Recent productions by Brazilian artists such as Mobile Crash, by Lucas Bambozzi, and Crepúsculo dos Ídolos, by Jarbas Jácome, and actions by collectives, such as Metareciclagem and Gambiologia.net, indicate an emergent technophagic trend. Strongly marked by proceedings of resignification of the everyday and micro-political strategies, these artistic practices have established a specific framework in the field of the current aesthetic technologies in Brazil, especially in the most recent types of media art: the art networks and the creative uses of free software.

Coletivo MetaReciclagem, s. d.

The problematization of technology and science in the artistic field is not new. We can say it was an issue dear to the Renaissance mind, as the systematization of perspective by Bruneleschi and the development of the camera obscura demonstrate (Dubois 2004, 35-36). However, in the specific context of the digital arts, this process of problematization of technology acquires special political and institutional contours. All choices, from the programs to the equipment, are ideological and occur within industrial circuits, accentuating a phenomenon that was already apparent with the emergence of photography, as we have already learnt from Flüsser:

I speak intentionally of technological aesthetics and of media art because this is about an artistic production that cannot be called “new media”. Besides being imprecise, this term also has the inconvenience of resuscitating the disturbing paradigm of the so-called modernist avant-gardes: the notion of novelty as a parameter for analysis. In this perspective, we speak of "new media” as if the adjective “new” were capable of defining a repertoire or a type of creation.

But besides this conceptual deadlock, the term “new media” reveals another problem that bothers me more than its simple imprecision. The recurrent use of this term seems to reveal the difficulty of the contemporary art system in absorbing the network culture and the digitalization of the everyday in its most radical expressions. It is certainly easier and more practical to speak about new media and to generalize, without criteria, works and artists under one label, than to face the challenges of creating concepts that can handle an emergent production with several formats.

It is also important to highlight that all media, when it emerges, is new and it is not its novelty that implies change or cultural, epistemological, and aesthetic transformations. Because of that, what is important to assess from the critical point of view are the degrees of complexity and of symbolic plurality that the works related to digital media tout in the man-machine relationship, following the path opened by Guattari in Chaosmosis, when he differentiates machinism from mechanism: "Machinism, in the way that I understand it, implies a double process – autopoietic-creative and ethical-ontological (the existence of a 'material of choice’) – which is utterly foreign to mechanism” (1992, p.138).

This complexity appears in projects that not only use mediatic values or thematize them, but that also instrumentalize them without giving in to the techno-Parnassian charm (the use of technology by technology). This is without doubt one of the most common problems of the area of creation with digital media nowadays, when the undeniable popularization and the welcomed enhancement and cheapening of the programs and technological devices have been followed not only by new spheres of experimentation, but also by new equipments for domestication and control of the collective imaginary through the commoditization of discourses and hacktivist practices.

They are proceedings that operate by the domestication of the senses and the conformation to models and rules of conduct, trying to appropriate the nomad dynamics of the networks in order to idle them, like the capture devices in relation to the war machines that Deleuze and Guattari speak about in A Thousand Plateaus. A good example of this situation is the exponential growth of the social networks and their incorporation into marketing campaigns and corporative discourses, an indicative of how well-succeeded is the rhetoric of that which I have been calling "the era of cute capitalism". A capitalism in which everything sounds onomatopoeic, happy and chubby, such as the logos and names of the main social networks of web 2.0.

In this context, the brands of the products that we use start to constitute layers of our subjectivity, transforming us in happy “fansumers” [2] of brands and of their capacity to satisfy desires that we did not even have. The process of “brandification” of the everyday and of the personal relations operates in a perverse way, through the introjections of corporative values that are superposed and confused with social values. We start, then, to relate through the imaginary of the brands, which convert into the "alphabet” of our identities: “Are you a Mac or a PC? Who are you wearing? What’s in your Netflix list?” (Rushkoff 2009, p. 119).

This “mood” is the result of marketing operations that act through the domestication of the senses. This happens in response to the economic transformations of the 21st century, marked on the one hand by the enormous consumption growth, and on the other by the increase of similar products from the technical and functional point of view. These transformations implode the logic of the differentiation of the brands by names and labels and induce the traditional formats of advertising communication, destined to mass audiences, to give place to "aesthetic wars" in search for segmented “nanoaudiences”. The target now is the conquest of subjectivities through the "colonization of perception”, trying to "form values that will guide the options and actions of the consumers” (Reis 2007).

