Fornt page: Haring, K.,(c.1988), Untitled.
Haring, K. (1988) Man of Hearts.
Buymeacoffee.com/catartica
Keith Haring AGC
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The retelling by images Valentina Sepulveda.
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Glossary: Camp Emma Zamudio Salas
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Misfortune Victor Rivera
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Virtue of Normality and the illness of the Soul M.I. Flores Nachón The house of the man who dominates solitude
Bruno Sánchez Art, fascism and the infuriating gentleness of everyday life
Ernesto Ocaña
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Ping Body, Sterlac´s puppet Rossana Huerta
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A.G.C.
Lines, vivid colors, dogs, hearts, and characters moving and expressing endless emotions, are characteristics that make the work of Keith Haring (1958 - 1990) globally recognizable. Thanks to his outstanding career, this month in Catártica magazine we wanted to make a small tribute by including our logo inside one of his pieces. Haring began his career through graffiti, inspired by artists such as Christo (1935 2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 - 2009), who based their work on free and public art and encouraged Haring to paint in every corner of New York, where with chalk, spray paint and acrylic paint he developed the style and figures for which he is so well known. Due to his affinity for street art, there are currently more photographic records of his murals than of the actual pieces, although within his repertoire we can also find sculptures, posters, and lithographs.
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His work, classified as pop art and inspired by the music, comics, and fashion of the time, certainly reflects the atmosphere of the 80s, where artists such as Andy Warhol, Basquiat, and Futura 2000 were also developing works. Likewise, an important part of his work focused on raising awareness of various politically relevant issues of the time, such as AIDS, which we can see in the work Ignorance = Fear. Silence = Death (1989), discrimination as in the poster Free South Africa (1985) that he distributed in the streets of New York in 1986, and nuclear weapons with the poster Antinuclear Rally (1982) that exposes the disagreement to the production of nuclear weapons and presents a baby surrounded by lines inside a mushroom cloud that allude to radioactivity and intend to make a reflection of the repercussions in the future. Also, as we can see on the cover, he had a series where hearts and the color red were the protagonists. With the theme of love, Keith Haring wanted to remind the viewer that love can come from anywhere, a message that is precisely important in this pride month.
Fernández, Tomás and Tamaro, Elena (2004), Biography of Keith Haring, The online biographical encyclopedia, Barcelona, Spain.
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¿Qué normal es lo normal? Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Fotografía Digital 2021
Yellow Mellow Summer Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Fotografía Digital 2021
Amour Plastique Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Fotografía Digital 2021
For as long as I can remember I have been drawn to anything that has to do with art. It is my warmest means of expression and my way of immortalizing my existence and my surroundings. My main tool is the camera but I explored different techniques within my works and my creative processes. I do not see my works as an image captured on a wall or screen, my pictures are the product of everything: it starts from the moment the idea when it is planted in my head, to the execution of it and even the exhibition; I like that my work is full of nostalgia and can immerse the viewer in some experience that seems their own even though it is not.
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Within my work and throughout my short career, I have managed to delve into social and personal issues. The topics I have addressed are closely linked to my experience and imagination. Where I address gender issues, my experience as a woman, can be found in my collection “8M”. Whereas topics such as depression, isolation, loneliness can be seen in “Mind Melted & Trapped''. I play a lot with the narrative of the images, creating stories reflecting a little my perception of the world and in tune, creating new ones, this can be seen in collections such as "The diary of Beatriz", a collection that follows the story of Beatriz and Ruth, a couple of women who had the misfortune to run into the same man. The story is narrated by Beatriz through her personal diary. Within this story I wanted to touch on gloomy and sadistic topics related to the femme fatale and the fury of women. Also the use of narratives can be found within my collection “Vivian & Violet”, works based on a short story I wrote, analyzing topics such as death and the resistance of being who you are. "People Are Strange" and "What normal is normal?" explore the social precepts of good and evil, through the psyche of each individual and the graphic representation of what we see as madness.
El diario de Beatriz Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Fotografía Digital 2021
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In my most recent works, I have played with documentary photography to capture my experiences and my identity, through different elements and people around me, also seeing it through literature, poetry and my own writings and experimenting more with this hybrid intervention. Photography for me will always be that magical entity that allows us to stop time, revive it and intervene in it, invites us to remember and thus also create our own narratives. Time is a very peculiar and enigmatic thing, and the little control we have over it is provided by photography and its derivatives. What we do is something very transcendental, immortalizing, capturing, telling through pictures of life, very magical if you ask me.
