Body and technology, tools for investigation and experiment throughout the months of residency in the city of Belo Horizonte. I started living in the capital of Minas Gerais with my Parangolé, digitalizing the landscape and incorporating the experimentation.

We started the project working always with the presence of a body performing live actions while technological mechanisms served as an interface of image production, in that they potentiated the actions or created extensions of them. The technological mechanisms chosen in this project served as a bridge to the virtual universe of the “network societies” 1. Technology offered us tools to make appropriations by hacking and subverting practices, thus creating pirate languages inside anthropophagic concepts.

On BZI what interests us is to capture, manipulate, and transmit real-time images. These images seek for magic and signs in the dimensions of the urban strictures of the cities’ architectures, in relation of brutality between structured-concrete and the contact with the texture of human skin, in the flows of body movement and also in the maps, paths and routes that result from the mobility of the body. We sought to make that the contrast between the materials that compose the urban environment and the human body result in fusion: body, architecture, and technology. This happens, in terms of action, through performance, transmission of live images, and manipulation of videos in real time. We have developed two performances: p.E – parangolé Eye and Escalade in projection.

Exploring technologies

We explored the possibilities of video capture, either through fixed or portable cameras, such as cell phone cameras and wireless webcams. The resulting flow can be transmitted by network and recreated from the real time video filters. We worked with the programming platform PureData and video manipulation filters in real time (FreeFrame). The images are captured by cell phone cameras and microcameras. We also used wireless microphones and contact microphones.

In order to transmit the image live we use streaming platforms especially created for cell phones (such as Octrovideo) and the streaming platform Giss. Giss2 is a network, a group of open servers. The codec used by GISS is Theora (xiph.org) – an OGG video layer whose audio layer is the compression Vorbis (a free alternative to mp3). According to Pedro Soler, former director of Hangar, the center of art and technology of Barcelona, in his paper Streaming, “La creación del primer y único codec realmente gratuito - sin patentes ni derechos de propiedad - tiene un profundo sentido político y se separa de los sistemas cerradas tipo RealMedia de la primera epoca del streaming a finales de los años 1990. La libertad y la no patentabilidad del codec y del servidor icecast son aspectos fundamentales para la creación de la capa social de la red de comunicaciones internacional.”

parangolé Eye

What's the chatter?

Parangolé means chatter, jabber. In the 1960s Rio, “What’s the chatter?” (“Qual é o parangolé?”) was the slang used to ask about the news. According to Wally Salomão, Helio read the expression from a piece of jute in a beggar's makeshift house. The scene marked him so much that he named what he called “discovery” Parangolé. 'Discovered’ in 1964, Parangolé is a sort of cape (or flag, banner, tent) that does not plainly unfurl its tones, colors, forms, textures, graphics, or the impregnations of its support materials (fabric, rubber, paint, paper, glass, glue, plastic, rope, mat...) but from the movements of someone who wears it.

What’s your parangolé? Think.

At this moment, the reader needs to be generous so that the work (text and experiment) can be complete. We need to share thoughts and actions. To start, what about reading the instructions manual? For us, it all started like this:

So? What’s the parangolé?

This ‘work’ depends on you making it and for it to exist it needs you to wear it, to manipulate it. According to H.O:

I will tell you about mine. My parangolé has strong colors, bubble wrap, a transmitter and an eye. An eye to see the world and a transmitter to share it. My parangolé’s eye is a transmitter eye of live image and sound; it is a cell phone with a 3G internet SIM card that allows me to transmit the incorporation that I live when I wander the streets. In this case, In-corporation = connection + transmission.

My parangolé, similar or different, tries to expand the suprasensorial idea through the available media, accessible now. My parangolé as a possible cape (today) wants to feel and transmit what it feels. And this is possible through the images produced by the cell phone cameras that, connected to a streaming program, broadcasts live, via internet, to a platform such as Giss, what they see. My parangolé Eye is an eye cape that scans the whole world and tries to transmit everything it feels through its supravision.

