A projection with colored balls that the public’s shadows can hold and throw upwards; metallic gloves that, once touched, trigger mutations in a character in a short story; a digital graffiti triggered by hand movements and projected onto the surroundings; a superposition of the visitors’ jumps in an exhibition; a software that generates random patterns for clothes design; a light that is turned on when two hands touch; a sound recording of the city that generates moving images; multimedia navigation by touching water; sounds triggered by touching pieces of Bombril steel wool; a song that is constructed by a camera scanning a painting.

The recent artistic production, deemed “technological” in Brazil, seems to contain a vast array of strategies and procedures - almost all, however, belonging to a general line that sees “technology” as basically computers connected to input/output processors. Although diverse in media and content, the structure of the sentences is repeated: a sound that generates an image; an action that rotates an engine; a command that produces images; an image that generates a sound.

On the one hand, the restriction of the idea of technology as “information technology + external processors linked to sensors and actuators” leaves out other possibilities of technological experimentation - how many other technologies lie outside this scope? On the other hand, a certain fascination with the more recent technologies (that often go from means to ends) blinds more promising possibilities of social, cultural and political insertion.

_ compliment

(Before misunderstandings arise: I write here both as a critic and as an object of criticism, since I’m part of the group acting in this field. If the criticism is severe, it’s self-criticism. If not, the praise is to my colleagues. Thus we are relieved of the temerity and controversial role of the “external critic” who makes final judgments and provokes the artists’ rage or adoration.)

_ fire

The mythical primitive man had a cousin called Delcir, the aesthete. In fact, it was Delcir who first found a dry, burning stick after a thunderstorm. Since then, men spent their days among pieces of wood, stones and bolts in the doubtful endeavor to reproduce sparks. In a cold spring afternoon, alone in the forest, Delcir performed a miracle, sparking fire in some dry sticks - and hid his discovery. From then on, he started playing (always in hiding). Lighting and putting out the fire, seeing the flame go up and change color, burn a leaf and suddenly vanish. The floating red, yellow and blue, chameleon-like. In those days, despite the progressive technical mastery of fire, Delcir still slept in the cold, holding a wool blanket, dreaming with the fatuous games of the day to follow.

It took only the smell of smoke, without accompanying thunderstorm for the primitive man to discover his cousin’s secrets while hunting in the woods. He started to watch Delcir from afar, taking note of all his procedures, with illustrative schemes and methodological descriptions. He produced, then, the first technical manual for the production of fire. Among the clan, fires were made to warm up the nights, cook meat and drive other animals away. And later also for controlling the forest that spread over the territory, weld iron, build computers and airplanes.

Sorry for the trivialization of his discovery and the puerile transformation of a sophisticated artistic element into a mass utility, Delcir abandoned fire and went in search of other matters.

_ apple

We designed riveting interactive interfaces, innovative and trendy. At first for CD-ROM, then for the Web. A disappearing mouse cursor that turned into a black square on rollover/rollout, examples of possibilities of access to content in unconventional methods, exploring graphic and navigational resources. First, Lingo, and then ActionScript. We followed and contributed with the birth and unfolding of a sophisticated cybernetic culture, electing the quality of the graphic interface as a preeminent locus of the contemporary scene.

In this venture, however, the web designers, web artists and multimedia designers worked in conjunction with Apple designers and engineers. Blow. The iPhone (and now the iPad) with its subtle, intuitive and unreachably well-built touch screen interface puts content from the web on the background with more standards than ingenuity. Not only because of the still unresolved technical incompatibility between the iPhone and ActionScript, but mainly due to the fact that the main interaction resources are linked to the operational system, where the cursor has been abolished. A finger movement navigates the web, loads pictures, two fingers together can scroll, two separated fingers zoom and rotate images, etc.

In the iPhone’s marvelous world of touch screen, the inventive aspect of interactivity is already resolved, giving back to the pages the printed fixity from which they derive. The web page, descendant of books, was timid as a child, wandered around the fascinating movements of Flash as a teenager, and, in adulthood, returned, resigned to the printed fixity of paper. Web design is back to being graphic design.

It seems that whoever wants to be a multimedia-artist will have to migrate to the operational language of the softwares and plugins. Let’s hope that we can take this opportunity to think about the meaning of these interfaces, whose fluid perfection, when devoid of a more prosperous ‘for what’, is also an access road to the happy colorfulness of boredom.

_ iron

How charmed should for those architects have been with the plastic possibilities of cast iron! To twist, to stretch, to fold, to add. To make door handles, railings, handrails, stairs, stained glass, benches, tables, chairs, decorations for the façade – all in the best Art Nouveau style. The aesthetic depuration is impressive, as well as the care with the design and the refinement of those complete craftsmen, leading teams of competent artisans in the matters of iron, glass, wood.

But it is just that one of the most significant chapters written by iron in the history of architecture is precisely that in which it hides inside pillars and beams. The reinforced concrete that allowed the house walls to be opened, the building of those ribbon windows by Le Corbusier, but, mainly, all the glass façades from the best and the worst buildings of the four corners of the earth.