Heartbreak Hotel Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Digital Photo 2022
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Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) is a 21-year-old photographer and visual artist born in La Paz, B.C.S, México. She has lived most of her life between Tijuana and San Diego CA, where she currently resides. She is a student of Plastic Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California. She has worked as a photographer at New Icon Model Management, as well as a content creator at Afinidades Mag magazine, and as a freelance photographer. She has made collections such as "8M", "People are Strange", "Mente Merretida" and "Qué normal es lo normal?, "El Diario de Beatriz", etc. Her works have been presented on platforms such as @feminist, @fotografaslatam , among others; as well it has been exhibited in the "Declaraciones Cuerpo" exhibition at the Centro de la Imagen and in the exhibition "Corporalidadex" at the Tijuana State Center for the Arts. Her photography is characterized by the surreal and everyday, with touches of nostalgia that define its essence. Her technique is a fusion of the digital, the analog and the hybrid.
www.vveldass.com vveldass2@gmail.com @vveldass
Del Rocio Valentina Sepúlveda (Vveldass) Fotografía Digital 2022
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Emma Zamudio
CA MP glossary:
Origin
CAMP as a word has several origins, in English it appears as slang to refer to homosexual people, in French “camper” refers to posing or/and seducing. As a whole for several centuries it is being built as a notion belonging to the non-heteronormative Western counterculture. The CAMP appears in front of the academy and high culture in 1964 due Susan Sontag essay "Notes on Camp". [Image 1.]
Where is CAMP expressed?
The CAMP is found in cinema, literature, plastic arts, fashion, design, decorative arts, theater, operas, ballet, music, etc.
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Exists… in the visual, as aesthetics. outside the mainstream (the culture of the masses / or the normative) [Image 2]
It is… [Image 3] artifice, because the natural cannot be CAMP. decorative, not useful. sexual ambiguity. performative, ironic, amoral. overtly sexually. personal, being directly related to the producer. It is not explained, nor is it intended to be deep in content. Pick up elements from the past using them in different ways. [Image 4] Loves excess, does not go unnoticed. The CAMP is noticeable.
It has been said that… “Camp affirms that good taste is not simply good taste; that there is, in reality, a good taste of bad taste.” (Sontag, 1984, p. 15-16) "[...] the camp way is not established in terms of beauty, but rather in terms of artifice, of stylization." (Sontag, 1984, p. 2) "[...] all CAMP objects and people must present an element of unnatural extremism" (Eco, 2018, p. 410) "Camp is the love for the eccentric, for things that are what they are NOT […]” (ECO, 2018, p. 410) “Camp is the experience of the constantly aesthetic world. It embodies a victory of 'style' over 'content', of 'aesthetics' over 'morality', of irony over tragedy. (Sontag, 1984, p.12) [Image 7]
Sontag, S. (1984) “Notes on 'camp'” in Against interpretation and other essays. Barcelona, Seix Barral Eco, U. (2018) History of Ugliness. Croatia, Lumen.
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1.Cover of the essay Notes on “CAMP” by Susan Sontag
2.Scene from the film The rocky horror picture show, (1975) based on the play of the same name by Richard O'Brian. Both considered CAMP.
4. Marie Antoinette's apartments in the Palace of Versailles. Rococo is a period from which CAMP rescues, among other elements, excess. 3. De Saint Phalle, Niki (1966) Hon/Ella and planes.
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5. Dress Marjan Pejoski, during the 2001 Oscars. The singer is considered an exponent of CAMP, this being an example.
6.Different models of Tiffany lamps. Considered CAMP for contrasting a design that simulates nature with something artificial, as well as its uniqueness.
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7.Scene from the ballet Swan Lake written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Due to its simple story, the musical arrangements, scenery and choreography in its beginnings, it was considered too much and was not liked.
MISFORTUNE Victor Rivera
Of all those times when he felt the irrepressible desire to write something, this one in particular was regrettable. She had in front of him a beautiful view of Lake Chapultepec. A crown of trees encircling the surface of the water, sprouting buildings like protrusions from their leaves. The boats, like ships, embarked in the unknown on the mirror of the sky and the great waterfall, witness of so much, as an eye cried without respite towards a Homeric prediction. There he was, from three in the afternoon, feeding the ducks, throwing breadcrumbs. She had decided to arrive early, to participate in the farce before the storm. He took it easy, as she could he, what else could he have done? He would have finished his shift at the office at five, as established in his contract, and would have taken the subway fifteen minutes later, so he would not have had to wait nearly three hours for Lucía's arrival. But that would only have closed the gap in time, and he needed every second, every blink of an eye to delay the moment. He needed to sit and watch the sunset, doing nothing but throwing bread, losing focus, rambling, and avoiding thinking about how he felt about himself. After all, by this point she had probably already packed her bags for her new life in Buenos Aires, while he would be stuck in Mexico, resigned to living a life that for him was ordinary, growing old in a boring job, with dissimilar people, and dealing with the unbearable rush of the city. Over the years, he would probably start a family, although there was also the possibility of being alone. However, none of that frightened him, everything was unsatisfactory for him, because even before Lucía, the only constant was his misfortune.