We entered the era of creative advertisement, in which it is not about boasting unique and objective properties of the products anymore. What matters is to communicate a “personality of the brand”. “The advertisement seduction changed its register; now we invest in the personalized look – we need to humanize the brand, give it a soul, psychologize it.” (Lipovetsky 2009, p. 217)

And it is this humanization that guarantees the success of the colonization of perception. The operation of conquest imposes itself as an ingenious capture device and appears neatly in the way in which the corporations have been transforming counterculture words of order into advertising slogans and flags of their “causes”. As Tatiana Bazichelli highlighted, this makes the deepest political and cultural questions of today a “language battle" that is reflected in the absorption of the vocabulary that defined the hacker ethics of the 1990s - Do It Yourself, sharing, and social networks, for example – and the discourse of the exponents of the web 2.0 business world (Bazzichelli 2009).

It is difficult, in this context, not to agree with Richard Sennett (2006) when he affirms that the main consequence of contemporary capitalism is the corrosion of the character. After all, the efficiency of the process of colonization of perception depends on the absorption of the marketing discourse – the old codes of the hacker ethics – as values of consumption. Just read the traditional introductions in the “About Us” sections on YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook to conclude that this has already been done. They repeat, as mantras, each one with their own chords, the ideas of a community for all, the open space, the free culture, the commitment with sharing and connecting people. As Douglas Rushkoff affirms, "the open-source is reinterpreted as ‘crowd-sourcing’, that is, only another way of having people do jobs in exchange for no compensation” (2009, p.199).

It is precisely the “defetichized” little domesticated character in relation to the art and technology market guidelines that calls the attention in the current Brazilian production, in which a tendency of critical use of the media, a technophagic strand, seems to be announced, or of a technologic phagy. This tendency can be the first draft of an aesthetic practice that operates through the combination of devices, circuit-bending practices, remodeling of equipments, and integration of media of different ages.

Technophage is not a movement, but a personal conception that intends to handle the operations of combination between tradition and innovation, unusual arrangements between scientific and craft knowledge, revalidations of the notions of hi and low tech, proceedings of resignification of signs of the everyday mediated by essentially micro-political technological devices and actions of critical appropriation of media and technical resources. They are actions aimed at the destabilization of the certainties about a continuous progress that results in paradoxical creations such as the Cube by Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti and Anamorfoses Cronotópicas by Marginalia Project, as well as Milton Marques and Mariana Manhães’s surprising creatures. In the first case, we have a system thought in the light of the most recent theories about immersive interfaces and constructed according to illusionist paradigms dear to the pre-cinematographic aesthetics and to the mechanisms from the 1800s. In the second, a mix of circuits, micro-wave engines, micro LCD screens, wires, nuts and bolts that come to life in new symbolic devices.

Infinito ao Cubo, Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti, 2007.
Photo: Leonardo Crescenti

Liquescente, Mariana Manhães, 2007.

It is not another retro relapse expressing notions of merely cosmetic recycling of old equipments, which is the keynote of the industries of several consumer goods, from refrigerators to cars. As T.J. Clark has already pointed out, this type of product with a style from the past creates pseudo memories that border on nostalgias of the present, which Jameson spoke of, accomplishing the purpose of “making up a story, a lost time of intimacy and stability, which everyone affirms to remember, but that no one has had.” (2007, p.332).

The production to which I refer here does not converse with this pasteurized revival. They are projects that many times border on the limits of the handmade, such as the acid Armas.Obj by Leando Lima and Gisela Motta, and of ironic reinvention of technology, such as in Crepúsculo dos Ídolos, by Jarbas Jácome, and Contato QWERTY, by Fernando Rabelo. Armas.Obj, for instance, questions the militarization of the everyday “embedded” in the playful routines of the games. For such, the artists remake, in paper and in human scale, the weapons that are provided in the most popular shooter games, such as Counter Strike. The counterpoint of the lightness of the paper in relation to the weapons makes an interesting discussion about the brutality and the war imaginary of these types of games emerge without sentimentality.

Armas.obj, Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima, 2008.

