Sofia Crespo
Introducción
Desde el 28 de octubre de 2021, la exposición "Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network?" estará abierta en conjunto con el número colaborativo entre H-ART y DAHJ bajo el mismo título. Como una forma de praxis, la exposición en realidad virtual amplía las discusiones de las revistas a las áreas de producción artística.
Hace veinte años, Mary Louise Pratt propuso la noción de "zona de contacto" como un lugar en el que se discute y se desafía la cultura. El arte puede tender puentes o desestabilizar las disciplinas y los métodos para replantear historias y aportar nuevas ideas. Sin embargo, a escala global, existen numerosos problemas de desigualdad en términos de acceso a tecnología. Si bien las perspectivas académicas ofrecen una valiosa contextualización, los artistas pueden abordar cuestiones relacionadas con la tecnología y las redes globales a través de la práctica corporal y la intervención directa. Los artistas están en una posición única para crear cambios de paradigmas en los valores y las cuestiones éticas mediante el uso de infraestructuras de datos y sistemas de información en su trabajo.
Los artistas que participan en la exposición abordan temas relacionados con el arte digital del mundo de habla hispana y portuguesa, definido en sentido amplio, incluyendo las historias coloniales y las tecnologías fronterizas, los futuros imaginados, las realidades y redes poscoloniales, las desigualdades globales o históricas actuales, los retos y las barreras que enfrenta la comunidad latina (lingüísticas, sociológicas y de infraestructura), y los artefactos como datos o los datos como objeto.
Introduction
Starting October 28, 2021, the exhibition “Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network?” will be open in conjunction with the collaborative journal issue between H-ART and the DAHJ by the same title. A form of praxis, the VR exhibition expands the journals’ discussions into areas of artistic production.
Twenty years ago, Mary Louise Pratt proposed the notion of a “contact zone” as a place where culture is negotiated and challenged. Art can bridge or destabilize disciplines and methods in ways that reframe histories and bring new insights. Still, on a global scale, there are many issues of inequality in terms of access to technology. While scholarly perspectives offer valuable contextualization, artists can address issues of technology and global networks through embodied practice and direct intervention. Artists are uniquely positioned to create paradigm shifts in values and ethical issues by employing data infrastructures and information systems in their work.
The feature artists address themes of digital art of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, broadly defined, including colonial histories and frontier technologies, imagined futures, post-colonial realities and networks, ongoing global or historical inequities, latinx challenges and barriers (linguistic, sociological, and infrastructural), and artifacts as data or data as object.
Joining the Exhibition Room
To access the VR exhibition environment, click "Load Room" below and then select your avatar and "Join Room" to view, or open the environment in a new browser window via this link. Before entering a Hubs room you are in the room's lobby. You can see and hear what's going on in the room but you can only interact with the others using text chat. The process of entering a room is a bit different depending on your device.
Please note that the environment only allows for 50 people to enter at a time. If you cannot join us right away, please wait a few minutes and try again.
For more information, see this documentation on how to join rooms in Mozilla Hubs.
Navigation
If you are joining via a desktop, click and drag with your mouse to look around. Use the arrow key or the ‘W’, ‘A’, ‘S’, and ‘D’ keys to navigate forward, backward, up, and down based on the placement of your mouse. Using the ‘G’ key will allow you toggle between fly mode and ground mode. If you plan on joining from a touch-screen device or a VR headset, here is additional documentation regarding how to navigate.
Annabel Castro
Bio
Annabel is a digital media artist. She got an MA in Sciences with a specialization in art and technology at Chalmers University. She has a Ph.D in the DXARTS department at the University of Washington.
The crossing of geographical, virtual, and mental spaces, the journey as a landscape, and identity are recurring subjects in her work. Castro received PBEE support from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico, the La Paz award from the SIART international art biennale in Mexico and the Open Territories commission of the mARTadero cultural center in Bolivia. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Research, Innovation and Development of the Arts of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León and a professor in the Department of Art and Humanities of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana campus de Lerma.
Her work has been shown at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, the Video and New Media Biennale of Santiago, SIGGRAPH Asia, the Teopanzolco Cultural Center in Cuernavaca and at the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore of Bolivia, among other spaces. Castro has published in journals such as Artnodes of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Art and identity politics of the University of Murcia and Cultural Geographies.
Fuera de sí: destierro en casa / Outside in: exile at home, 2018 (Fixed Adaptation, 2021)
Based in Mexico, Annabel Castro is a digital media artist who focuses on overlaps of geographic, virtual and mental spaces, landscapes as trajectory, and identity. Outside in is an installation based on machine learning algorithms and their systematic bias. The art piece focuses on one particular discriminatory case that happened in the United States of America after the Second World War. During these years, the American Government arrested Mexican people of Japanese descent.