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Since he was a child, Rodrigo knew that he would bear this feeling when nothing his parents gave him pleased him. When he was afraid to live with other children and forced smiles on the playground. He was cold and distant in the face of any sensible act. He learned to suffer when he realized that he hadn't enjoyed what little sex he had had either. And it wasn't that he was abject by choice, this was a trait of his that he despised. Without excuse, in each experience, he sought more than he was given, but what? Some divine message, some provident, or perhaps it would be a mystical object, a work in a museum, Aleph himself under the stairs of his building. But nothing. He never found anything, and he was disappointed and his bitterness fed and grew like a deep resentment towards the world that he promised so much in the novels he read and in the stories he enjoyed in the movies. He wasn't upset at not finding answers, he was upset at not having the determination to go looking for them. He left his house at the same time and always at the same time he returned from work. It was two years ago, while he was walking through Reforma to return home, that he saw her for the first time. She was sitting on a bench, wearing a flowery yellow dress that stood out in a city full of pants because of morbid. He watched her for a few seconds and without saying anything about her, he followed her path. If she had depended on him, she probably would have never met. But she was sure of herself, she had initiative, a fact that for him was living proof that fiction is not alien to the reality that we perceive. She, noticing her fleeting look, got up, touched her shoulder and asked her if she knew how to get to the Chapultepec forest. Her Argentinian accent immediately captivated him and after giving him directions, he took the courage to offer himself as a guide. In a second he felt awkward and knew it had been inappropriate, he wouldn't have done it under any other circumstances. Contrary to any bet, the young woman accepted and they walked together until they reached the forest.
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By the time they arrived, a downpour was already falling and they decided to take refuge at the gates of the Lake House. There he learned of her dreams and his desires. They talked for hours about everything. They would remember that day forever as the day Rodrigo mistook 'For a Head' with 'Madreselva'. "They don't even look alike," she told him as she blushed with laughter and tried to light her cigarette. She cried with laughter because she wanted to know what he was like, she was not willing to deal with someone who sought to explain his own culture and who also felt offended for not having achieved it. But he laughed with her and apologized over and over again, and that was sweet. He, like few times, did not feel that he had to force her happiness. They began to see each other frequently. She didn't know anyone in Mexico and he didn't have any college friends of hers, not that she talked at work. Her connection was unique and for the first time she felt that she had that something that she always searched for. Soon the days of repetitions ceased and small trips to the park turned into enigmatic adventures. Every once in a while they went to Diana's movie theater, drank coffee in Punta de Cielo and browsed in the bookstores in Viejo. They enjoyed her company and little by little she understood more about her culture. She was particularly captivated by Argentine music. He knew about Mercedes Sosa and her fight; learning to love the "skinny"; she understood Charly's lyrics, that he was and continues to be the Maradona of music; if she had only seen Cerati live, he would be someone else now. For the first time he didn't feel miserable, there was excitement in his life and he, who always raised his expectations, learned to hate his manners as much as to love his impulses. They had taken a long time to commit, his first kiss had been almost a year after they met and they had only had sexual encounters a couple of times. Everything was so calm, everything gave him peace. However, the commitment was what cost them. They both lived alone in Mexico City, he near Lindavista and she on Insurgentes Sur. The thrill of seeing her mishap was always more appealing to him than the thought of waking up with her. He hated the idea of rushing things, and so far she had accepted it.
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Everything changed for him suddenly when the confinement arrived and she had no choice but to return to her parents' house in Argentina. Lucia, who had given meaning to her existence, was leaving that very day and she didn't know how to take it. On the one hand, he knew that he didn't have the money to go see her, that saving money meant limiting himself as much as possible. In addition to this, the crisis increased and there was no clear end in sight. Although deep down, he knew that one word from her could have changed everything. However, he was crestfallen, robotically feeding the animals, looking at the boats so small. When he arrived he was already convinced of what would happen. The cold took hold of the night and he never dared to look into her eyes. It was more what was not said than what was spoken. Within a few hours, they went home knowing they would never see each other again. But what did she feel?
