off as the art work instead of a new art work. In each DVD, I made them in the exact style of a Chinese bootleg DVD you would find on the streets of Shanghai. You see the reflection off the TV of me behind the camera (referencing to the often seen man standing up at the movie theater at the bottom of the screen). The cover art is overly bright colored and with bold 3D letters (I was modeling them off porn DVD covers). The back of the DVDs are filled with non-sense text (Chinese bootlegs are filled with non-sense text to try to make them look more legitimate). I even included the thin plastic wrapping pouch that bootleg DVDs are sold in.
At the day of the opening, I knew two of the artists were going to be present because they were giving small talks, I set up a cardboard stand in front of the space with the bootlegs and people immediately started buying them. One was purchased for Guido van der Werve as a gift from his friend and I think he was kind of shocked because he immediately ran outside. I'm not entirely sure if he comprehended what was going on but he took one look and then went back in, not really talking to me. Marco Schuler was much more cool about it. He came up to me and bought a DVD himself, but complained that since he made the original video, I should give him a discount. He gave me his card telling me to get in touch with him but I'm afraid he wants to sue me. All the DVDs sold out in 30 minutes. I really want to do this at the Shanghai Biennale actually, I think it would be great. I just don't know a way to get access to the videos they show before the opening...
Surely there must be more to being Chinese than surfing on the wave on the "Chinese art is hot' trend. So how do you navigate between two different countries so different? Do you show your artwork in China? Do you have a strong relationship with the art community over there? Well, funny things happen when I show work overseas. I work out of the USA, my information is from the USA, but somehow they always find out I'm Chinese, so next to my name it would appear: Jay Yan (USA/CHINA) without me even saying anything. I am not the expert on Chinese Contemporary Art, 90% of it stems from just long conversations about it with a Collector that likes me, Guan Yi, from Beijing. Luckily he is one of the top Chinese Collectors with excellent tastes (and I'm not just saying that because he bought my work) and he really introduced me to Chinese Comtemporary Art. As I walked through his private collection, it was a complete history lesson on Chinese avant garde art. He introduced me to my heroes like his friend Ai Wei Wei and the works of Zhang Huan (whom you've written about next to my work, which I was flipping with joy about). He told me about the "China / Avant Garde" show in 1989 that was shut down by the Beijing Police and about how the artist Xiao Lu shot at her own installation. It sounded like an amazing time at which point I told him about this idea I had of graffiting Tian An Men square with time delayed paint so the paint wouldn't show up tills days later. The conversation got a little more serious and I understood the time was still not right for such a daring act. A cab driver in Beijing once told me "when you are unknown, it's ok to experiment and do crazy things, just not political. When you are somewhat known, it's better to be safe, because they can still make you disappear and no one would care. When you are famous, then you are too well known and you can start doing whatever you want again.... but still be careful of the political stuff." I do not show my work there as often but I help my friend setup her work in China sometimes and I always pretend to not speak a word of chinese because if you are a foreigner, they treat you better. They get you a translator, which doubles as your assistant, and they are way more willing to help you. The best part is, if they talk in front of me in chinese about how they are going to cut corners on the installation, I can catch them (sadly, this happens more than I would like). It's a weird system, you have to know who to bribe so you get the best work from their staff etc. I left China at the age of 6 in 1990 so I can not make work about the culture, just make works about the things I find interesting from an outside perspective. Every time I go to Shanghai, I find funny things that the culture does. Like when I was young, I tried to go to a video game arcade in Shanghai and I got yelled at by all the men inside for trying to go to the arcade because children weren't allowed back then.
The installation Whisper looks extremely poetic Thank you ...but your description of the project is a bit laconic. I try to not talk so much in my descriptions so makes interviews like this more interesting How does it work technically? I keep my description laconic to avoid people thinking about this question. It works by placing speakers underneath a vase with flowers. The speaker vibrates the vase and the flower to audible frequencies. The base stand is then soundproofed to block out all sounds except those coming from the flowers. The Calla Lily flower was chosen because it's stiff stem carried the vibrations well, and the trumpet shape of the flower amplified the sound. Physically, not really, the flowers are easy to replace as long as they are in season. If they are not, it's a nightmare running around the city trying to find them. Semiotically, flowers have a long history in art. I try to reference both O'Keefe and Mapplethorpe in the piece, these flowers have such a strong context and simple form that it was really hard finding the appropriate sound to play through them.
