“Between the known and the unknown there are doors” reads the graffiti in Córdoba, Argentina. The words on the wall indicate the door as a passage, a path between the known and the unknown. In the linear path of reading we are conducted to the unknown. In the interactive video-installation Marginalia 1.0 beta the sentence is the space to be discovered and produced by the public.

The interactive video-installation Marginalia 1.0 beta is a project conceived by André Mintz and Pedro Veneroso in 2008 for the Festival Conexões Tecnológicas promoted by Instituto Sérgio Mota. Aimed at undergraduate students and recent graduates, the festival counted on professors from several Brazilian universities to indicate the competitors. Marginalia 1.0 beta was the 2008 winner. Since then, the creation duo amplified their field of work and today not only do they give continuity to the research in art and technology, but also coordinate Marginalia + Lab, an education and research laboratory that hosts and supports projects from other creators.

Marginalia 1.0 beta is the translation of the look of a generation formed with no preconceptions, independent from formal consolidated systems. It is a generation in-formed by academic references and especially by the search, the exploration of the unknown without immediate objectives. I mean the internet and computing in general. All and each cognitive path presupposes the unknown and invention. The difference of proceedings of the generation here represented by André Mintz and Pedro Veneroso is its playful aspect, the slow and ongoing constitution of a technical repertoire from the gradual confrontation of the problems encountered on the way. Internet navigation is a metaphor for the process of creation of these young people and their generation.

In the trajectories of exploration and knowledge of the field there is no necessary a priori objective to be achieved; some works may be the result of the exploration of programs and program scripts without immediate purposes; small revelations on the way are conquests. Something like an amateur, a sort of weekend Dr. Sparrow that reinvents his gadgets at each new encounter with the pleasure of making. This speech may seem idealized and may disregard the difficulties found; but with this tone I seek to emphasize the generalized presence of a cognitive ecology of the inventor in the process of internet navigation that is transferred to other spheres in life, which is in the use of programs available online. This process is not the privilege of a generation, but it is dominant in it; it is more common to face problems initially in a playful way. If in the confrontation with the difficulties the maker sees himself without any alternatives to solve the problems of the initial project, in the discussion groups they share the experiences of other young researchers/makers. Codes and open scripts are available. The source code of the work Anamorfoses Cronotrópicas, by André Mintz, for instance, was made available online and later appropriated by several makers for different purposes.

Returning to Marginalia 1.0 beta, it proposes to, as an experience, the exploration of a device for the encounter of the sentence: “Hay cosas conocidas. Y cosas desconocidas. En el medio están las puertas”. In a dark room the black screen keeps the sentence as a secret. It will only be revealed by the beam of light of a flashlight. It is up to the public to reach the screen with the light so that small pieces of letters become visible, but the whole will never be constituted. We have access to parts of sentences; the reading of the whole demands patience; the image surfaces slowly and in fragments. It is by adding the letters and words that the whole sentence is achieved. The work is produced by the manipulation of the flashlight. The device as a whole is the articulator while the work is experienced because of its presentification and the interdiction represented by a wall that historically has hosted public manifestations against the government. We go through the work with an object used by spies and detectives when they invade spaces. The flashlight provides small and discreet light, the same discretion that the graffiti artists used when they printed their emblematic sentence, when they launched the invitation to walk through the door between the known and the unknown.

The assembling of the devices is considered by Anne-Marie Duguet a video paradigm, a distinctive element in relation to the cinema. Simultaneously machine and machination, according to Duguet the devices aim at promoting specific effects: “this agency of the ‘pieces of a mechanism’ is at first sight a generator system that structures the sensitive experience each time in a specific way. More than a simple technical organization, the device puts at stake different enunciative or figurative instances and articulates institutional situations as processes of perception” (p.21). Marginalia 1.0 beta, as we have already said, emulates the proceedings of investigation of the executioner to peer the revolutionary, the challenger, inciting the public to experience its place. It transforms the production of the work into a process of search.

I say production because from the encounter with the words and the sentence the work gains life and starts to exist; until then it is power waiting to be activated. It is produced by each spectator whose experience is unique in the light of his choices when he travels the black space of the screen. The time spent in each place and the feeling experienced when the appearance of the image is revealed also shape a unique piece of work, a unique navigation. I felt like reading the sentence, but it did not consolidate. As I was on my own at the moment of the encounter with the work, I used more than one flashlight to see the whole sentence, but it still did not work; the scale of the screen and the words did not allow the formation of the whole. The authors offered the incompleteness in terms of visual representation. If there was a whole, it related to the mechanism of spying, of living the revelation of parts of the wall of the photograph from Cordoba. Political and aesthetic institutions were activated as we browsed the figure through the passage of the beam of light from the flashlight. The protest and its repression were latent, waiting for the agents to exist. Restlessness requires actions.

The object is not constructed. The subject browses the image in search for the completeness of the meaning. It never completes either. It is in the act of browsing, it is the aesthetic and political action. We are standing before the presence; we are incited to fill the wall with meaning. It is in the encounter between subject and object, both to become, that Marginalia 1.0 beta happens. The sentence on its materiality is never presented; we experience a type of encounter whose meaning, if there is one, emerges from the situation, the interaction, the lack constituted in the encounter. It is the notion of presence that is consolidated. For Jean-Luc Nancy it is something that emerges and never stops emerging (p.20)[1]. What emerges is not necessarily the meaning; on the contrary, in this case, it is the challenge of an experiment without the revelation of its completeness, of a slogan or counter-slogan to the street protest. We experience the search for meaning; we experience the desire for the complete sentence, a desire that is slowly achieved by light. It is the virtual passage, a kind of two-way door between the known and the unknown, as the sentence suggests. The light does not guarantee the enlightenment on the path to be taken; it remains a presence, something that brings textures, pieces of word-color, wall given to exploration.

In his dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht questions the interpretation as the only access road to the world, specifically to the texts. The notion of presence will delegate a permanent situation of experience, a way to access the objects, the empirical world, not based on conceptual deduction but on the encounter. The sentence only exists in the act, in the enunciation; in this association with the production of a time and a space constructed in and by the moment of encounter between public and device, of the invitation to exploration. Finally, the experience overcomes the paradox of the incomplete revelation; the representation succumbs to the emergence of the lack, in the face of the presence.

NOTES

1. Quoted by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in A materialidade da teoria. In: Corpo e forma.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrícia Moran: doctor in Communication and Semiotics by PUC-SP, professor of the Undergraduate Audiovisual Course of ECA-USP. In audiovisual creation and direction, develops language research and diverse media, exploring the possibilities of plays among genres. Prepares the premiere of her first feature film, the fiction Ponto Org. Her documentaries, video art and fiction participated and were awarded in national and internationl festivals, among them we highlight: Maldito Popular Brasileiro: Arnaldo Baptista; Clandestinos; Plano-Seqüência; A plenos-pulmões. Develops, for some years, the research The metaphor of the senses, about the poetic of live projections and of VJs, particularly.