Anxiety, tiredness, insecurity, sadness, frustration, impotence, anxiety, guilt, melancholy, disgust, annoyance, anger, aversion, compassion, empathy, pain, acceptance. By the time she got on the plane she only kept her notebook from him. Nothing there revealed anything other than a terrible confusion. He loved her, but he wasn't about to get used to her nakedness; to lose her shame; he didn't want to see her sick; and he was opposed to the idea of seeing her children grow up. This, however, was exactly what she wanted. While he was afraid of changing everything and clinging to the habit, by the same habit she condemned herself. She, on the other hand, so sure, she would not live in the time of memory and she would accept the pain of loss, although in the end she is also a shitty ordeal.
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VIRTUE OF NORMALITY AND THE ILLNESS OF THE SOUL M.I. Flores Nachón It is an absolute privilege of madness, to reign over all that is evil in man. Foucault, M., History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961)
In the constant dichotomous world, madness is the other to reason, the black of the white without reaching a gray point. In the year 1961 the French philosopher Michel Foucault develops the macro essay History of Madness in the Classical Era, in which he discusses the experience of madness in four periods. As a brief summary of what is written, it speaks of madness in the Middle Ages as the bond to sin, a union with the well-known church of terror, which seeks relationships between diseases with demons, as an explanation of the evils of the earth. , always presented through opposites, dichotomies, as we mentioned before, Lent and Carnival, faith and questioning, order and disorder, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. On the other hand, during the Renaissance, madness could be seen through a funny person's mockery of the figure of genius. The crazy, extravagant, is the daring to tell the truths that reason seeks to hide. Full knowledge of himself and his environment. This is where we will find the painting that will be the protagonist of my analysis below; The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (c. 1500-1) by Bosch. The next moment that Michel Foucault decides to develop, in breadth, is the creation of the General Hospital in Paris in 1656 after a decree of Louis XIV with the intention of housing the marginal population, understanding it as poor, homeless, old, prostitutes, homosexuals,
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disease carriers, and insane, as they were seen as dangerous. Illness, otherness and misery become undesirable, and beyond the treatment of illness, tolerance of otherness and correction of misery, systems of segregation of the population are produced. In moments closer to contemporaries, medicine has opted for a confinement treatment; repeating a process of segregation of the population known as "mentally ill", for their study and possible search for a cure. The disease of the soul, later known as mental illness, becomes a label, an identity that does not go unnoticed on a business card. M. Foucault takes the confinement, surveillance and punishment exercised in the case of the experience of madness, and analyzes it from a distant point for its understanding, concluding that they are unfair methods for the brutalization of the patient and that beyond a cure or understanding of the truths of reason, were "normalized" from submission to what was accepted. Their disagreement had to be suppressed in order to fit in with social determinations. Being "normal" becomes a virtue, and the illness of the soul becomes an ordeal. The inherent, congenital and inevitable crime. Punished from non-acceptance, mockery and rejection. That is why I decided to take as an example the works in which Bosch turns madness into a fun game, and reason into a mockery. Extraction of the Stone of Madness, produced approximately between 1500-1, presents a scene painted within a mirror-like circle, similar to the circular reflection in the background Arnolfini Marriage (1434), in which we can internalize ourselves in the representation of madness. During the time of production through word of mouth legends, madness was associated with a stone lodged in the head, which had to be removed to return to normal. So it is then, that we are presented with the four characters within the fun painting. In the first instance, the mad patient is sitting tied to a chair, without his shoes, looking directly at us, being attended by a surgeon with a funnel on his head, who immediately makes his action less serious, the funnel makes fun of his reason and places him in madness, his bag, held on the chair pierced by a dagger, betrays his charlatanism, symbolizing his deception. From the patient's head, the false doctor extracts a tulip that could have different readings, one of them being the extraction of sexual desire from the patient's head, moving him away from lust and sin and returning to the Christian path. On the other hand, there is the nosy and drunken friar, who shows interest in the procedure without intending to let go of the pitcher full of wine that he carries in his hands. And next to her, the disinterested nun with books on her head as a symbol of stupidity and ignorance or on the contrary, knowledge that was only
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attainable for those who practiced witchcraft. Demonstrating both characters the break with the cleanliness with which it was intended to understand the clergy. Around the scene there is a legend in calligraphy that turns the painting into a verbal and visual game;reads:
Meester snyt die Keye ras, myne name is lubbert das Master, take this stone away from me soon . My name is castrated badger.