Apart from flowers you also worked with meat in the past. What exactly attracts you with organic materials? I wondered what butchers do when they're bored. I don't think art is about how well you do or make something anymore, it's about how great your idea is and how to execute it in the best possible way. Do you manage to live from your art? I wish. Dynamic art requires computers, displays, cameras and the equipment cost for one piece already pushes a work past $5000 and that's before the artist and the dealer's share. Jennifer Steinkamp taught me how to package a work and set it up easily for collectors, but you have to be her to charge an amount that makes sense for everyone. I help artists create detailed visualizations of their ideas for proposals or for direct art fabrication. How much do you manage to control the way people interact with your work? Hiring a pretty girl to come every now and then and interact with the piece.
Which kind of unexpected behaviour have you witnessed with your installations? The piece "throw your hands up" specifically comments on how funny people interact when you remove the actual installation and place their behavior out of context. Most people just wave their arms in the air because they are too embarrassed in a gallery setting to do anything else really. The "we only come out at night" piece has attracted singing, people offering up their baby and women flashing their breasts at it For unexpected interesting interaction with your art piece, serve alcohol,
Is there any place in the world where you'd love to project your interactive projections? On the portrait of Mao @ Tian An Men Square, Or on anything Pablo Valbuena plans to project onto, I had a great time at the last Today's Art projecting over his piece and we had a good laugh about it. I made a piece that was on wheels allowing me to project all over the city and interact with the people below. I then started projecting on the other art works at the show using my piece to "attack" their pieces. Some people really loved the idea of two projection pieces interacting, but this one girl yelled at me for 10 minutes about how I should be ashamed of myself. I am now interested in my much more simplistic interactive projection pieces like pieces from the "projections for a large wall" series. I want to find some nice curved spaces, odd shaped walls to divide with 2 colors or a simple colored line that one can manipulate. I've been friends with Christian Moeller and Casey Reas for almost 6 years now. They introduced me to art and really helped and encouraged me through my career. I went through a Bas Jan Ader phase for 2 years which threw me off because it was such an romantic emotional style of work that I had never done before. I watched Bas Jan Ader's piece "I am too sad to tell you" and thought this was the greatest art piece I have ever seen. Ai Wei Wei keeps me interested in contemporary chinese art. I'm currently on an Ellsworth Kelly kick . Any upcoming project you could share with us? I will no longer use the random() function in any of my future pieces.
I have an upcoming show at the new Di Yu Gallery in Shanghai. I am currently trying to get my hands on a replica of the gun that shot Andy Warhol (the original is locked up at Riker Island in New York). I want to make short line of electronic toy guns that you can point at an art work and Andy Warhol, in his voice, will tell you whether it's art or not. Thus we can have a device that will finally tell us whether something is art or not. It's also kind of a homage to Xiao Lu's performance during the China \ Avant Garde show. Thanks Jay! |
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Crisálidas (Chrysalises), an installation on view until April 6 at LABoral in Gijon (Spain), is a luminous collage of moving images processed from mass media, re-interpreted into an intuitive and sketchy drawing on acetate, and furthermore regenerated through layering and chance encounters with other drawings. This process results in the chance emergence of hybrids and in strange random combinations of the drawings. These collages are the starting point for the enfolding mural art installations and the animation videos that complete the piece by Fernando Gutiérrez, generating subjective atmospheres as invitations to the world that approaches the unconscious from an iconographic perspective. Crisálidas is a piece that innovates the traditional technique of drawing from within, while redefining it and positioning it in the present by the use of new techniques and supports. The project, developed by Fernando Gutiérrez, is the winning piece in the second edition of the LABjoven_Experimenta Award (the previous award went to Situation Room by Pablo de Soto from hackitectura.net), an annual award open to young artists born or residing in the Principality of Asturias. Its purpose is to facilitate the development of experimental art projects conceived specifically for their exhibition in Sala Plataforma at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. I asked Fernando Gutiérrez to give us more details about his artworks (if you scroll down you can read the original answers in spanish):