The installation put into perspective what this event means if we analysed it. The fact that Mexican people were arrested because of their heritage, assigned a new meaning to their faces such as potential danger or person genetically prone to betray their nation. Castro’s artwork brings to the present an example of systemic discrimination. Most of the datasets that train algorithms nowadays are already biased, based on all these isolated and small historical events. To showcase this, Outside in uses four movies where the algorithms cut into different fragments and reassemble them creating a new movie. The fragments are converted into archetypes with a new meaning. The artist aims to make the visitors reflect about the power of algorithms, their results and their biased meaning. As citizens we will suffer the consequences of an biased algorithmic society, that it will discriminate against us based on our gender, race or facial features.
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Juan Covelli
Bio
Juan Covelli is an artist currently living and working between London and Bogotá. A graduate of MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, London, his practice revolves around the technological potentials of 3D scanning, modeling and printing to readdress entrenched arguments of repatriation and colonial histories. His work has focused on new materialities generated by the digital era; in particular, on the dynamics and approaches of the physical within the digital world. In the last few years, he has been exploring the relationship between technology, heritage, archaeology and digital colonialism. Using video, modeling, data sets and coding he creates IRL and URL installation-based works which collapse historical practices with current models of display and digital aesthetics.
Terra Incognita, 2020
Based between London, England and Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Covelli’s practice navigates the history of colonialism via technologies of 3D scanning, modelling, and printing. This digital world, Terra Incognita, was created in the gaming program Unreal Engine. The video on display grapples with Enlightenment-era European botanical expeditions in colonized South American territories. Western natural history ideals of “universal order” and “truth-to-nature” were instruments of imperial thought; this artwork imagines the dystopian future where these ideals evolve with the help of today’s advanced technologies.
With subtle references to Dr. Robotnik’s hybrid techno-animals, Amazon’s delivery boxes, Lord of the Flies, and Animal Farm, Terra Incognita highlights the role of flora and fauna in colonialism. In the video, a digital landscape is punctuated by technological instruments – specimen-collecting drones, mining and logging vehicles, and fenced-in plants indicate a foreign power intent on the study, expansion, and exploitation of the land. The environment is also home to 3D modeled “beasts,” inspired by representations of South American animals by Spanish conquerors that formed a collective European imagination of the “exotic” continent.
As advanced technologies facilitate human expansion into new territories, Covelli’s work reveals the expedition as a model of power that continues in the twenty-first century. With the recent launch of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket and Elon Musk’s SpaceX initiative, expeditions are once again at the forefront, with digital technologies leading the way to a new colonial future.
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Sofia Crespo / Entangled Others
Bio
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understanding of creativity. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.
Beneath the Neural Waves, 2020-2021
A founding partner at Entangled Others Studio, Sofia Crespo is a neural artist whose biology-inspired work often utilizes Artificial Intelligence image formation to explore simulation, evolution, and relationships in organic life. Beneath the Neural Waves is a digital aquatic ecosystem. The web-based coral reef is a diorama for the twenty-first century; the project offers a new kind of artificial life that goes beyond the stuffed pelts of “exotic” animals staged in Western natural history collections. This ecosystem is alive – multiple species of fish navigate between coral, anemones, sponges, and seaweed in their underwater sphere. In this digital setting, natural life is entangled with sculptural fragments, text, simulated waves, and contemplative music. To Crespo, coral reefs are the perfect example of interconnectedness in the natural world: “no one creature is the core component of the reef, rather it emerges from the interwoven whole of all the individual component species.”
In this iteration of the project, the spherical 3D coral reef from the web-based experience resides in the virtual gallery. Separated from the original work, this artifact is almost like looking at a shell, detached from its rightful place in the sea. Coral reefs are the most diverse marine ecosystem in the world, but they are also one of the most threatened. Biodiversity loss, coral stress and bleaching, and rising ocean temperatures may lead to permanent changes to this environment. Beneath the Neural Waves is a speculative ecosystem, but perhaps looks to a future where humans’ primary experience with the natural world is via digital technologies and organic simulation.
More Information
https://beneaththeneuralwaves.com/
Zach Mattan and Raul Urias
Bio
Zach Mattan is the co-founder and CEO at Electrifly Co., an augmented reality art and goods company that works with artists, businesses, and organizations to create unique augmented reality experiences and interactive products.
Raúl Urias Visual artist and illustrator currently based in Mexico City. His pieces have been part of several group exhibitions and one solo show. His work as an illustrator has led him to collaborate with different advertising and entertainment clients from all over the globe.
Tlaloc, 2021
The original illustration for this augmented reality enamel pin was done by Raúl Urias, a Mexican artist currently based in Mexico City, and it was animated by Electrify, an immersive art company co-founded by Zach Mattan. The pendant depicts the Aztec water deity Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, associated with settled farmers.
At the time of Spanish conquest around 1519, the Nahuatl-speaking people from Central America became collectively called “the Aztecs,” though the group who lived in the capital city of Tenochtitlán, called themselves Mexica and ruled over Mexico and their neighbors. As the subject of extensive Spanish inquiry, their history and culture was documented. Coming to power about a hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, Tenochtitlán was a city of close to 200,00 people with streets and canals like Venice.