Lubbert Das, is an expression commonly used in the Dutch tradition to talk about that character who turns out to be mediocre, lazy, and stupid, literally translated as a castrated badger, and thus understood by the idea that the badger is a lazy animal. In addition to the Renaissance period, in which the madman was the mocking person, Bosch takes advantage of his own madness to make fun of the charlatanism and the folly of the social tradition that celebrated normality. And taken by the hand of Bosch's painting, I accompany his timeless critique, in a society that continues to punish otherness, the uncomfortable, unsettled, upset, saddened and angry. As concluding thoughts, I think it is the disagreement of some, which has allowed artistic productions that we flatter; I think of Magritte, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, as early and famous examples. Madness is the door that reason has wanted to close on us. Enclosed in the ship from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with a thousand arms, to the sea with a thousand paths, to that great uncertainty external to everything. Foucault, M., History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961)
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THE HOUSE OF THE MAN WHO DOMINATES SOLITUDE Bruno Sánchez
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit alone, in a room, quiet."– Blaise Pascal
Despite having dedicated himself to mathematics, Blaise Pascal supposed that the human being is naturally but irrationally afraid of the silence of existence, he avoids boredom, misinterpreting it as "wasting time" and instead, he allows himself to fall into distraction without heading with the innocent belief that it is more "productive", so we train ourselves to do nothing more than avoid our problems and fleeing our emotions to the false comforts of the condescending excuses of the mind. The essence of the problem is that very few people, and rarely, manage to learn the art of solitude. Today you can connect with practically any place and person in the world if you put your mind to it, but the idea of proposing to delve into the "whys" of our own individual condition are doors that stop at the threshold, like in the movies of terror, but with the difference that you know perfectly well that it is hidden inside. And while there are various groups, practices or theories to "let yourself in", they are generally excuses hidden under generalities that only
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brush the doorframe, causing nothing beyond a placebo. There are no esoteric rituals or ancestral techniques for such, every person; Alone or accompanied, you can take a walk to understand your insides with the simple fact of…well…entering through the door. If this inability is an absolute truth for the human condition in general, then it can well be shown that the problem has increased exponentially in the face of all the available connectivity and distraction options that currently exist, which present a pleasant hypothesis that is concluded at herself:
Why be alone when you might not be? It is very important to clarify something, being alone is not the same as feeling alone and neither is the same as being lonely, one is a momentary state, another a feeling and the last one, derived from the previous 2, a lifestyle, entailed in letting oneself be guided excessively by a passing state or by the importance of a feeling. It is the sour origin of the misconception that universally antagonizes loneliness, it is therefore that the less comfortable one feels with loneliness, the more likely it is to become unaware of oneself, spending more time preventing that attention from being focused on another. most profitable part of true human development.
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From a converging point of view between architectural psychology, trying to master solitude is like trying to master light, both being indisputable elements that complement the concept of open and individual space, it is with the light that the canvas is exposed for one to clarify. their thoughts, however, that is only achieved from the relative privacy that darkness grants to measure, many of some inhibit any attempt at introspection by feeling either too exposed or overwhelmed, that is why controlling the naturalness of light is to dominate the bases of the discrete advantages of solitude, understanding them makes one an artist of light and master of solitude. Although his professional title was engineering, Luis Barragán is remembered and renowned for being the artist and master of what would give rise to the famous New Mexican architecture. His architecture, simplicity of lines and austerity without unnecessary ornamentation, evoking harmony in being and clarity in feeling, characterized by playing with diaphanous spaces that give light a primordial place as part of the aesthetics of his work. His creations are places where being can be to be.