Crisálidas uses images extracted from the mass-media. Is there any political or ethical reason behind this choice? Crisálidas is part of a body of work based on the metamorphoses that small things submit us to. Such as going on a trip and coming back with the accent of the place we've just visited. We constantly reconfigure ourselves because of our empathic nervous system. Similarly, the drawings of Crisálidas contaminate each other in a process made of articulated collages, in which everyday images that we see in the media intervene. The selection of images is subjective and capricious, forming a visual diary of a reality that has been filtered to the point of intimacy. There doesn't seem to be, at least not in a conscious form, a political or ethical motivation behind Crisálidas. There's no prejudice. When i draw in a fast and careless way, images remain stripped, only their basic structure remains. It is difficult to determine its origin, its starting point. We might sometimes find an element that vaguely evoke its source, maybe we in a subliminal way we are reminded of its shadow. The idea that we can build parallel worlds on the basis of light evocations interests me.
You invited El Hijo to accompany your work musically during the opening of Crisálidas at Laboral. The concert, i read, was designed as a soundtrack and musical backdrop for your installation. Can you explain us how it went? And why did you chose El Hijo? More generally, has music any influence on your work? The work has been conceived without audio, i wanted the stimuli to be purely visual. On the other hand, we wanted to create something special for the inauguration and we invited El Hijo to create a sound environment. El Hijo's imagery deploys itself between the dream and the experience of life, reflections of the world reverberated in a poetry that caresses the metaphors of the work. Crisálidas identifies itself with his music and words: "emotional music that insinuates itself inside memory like water gets into the ears...", i would like my drawings to be interpreted that way. Music has a lot of influence on me, it is always present when i generate ideas, create associations... it's a permanent stimulation. However, there's been occasions when i have incorporated music into my work. That's something i've been thinking about more lately, i like the idea of working with musicians.
Crisálidas seems to be a seducing mix of drawing and new technologies. Had you experimented with new technologies before? What did the technological aspect bring to your work? Is the technological element, something you would want to keep on working on in the future? There is a very suggestive relationship between drawing and new technologies that i would like to keep on exploring. In my work i modify spaces through graphic interventions that organize emotional, sensitive and sometimes playful atmospheres. In parallel to the interventions i started experimenting with small animations and i found myself incredibly fascinated by the fact that images can take on a life of their own. In that occasion the two media could be integrated in the same space, different graphic skins through light and video. In Crisálidas the use of a digital and multi-function robot-projector DL1 enabled me to face a space of multiple projections, i could control the laps of time between animations and the movements of the beam on various spots in the room. All those features would be inconceivable with a standard projector. On the other hand, something as simple as changing the light in the room and the use of photoluminescent painting for some of the drawings enabled to get light in the dark, purely from the graphic impulse. I'll try and make a subtle use of these features, adding up technology here and there and in a very simple way. Not as a spectacle nor for the sake of it.
How did LABjoven_Experimenta help you developed your project? Which kind of support did you receive from LABoral? LABjoven_Experimenta offers the possibility to develop a site specific work with a professional production budget. It's a privilege to be able to work in these conditions... The work has been supported by LABoral's impeccable follow-up. The working team engaged themselves in the project right from the start, offering an intelligent support, helping its development and solving at every step the technical doubts we encountered. José Luís Macías and David Almazo were in charge of software programming for the projector DL1, they dedicated themselves emotionally in Crisálidas and they have broadened the perspective of the art piece. The experience has been very enriching.