In Crepúsculo dos Ídolos, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord surfaces without mystification. The software developed by the artist enables anyone to have their 15 seconds of glory and show on TV, live, and in real time. With a group of televisions connected to an open TV program, a microphone, and a computer that manages the system, Jarbas rides the mediatic circus. All it takes is coming close to the microphone and speaking whatever comes to mind. The sound is transcodified into a video signal and transports the interactor, in video, into the program and inserting him on the scene, like a layer. The appearance is short and rapidly effaces, consumed in a kitsch fade composed of computer twilight colors.

Crepúsculo dos Ídolos, Jarbas Jácome, 2008.

In Contato QWERTY, by Fernando Rabelo, computer keyboards are plucked to the limit of their basic structure and connected to rods hanging from the ceiling that bring the most popular connection device of the Brazilian jerry-rigologic culture – the old Bom Bril steel wool – on the tips. It is by manipulating Bom Bril that the public activates and remixes video sequences projected in big format, pretending to be VJs in the era of technologies of a thousand and one uses. The project Realejo, by Fernando Velazquez and Julia Carbonera, operates in the same line of unusual arrangements between hi and low tech and of resignification processes of the everyday; it replaces the old parrot for a cell phone that carries wishes sent by SMS.

Contato QWERTY, Fernando Rabelo, 2009.
Photo: Manuela Ossa.

It is interesting to notice that, if on the one hand what characterizes most part of the production analyzed in this essay is their notorious commitment to political activism, on the other hand what stands out is a very peculiar sense of humor. Far from being conformist, the joy that these programs emanate is a result of their irony, playful astuteness, and rigor in the development of the interfaces. In one sentence: these are works that make it clear that it is possible to be serious and critic without being boring and too discursive.

A good example of this finding is Mobile Crash [3], by Lucas Bambozzi (2009). It is an installation based on four interactive projections that react to the presence of the visitors as soon as they enter the exhibition space, having as a basis a series of small videos edited in a rhythmic sequence. Distributed, like in a game, in 12 levels, the videos are shot in reply to our gestures and become noisier each time, as we move.

All videos show obsolete technological devices, especially cell phones, being smashed by a hammer. The adrenalin that the project activates, leading the visitors to want to advance the levels, is possibly the result of the mixture between pleasure and repulsion by the destruction that it provokes while it promotes the technological defetichezation through the action in the technique. The more we move, the more we pulverize equipments that are quickly converted from symbols of luxury into trash.

Mobile Crash, Lucas Bambozzi, 2009.

By elaborating playfully and intuitively the theme of the programmed obsolescence, a proposal dear to the industry and the publicity since the 1950s that suggests to the public a cathartic participation in the process of discarding devices, the project promotes its uprooting from the marketing culture to which it originally belongs, and from the process of brandification of the everyday on which it depends today more than ever.

In this context, the project repositions the question of consumption, disarticulating it from mere consumerism. This way, it politicizes its debate by dislocating it from the sphere of mechanism to that of machinism and opens it to a new aesthetic paradigm, in the terms proposed by Guattari, one that is subjacent to the other projects analyzed in this essay:

NOTES

1. Free translation from Portuguese. N.T.

2. The expression is by Jack Schofield, Guardian journalist, who was commenting the introduction of the advertising system on Facebook.

3. http://bambozzi.wordpress.com/projetosprojects/mobile-crash/

4. Free translation from Portuguese. N.T.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giselle Beiguelman (São Paulo, 1962) is a new media artist and multimedia essayist who teaches Digital Culture at the Graduation Program in Communication and Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, Brazil). Her work includes the award-winnings “The Book after the Book” “egoscópio” and Landscape0 (with Marcus Bastos and Rafael Marchetti). She has been developing art projects for mobile phones (“Wop Art”, 2001), praised by many media sites and the international press, including The Guardian (UK) and Neural (Italy), and art involving public-access, by the web, SMS and MMS to electronic billboards like “Leste o Leste?” and “egoscópio” (2002), released by The New York Times, “Poétrica” (2003) and “esc for escape” (2004). Beiguelman’s work appears in important anthologies and guides devoted to digital arts including Yale University Library Research Guide for Mass Media and has been presented in international venues such as Net_Condition (ZKM, Germany), el final del eclipse (Fundación Telefonica, Madrid), Desk Topping – Computer Disasters (Smart Project Space, Amsterdan) Arte/Cidade (São Paulo), The 25th São Paulo Biennial and Algorithmic Revolution (ZKM). Curator of Nokia Trends (2007 e 2008) and Artistic Director of Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award.