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“Only in intimate communion with solitude can man find himself. He is a good companion, and my architecture is not for those who fear it and shun it”. – Luis Barragan (1980)
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At a certain moment they named their magnum opus, the Casa Barragán, as "the cure for claustrophobia", alluding to the idea of a cloister, a place not necessarily small in itself but enclosed from the outside with the historical aim of obtaining spiritual openness to the locked up, that is, a functional oxymoron, something that Barragán alluded to, not always consciously but always present, that he who knows how to be alone with himself, knows how to be in any company, that is, no longer being accompanied but in communion, first with the solitude of his person and then in company with other people, maintaining respect, from his distance, with the understanding of the things that are part of his unique life. In this sense, Barragán produces an architecture so that one can "feel alone", A house is not only inhabited by its tenant if he/she wants to, beyond the functionality of the machinery to live, the habitat is the person's alter ego, Barragán insisted, it is its projection in space, the tangibility of its balance emotional as an elementary part beyond their primary needs. All physical space rooted with a knowing spirituality; Whether individual or collective, they acquire the personality of those who live in them over time, the houses, the workplaces and the meeting spaces, if there were not the shyness of promoting the use of being more than mere transit, although that it falls on economic issues of those who develop those spaces from the imposed priorities of capitalist coldness. They say that the house-workshop of Luis Barragán, officially named with the same name, where he lived the last stage of his life, was thus created with all the reasoning of peace and spiritual logic that he felt required for his full comfort, which was modified. over the years, he was inhabiting it and modifying it, adding and subtracting elements. Houses live with us as long as we live with them. Barragán's work was one of those that emphasized a new way of understanding spaces and reality in a more introspective way, using the ideas of rationalism and modernist techniques to give priority not to the physical individual, but to the emotional individual. One of these steps was collaborating to break with the figurative accessories and false traditionalisms stuck in the modernity of his time, such as ornaments and styles without consistency, still used to a large extent since the first half of the 20th century. In more literal and technical aspects, Barragán's architecture is characterized by the balance between the straight line, the horizontality, the large unadorned walls, the colors in their own element and, most importantly, the timeless.
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It is also evident that another peculiarity of aesthetician the most significant components of his projects such as the walls playing between openings and solids; the textures in their complete naturalness and the vivid color, one of the most marked particularities in his work.
"Beauty, like wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper." – Luis Barragan
The singular signatures of his works are the openings, both windows and doors, walls and their thresholds that rise towards the sky, channeling through a stoic passageway of color and light, exclusive to the hour and the day, with areas to contemplate and points to reflect that they dispose the person to collect himself in himself to dispose of himself in silence... only if he proposes it, of course.
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ART, FASCISM AND THE INFURIATING GENTLENESS OF EVERYDAY LIFE Ernesto Ocoña
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Giacomo Balla Manifestación patriótica 1915 Oil on canvas 101 x 137,5 cm
Part I: Art and Delirium The reality is disgusting, not exactly our immediate reality because that is almost always entirely inescapable, to accept it at least partially is required. I’m talking about the reality that is not intimate, the one described in both books and in the news, echoed in the cries of faraway people; the one that seems so violently repulsive that most of us do our best to just ignore it. There is nothing we fear more than deliberately escaping from the fragile embrace of normalcy. Contemporaneity lives just seconds ahead of adversity, we are a prologue of catastrophe, every single day we try and invoke the tulpa that embodies anxiety. This year records have been broken in greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, acidification and rising level of the ocean, records that had already been broken last year. The global insect population is declining between 2.5% and 10% each year, and in some places hand pollination is about to become the norm. There are microplastics both in our lungs and at the bottom of the sea, and drinking water is becoming increasingly scarce in different parts of the world. All of this added to the injustice and cruelty inherent in human societies that doesn’t require environmental issues in order to cause misery. Understanding and absorbing this reality is terribly painful, I understand such things, we all understand that. That is why there is a collective delusion that asks of us to not be alarmists, that affirms that everything is going to be fine, a perhaps primordial need to focus on immediacy, carpe diem. Fascism just happens to be one of those creatures that thrives in response to apathy.
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Art is a word that bears a lot of different meanings, it’s a hobby, a specific aesthetic, it's a discipline, itś an industry, it can also be an object. For me it is always exciting, an idealized social construct, everlasting, and of unattainable perfection. Art is the eternal aspiration of creativity, or at least there is an intrinsic desire belonging to the word that requires constant reinvention. Art, especially as a contemporary discipline and industry, intrigues me almost as much as it irks me, it wears me down almost as much as it incites me, it seduces me with disappointment and a hint of humanity. The deliberate idealization of art has made it small, impotent, it has limited its cultural power, which was already quite specific. The dominant zeitgeist of contemporaneity is aesthetics itself, understanding aesthetics in the sense of an emphasis in appearance regardless of content. Art more than ever is subjugated to this aesthetic, not the classic visual aesthetic, but to the aesthetic of social struggle, of deconstruction and poststructuralism, the apparent aesthetic of self-reflection in the face of privilege. The appearance of things has always been important throughout history, but in today's world where there is such an emphasis on immediate communication, aesthetics have become utterly dominant. The great dissonance between our own aesthetics and our essence has become conventional, our contemporary era is terribly focused on aesthetics. By adopting certain visual, verbal, and behavioral codes, we can adopt not only vague notions like the appearance of intellectuality or generosity, but more specific concepts. It is thanks to the importance of appearance that as an example, corporations that exploit and pollute the environment can appropriate a conservationist narrative, or that certain politicians, regardless of their discriminatory attitudes, can adopt an aesthetic of tolerance. This is a common phenomenon, and it’s the basis of the relationships that we form in social media, it’s the origin of voluntourism, performative activism, selfie filters, and even artivism. Contemporary art as a genre is the maximum expression of the status quo and the ambiguous values that sustain it. The art that is shown in biennials, galleries and museums is normally ineffectual and often ignorant in the face of social hardships. And all this would not be a problem if such art did not make an effort to appear otherwise. There are many examples of contemporary art that seek to contemplate on poverty, discrimination, identity, and injustice, but they do so from the outside, with a fetishistic gaze, seeking to obtain discourse without providing their immediate society with any palpable change. Contemporary art is built through social trauma, but it lacks the desire to create progress. However, despite its fetishism, performativity, and social irrelevance, something that remains true is that art reflects its own society.