The iron bar that comes out twisted from the façade and hides among a cement, sand and stone slurry: this is the architectonic jump from one century to the other – at the same time that the architects of Art Nouveau explored cast iron with skill and ingenuity in their plastic and design aspects.

_ youtube

Already in the 1980s, the philosopher Vilém Flusser announced the appearance of youtube. Because when he criticized the unidirectional way that television worked and its fascist and totalitarian aspect, he proposed, as a counter-model, that televisions worked as telephones: dialogically. His simple and clear reasoning noticed that, while in the television system programming was controlled by few, in telephony anyone could call and receive calls, be active or passive. A television working like a telephone seemed to be, at the time, an unlikely dream of liberation, of losing control, of a society with more autonomy and dialogue.

It is interesting to think that, about 20 years after Flusser’s writings, when a group from California created youtube, they didn’t do it because of a technical novelty. All technical requirements to create a website to share videos had already existed for a few years. One of the most revolutionary inventions of the ending decade wasn’t born from a technical revolution, but from its shrewd exploration – or, in Flusser’s words, “from injecting values into the emergent forms.”

Youtube was created by three PayPal former employees, a designer and two programmers, because, according to the story, they wanted to share the video of a party with friends. It is a pity that Flusser did not live to see three employees (those who surround the device) trick the system with a revolution as simple as it is radical, which twists the relationship that society has with the images that program it.

Well, “to inject values into the emergent forms”; is that not the role of art? Wouldn’t the creators of youtube be themselves the great artists of the beginning of this millennium? In a kind of cybernetic land art, can’t we think of youtube as an intervention in the social and cultural landscape, a topsy-turvy Berlin Wall (or Israeli Wall) that changes the meaning of television cables and makes videos become callable?

_ ice

We should remember the gypsies arriving in Macondo with amazing inventions that the local inhabitants paid 5 cruzeiros to see. First, an enormous magnet, with which Melquíades used to drag an iron bar through the streets; then the magnifying glass, the possibility of lighting fire through sun light; and finally the ice machine, which captain Aureliano Buendia, years later, would remember before the firing squad because of the amazement it caused him when he was five.

In spite of the latent applicability, the inventions were not taken as social or cultural goods, but as the attraction per se, full of delight, amazement, and fascination that excited the city and yielded dividends for the gypsies. In that pre-modern Macondo, this state of dazzle was tensioned only by the failed attempts of José Arcadia Buendia to transform pure inventions into technologies for the social progress or personal fortune (the magnet was transformed into a tool to look for gold; the magnifying glass into a solar machine for war; the ice into the constructive material of an austere, glowing, and marvelous city).

José Arcadio Buendia, this quixotic engineering anti-hero, was for a long time the only inhabitant of the city to see in those inventions the possibility of a social transformation, while the others called him crazy because of his hallucinated contracts and rejoiced with the marvelous magic of the gypsies.

_ boat

"The historic transcendental is at mercy of a boat trip”, wrote Pierre Lévy already in the 1990s, about 5 years after the publication, by Vilém Flusser, of his Into the Universe of Technical Images. Both analyzed the political and transforming role of technology, reflecting about the invention of agriculture, writing, print, photography, etc., and the radical alterations provoked by them in the ways societies relate with each other. (We could review here the youtube revolution, obviously as a branch of the broader revolution brought on by the internet, in relation to the democratization of information and communication: only because it is structured as a network instead of a tree, the ways to relate to knowledge and the society are altered, with consequences that have only begun to be outlined.)

For Flusser, the contemporary revolutionary does not shout in the streets with Che Guevara posters (because its screams are captured by the system and compose the mediatic spectacle that we want to break); it interferes subversively in the universe of the technique – it injects values into the emergent forms. We could think, once more, about how art can contribute by injecting values into the technologies that appear, from a concrete political perspective.

But this text does not want to end with a moral. Its structural fragmentation is precisely an attempt of a multiple look into the relationship among art, technology, politics, and society. Without denying the inclination for a combined performance (creating a kind of revolutionarynerdartist), we would rather think of this point of view as another one among others. Therefore, the brief conclusive inventory must be taken less as a panacea than as a counter-point to the current scene of “art and technology” in Brazil.

Websites for the articulation of free rides and for collaborative hosting; the construction of a pedestrian street activated by Facebook; a website to share recipes of urban transgressions; a website that sends emails to the Senator José Sarney and keeps them in a public list; a website for the population to vote bills pending in the Chamber of Deputies (the Brazilian House of Representatives); a global symphonic orchestra articulated by youtube; megaphones installed in cities scream messages sent by anyone through the Internet.

_ books

Cortázar, Julio. O jogo da Amarelinha. Tradução de Fernando de Castro Ferro. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2006.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Cem anos de solidão. Tradução de Eliane Zagury. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1998.

Flusser, Vilém. O universo das imagens técnicas. Elogio da Superficialidade. São Paulo: Annablume, 2008.

Levy, Pierre. As tecnologias da inteligência. O futuro do pensamento na era da informática. Tradução de Carlos Irineu da Costa. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Andrés has a master in Architecture associated with the office Superficie.org; he is a professor at UFMG and the editor of PISEAGRAMA magazine.