Spanish version of the interview.... Crisálidas uses images extracted from the mass-media. Is there any political or ethical reason behind this choice? Crisálidas gira en torno a un flujo de trabajo a partir de las metamorfosis que nos producen las pequeñas cosas, como salir de viaje y volver con el acento del lugar que has visitad. Nos reconfiguramos continuamente desde un sistema nervioso empático. De la misma forma, los dibujos de crisálidas se contaminan unos a otros en un proceso de collage articulado, en el que se intervienen imágenes cotidianas que vemos todos los días en los medios. La selección de imágenes es subjetiva y caprichosa, conformando un diario visual de realidad exudada desde la intimidad. No parece existir, de una forma consciente, una razón política o ética detrás de Crisálidas. No se hacen juicios de valor. Cuando dibujo de forma rápida y despreocupada las imágenes quedan desnudas, tan sólo permanece su estructura básica. Es difícil saber cual es su procedencia original, el punto de partida. En alguna ocasión algo nos puede recordar vagamente a su referente, tal vez de forma subliminal recordemos una sombra. Esta idea me parece interesante, la construcción de mundos paralelos a partir de leves evocaciones.
You invited El Hijo to accompany your work musically during the opening of Crisálidas at Laboral. The concert, i read, was designed as a soundtrack and musical backdrop for your installation. Can you explain us how it went? And why did you chose El Hijo? More generally, has music any influence on your work? La pieza está concebida sin audio, quería que los estímulos fuesen únicamente visuales, pero queríamos hacer algo especial para el día de la inauguración e invitamos a El Hijo a realizar una ambientación sonora. El imaginario de El Hijo se desenvuelve entre el sueño y la experiencia vital, reflejos reverberados del mundo en una poesía que acaricia las metamorfosis de la pieza. Crisálidas se identifica con su música y sus letras: "música emocional que se aloja en la memoria como el agua en los oídos...", me gustaría que mis dibujos se interpretasen así. La música tiene mucha influencia sobre mi, está presente de forma continua a la hora de generar ideas, crear asociaciones... es un estímulo permanente, sin embargo en contadas ocasiones la he incorporado a mi trabajo. Algo que estoy reconsiderando, me seduce mucho la idea de trabajar con músicos... Crisálidas seems to be a seducing mix of drawing and new technologies. Had you experimented with new technologies before? What did the technological aspect bring to your work? Is the technological element, something you would want to keep on working on in the future? Existe una relación muy sugestiva entre el dibujo y las nueva tecnologías que me gustaría seguir explorando. En mi trabajo altero espacios a través de intervenciones gráficas que organizan atmósferas emocionales, sensitivas y ocasionalmente lúdicas. Paralelamente a las intervenciones empecé a experimentar con pequeñas animaciones y me producía una fascinación tremenda el hecho de que las imágenes cobrasen vida. En esta ocasión podía integrar los dos medios en el mismo espacio, distintas pieles gráficas a través de la luz y el vídeo. En crisálidas la utilización de un robot-proyector digital multifunción DL1 me permitía afrontar un espacio múltiple de proyección, pudiendo controlar los períodos de tiempo en las animaciones y el movimiento del foco en distintos puntos de la sala, cosas que serían impensables con un proyector estándar. Por otra parte, algo tan sencillo como un cambio de iluminación en la sala y el uso de pintura fotoluminiscente en algunos de los dibujos, permitía luz en la oscuridad desde el propio impulso gráfico. Traté de hacer una utilización sutil de estas prestaciones, sumando la tecnología puntualmente y de una forma sencilla, no como espectáculo ni un fin en sí misma. How did LABjoven_Experimenta help you developed your project? Which kind of support did you receive from LABoral? LABjoven_Experimenta ofrece la posibilidad de desarrollar una obra site specific contando con un presupuesto de producción profesional. Es un privilegio poder trabajar así... El proyecto estuvo respaldado con un seguimiento impecable por parte de LABoral. El equipo de trabajo se involucró desde el principio en el proyecto, ofreciendo un apoyo inteligente, facilitando su desarrollo y resolviendo en todo momento las dudas técnicas y de montaje que se produjeron. José Luís Macías y David Almazo se ocuparon de la programación del software para el proyector DL1, implicándose emocionalmente en Crisálidas y ampliando la perspectiva de la pieza. La experiencia ha sido muy enriquecedora.
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