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Antes de que se abra el paracaídas. Tullio Crali. 1939.
We live in a ferociously harmless, static society, where empathy is almost always performance and appearance. A society that is totally dependent on the same systems and hierarchies that exploit it. Art does not evolve and does not offer more socially relevant products because nobody requests or demands better, no one questions its virtues or merits. Because there are no external components to act as critics, art is constantly refined merely through its own aesthetic narratives in addition to being inhabited mainly thanks to privilege. The most frustrating thing about this static ideology that plagues our minds, cities and museums is that it does not generate resistance, that it lives in the center of ideas, in neutrality and moderation. The status quo is tolerant of intolerance, the most infuriating thing is how incapable it is of achieving any progress or substantial change. We are a prologue of catastrophe, we live just seconds ahead of adversity; we need real defiance, real resolution. In the last two decades, fascism, reactionary thinking and the far-right have gained power in all corners of the world, and together with climate change, economic inequality, and social injustice, it’s one of the main obstacles that as humans, thinkers and artists are ours to overcome.
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PING BODY, STERLAC´S PUPPET Rossana Huerta
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Do you know what new media art is? I think in itself hearing the phrase "new media" can be a bit intimidating since art is moving into another phase that we are less familiar with, especially if we have a hard time understanding contemporary art. However, it is not as complicated as it seems to be, we just need to understand a couple of new concepts that are interrelated to the technological world. Let's start step by step, with a small example, Ping body by artist Stelarc. Sterlac seeks to reproduce human properties through a technological tool to explore the power relations that are generated when control of the human body is left to both machines and viewers. To such a degree that the degree that there is a certain familiarity between his work and with Marina Abramović's piece Rhythm 0 since they work the body and the potentiality that is produced when the body is left in the hands of something external to oneself, which shows the curiosity and nature of the human being. Ping Body is a somewhat bizarre performance; we see the artist connected to various machines; each part of his body is controlled by a muscle stimulation interface, which allows anyone within the same interface to access and manipulate Sterlac's body —hence the relationship I felt with Abramović. It is first presented in 1996 during the Telepolis 'Fractal Flesh' event at the Centre Pompidou in Paris where Stelarc and his team linked electronically via a website with the Aalto Lab University Laboratory in Helsinki and the Doors of Perception Conference in Amsterdam. This website allowed the audience to remotely access, view and activate Sterlac's body through a computer-interlinked muscle stimulation system. Although most of the movements generated in Sterlac's body were involuntary, he could still respond voluntarily by activating his robotic "Third Hand" — another work by the 1980 artist. While the artist's body became an Internet-controlled robot,
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the fact that Stelarc retained control of only the third robotic arm installed allowed him to introduce multiple levels of control and communication into the system and a whole philosophical discourse behind it. During the Ping Body performances, what is observed is a body that moves, not according to the indications of another body in another place, but rather, the movement is created by the activity of the Internet: the body's proprioception and musculature are not stimulated by its internal nervous system but by the external ebb and flow of data. By randomly pinging-or measuring echo times between one computer and another-to fixed Internet domains, it is possible to map spatial distance and transmission time to body motion. The ping values are from 0 to 2000 milliseconds-indicative of distance and density levels of Internet activity and are used to activate a multiple muscle stimulator that directs 0-60 volts to Sterlac's body. Thus, ping values indicating the spatial and temporal parameters of the Internet are choreographed, composing the various performances. Meanwhile, an interface begins to plot the movements of the limbs it simulates and subsequently initiates the movements of the physical body. This, in turn, generates sounds assigned to proximity, position, and bending of arms and legs (Frieling, 1997). This resulted in a rather disturbing dance for the spectators since it was reminiscent of shadow puppets, the atmosphere changed to a darker tone when loud electronic music generated live from the data of the same network that made Stelarc move began to play. One's own body becomes an object of inspection on the network, rather than a subject surfing the Web, and is at the total mercy of those on the other side of the network, thus exposing one's physical well-being. By exposing and inverting a common Internet practice, Stelarc demonstrates, in a very visceral way, the physicality of online media and