In the augmented reality experience, lightning radiates from Tlaloc in the center and waves crash and swirl. An “old” deity, Tlaloc is depicted with the characteristic eye goggles or rings around the eyes and wears a necklace with an heirloom pendant, of the kind collected and buried as offerings in the Aztec Templo Mayor.
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Sara Lucia Ossa
Bio
Sara Lucia Ossa has a BA in Visual Arts and a MA in Cultural Studies, focusing on social artistic interventions. Born in Cali, Colombia, she is currently based in Bogotá. She worked in schools, high schools and colleagues. Recently she is working in a research company.
Her professional career led her to work as a visual and audiovisual art for children, youth and adults. In the same way as an instructor in cultural implementation programs in vulnerable territories. In addition, she worked and developed audiovisual component projects with photography, video and animation.
As an artist, Ossa has participated in various exhibitions, recently at the Mostra Museu Arte na Quarentena in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in which around 100 artists worldwide were chosen to make an exhibition on works created during the quarantines lived in 2020. This exhibition took place in the streets and public spaces of Brazil, as well as there was a digital version on the Mostra Museu website. She also participated in the exhibition MIDBO 2020 and Threshold 21 EAFIT University. In 2019, She was part of the committee of the artistic contest “Expresiones artísticas del Bicentenario”, Ruta project organized by the bicentenary of the UPTC University and the education department of Boyacá, Colombia. From 2014 to 2015, she was an active collaborator of the “Blanco Porcelana” project led by the artist Margarita Ariza. In 2015, Ossa participated in the animation team for the Arquitecturas Emergentes project, a video mapping projection on the facade of the La Tertulia museum in Cali, Colombia. She is currently part of the SensoLab group, a social science laboratory at the Javeriana University in Colombia.
Asepsia Social, 2021
The Colombian artist Sara Lucia Ossa explores social interventions through art. She has a BA in Visual Arts and a MA in Cultural Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. The interdisciplinary work of Ossa uses photography, video and animation. “Asepsia Social” is a proposal developed after the exploration of archives and artist’s interventions and focuses on the exploration of the social situations that occurred in Latin America, especially in Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “Asepsia Social” animations seek to generate a reflection on how digital technologies have facilitated connectivity during the pandemic, but have also promoted the invisibility of other realities.It has widened thes social gap in Latin America. For Ossa, the new normal “leaves us in a surreal present with curfews and quarantines, communicating and leading our daily life through screens and increasingly aseptic and isolated from social reality”.
In the animations, the fragments of canonical art history works are combined with stories about how the pandemic has affected the population in Colombia. The juxtaposition of information has allowed us to distance ourselves from the difficulties and reality of the Latin American context.
More Information
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Gabriella Torres-Ferrer
Bio
Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (b.1987 Arecibo, Puerto Rico) is an artist whose work considers futurability, new digital epistemologies and subverting hegemonic narratives; power dynamics and means of exchange and production in a globalized networked society. Their interdisciplinary practice integrates new media, installation, video, web-based interventions, among other experimentations.
Torres-Ferrer has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo del Barrio, the Shed, A.I.R. feminist collective, New York; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale online and offline in São Paulo, Mexico City, San Juan and Santo Domingo; Phillip Martin, Los Angeles; Curro, Guadalajara; Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Embajada, San Juan.
Gabriella is a former resident of Beta Local's La Práctica fellowship in San Juan. They are a 2020-2021 recipient of the Akademie Schloss Solitude Artist-in-Residence fellowship, Stuttgart, and received a guest artist, honorary mention at CERN Collide, Geneve.
Monumenta, 2018
Puerto Rican artist Gabriella Torres-Ferrer explores intersections of digital technologies and power dynamics in today’s globalized network society. With a BA in Architecture from Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, Torres-Ferrer’s interdisciplinary practice includes installation, video, and web-based projects that question and subvert hegemonic narratives. Torres-Ferrer created Monumenta in 2018 with advisor and collaborator Enityaset Rodríguez Santos. Monumenta is a participative website that utilizes the internet’s public domain space to develop an “anti-monument.” Participants are invited to share up to three files and 1600 words that, to them, rethink the possibilities of a monument. The website asserts: “We have assumed certain ways of creating and ideating monuments – that have been imposed from forces in power – but it doesn’t have to be like that, it does not need to have any particular form, visuality, material, medium and/or format.”
Monumenta pushes the capacity of emerging technologies to subvert established ideas of monuments in public consciousness. Defying borders, nationalism, and traditional materials, the project asks important questions about power, cultural identity, and ownership over personal and collective memory. Crucially, the website is not curated by the artist or any other power figure. To Torres-Ferrer: “openness is essential as public monuments should be made by the public not for the public.” The internet is the most open forum for global dialogue in world history; perhaps this space will foster a new conception of the monument that is born from grassroots values, commemorations, regrets, and celebrations.