the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment in computer networks (Frieling, 1997) (Stelarc, n.d.). Something that I like about this piece and that makes it stand out is the ease in which complex new media concepts can be associated with the piece. In terms of new media principles, it complies with the principle of modularity since both the human body and the computer network are independent of each other but work together to create a modular network of devices and connections that allow the movement of each part of the body during the performance. On the other hand, variability is presented in this piece as the different ways of moving Sterlac's body in a unique and unrepeatable way with each performance. Now, considering that computers connected to specific internet ports are used, we can deduce that the artist uses these machines as tools since, due to their use, impulses are generated that move the human body, thus creating artistic gestures. It also complies with two principles of mediality, this performance can be observed from a transmedial and multimedial perspective. The multimedial characteristic in this performance can be seen as
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a union of disciplines —artificial intelligence, robotics, theater, dance, etc.— although it could also be seen from the point of view of signs, since a multimedial video of the performance was created, which includes image and sound. In the same way, transmediality is seen at the stylistic level, since the movement that is created thanks to computergenerated impulses is part of a discipline that was essentially closed, since this technology was used only in biomedical engineering, but in this case, it was transferred to the artistic level to give it that artistic gesture.
Now, the case of Stelarc is quite interesting. He is a peculiar artist since he lived right in the era of the beginning and development of post- and trans-humanist thinking, which he clearly shows in his work. In his various works he takes up themes such as computerization, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics and cyborg to relate it to the human, since Stelarc believed that the human body was already obsolete and should have technological improvements to adapt to the new world. This amplification of the body with the help of tools, instruments and devices allows to explore the various alternatives of the reality and the possible of the human body: "a body that is already architecture, and as such can be built and modified according to the demands of the environment where the architectural project will be developed". (Apócrifa Art Magazine, 23 November 2011). This characteristic abounds in the art of new media and post-industrial society, there is a constant obsession for improvement, renewal and life. According to Edward Shanken, stories abound today about artists who seek to inject life into the non-living, the machine; to give it vitality, intelligence, and development. Basically, the artist seeks to be a creator of vitality through his works. Stelarc distinguishes himself among these
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artists by the use of electronic media in his body as an extension of his artistic gesture. As Shanken describes it, "overcoming the divide between carbon-based organisms and silicon forms of intelligence and life, between the real and the artificial, suggesting that these distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred and permeable." (2013, p.74). Undoubtedly, Sterlac leaves us with a striking performance that leaves much food for thought. The performance is distinguished by the simple fact of the use of technology to activate each part of the body and thus generate that disturbing movement. Stelarc bases his thinking on transhumanist theories since he seeks to transform the human condition through the use of tools —which in this case was the use of machines that act as tools—. To achieve this philosophical singularity, Sterlac reproduced human properties — that is, movement that does not come from a brain impulse— through the use of computers and an interface, creating a quasi-cyborg with his body. This relationship between machine and man breaks with the division between the natural and the unnatural, between the real and the artificial, when he puts the movement of the artist's body in the hands of a computer and its user. From here, he manages to express in a disturbing way a technological poetry through his body. It can be said that his body became the vehicle of his artistic message since there is a great possibility of change and use, which is able to adhere to technology.
Apócrifa (23 noviembre 2011) Sterlac. Apócrifa Art Magazine. Frieling, R. (1997) Stelarc - Ping body. Gagnon, J. (2011) Dispositivo, instrumento, aparato: un ensayo de definiciones. artnodes: Revista de arte, ciencia y tecnología, 11(6), 21-24. Kattenbelt, C. (2008) Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships. Revista De Estudios Culturales De La Universitat Jaume I: Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, 6, 19-29. Leen. (2009) Stelarc: Ping body. [Figura]. Manovich, L. (2001) El lenguaje de los nuevos medios de comunicación: la imagen en la era de la comunicación. Paidós. Shanken, E. A. (2013) Inventar el Futuro: Arte, Electricidad, Nuevos Medios. Departamento de Ficción. Stelarc (s.f.) Ping Body
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