The transmitted images are pure incorporation: flows, movements, deframings, defocusings. Eye parangolé is an attempt to minimize the effects of the "man-world mediation" common to "technical images.” In this case, contrary to what happens when a “technical image” is generated, there is no image capture because it is immediately transmitted and not stored or manipulated in an editing or cutting table. It is a live transmission of images captured by a camera that is commanded by a body (not a fist) that manipulates the picture frame. According to our experimentations, this causes the concept of (supra)sensorial, as a practice, to be shared via transmission. What happens is that the capture and transmission device is replaced by the Parangolé and soon we notice that someone who wears the Eye parangolé is producing the images. In this case, we do not produce scenes as windows to the world, but sensorialities through images to be decoded by the observer’s look that shares with us that moment of transmission with his attentive presence, the presence of someone who receives something that needs to be completed in order to exist.

In the end, what is transmitted looks like flows of thought, for instance, in which the images have no narratives, but movement, color, signs, and some atmosphere. This atmosphere may be called "magic”. This magic is also created by the low quality of the transmitted images. About the transmission, what is seen clearly is not important; what matters is the sensation of being taken by signs, by color, and by movement.

The Eye parangolé also has ears, which are attached to the vestment making it possible to share the experience of the one who wears it with the whole network. The images captured by the cell phone live with the other sound layers present at the moment in which the spectator breaths, walks and listens to the sounds of the place where he is. There is a transmission of sensorialities, a multiple encounter with all who in a certain way have affected or are affected by the unique moment of fruition. It becomes difficult to precise how many experience this multi-sensorial happening through the network. Thus we can say that the pirated and hacked Parangolé is more than a transition of colors into the space; it receives a new dimension that includes the sound experience of this varied moment of sensations and perceptions, which are the ears extended by anyone who is willing to participate in this moment.

Now I will leave you free to create your parangolé, if you want to, while I speak a little bit about the reasons for all this.

Why Parangolé?

Parangolé is the landmark of a very important cycle of artistic experimentations conducted inside the Neoconcreto movement by Hélio Oiticica, Amilcar de Castro, Ligia Clark, Ligia Pape and Franz Weissmann. Hélio used to say that Parangolé was an "Anti-art” 6 par excellence. For me, the discovery of parangolé would be the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. It marks the expansion of painting (color, image) to the streets: action and movement at the same time that it points to a horizon: environmental art, urban intervention, anti-cultural revolution.

Susana Vaz, speaks about the experiment by quoting Haroldo de Campos:

Parangolé is the “transition of the color of the painting into the space", it is born from the abstraction of the image, and for the image it may return. See our Eye parangolé for yourself, maybe the fabric is a bit similar, but the materials that it carries are already different because our life is not that of 1964 anymore. Our relationship with the world now also happens through our electronic devices and their capacities to produce and transmit images. And why not create our parangolé?

Let us make a Parangolé with the materials that we have at arm’s length, the simplest and tritest: fabric, cell phone, plastic... We have in minutes, today, a cape or a banner very different from the one from 1964. Let’s see: in 1964 H.O did not carry close to his body (almost as an extension of himself) a portable phone. At that time there were vinyl records and Super 8.

I see now, while I write, an old photograph of Hélio's atelier from 1978. I will describe what I see to you: a table; on it there is a book from which I read "Illumination Arthur Rimbaud”, young Rimbaud’s face is printed on the book cover. To the left I see a small radio; to the right, a cassette tape recorder, both scattered on the table. Behind the micro speaker there is a spool with a silver thread that seems to be a weld wire; or would it be a ball of thread knitting? Telephone, cables on the table connecting the devices among each other, pencil cases, pens, and other utensils. It looks like the atelier of a modern man to me, connected to his world.

The popularization of the internet and the virtual universes of the network societies deeply influence the relational and sensorial structures of the 21st century. Well, a Parangolé from the 21st century has to be in accordance with its own time, has to be connected to the networks that pervade it.

I think that the concept of “Environmental Program"[8] that pervades Helio’s works may be completely connected to the technologies and the new media. Therefore, I could hack Suzana Vaz’s sentence, with her permission or not, according to the copyleft rules [9]: “This experience franchises the access to a nuclear and incorporated conscience, directly dependent on the homeostatic, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive systems and on the inputs of the sensorial modes that interconnect the instances body/mind/environment.”

Body, mind, environment, and technology. When I wear my Parangolé, I transmit, via technological mechanisms, sensations, colors, and movement, giving back to the image its aspiration of “map of the world”. Flusser points out:

To develop transmission systems of sensoriality from images taking as a starting point the appropriation of Parangolé is to resume in a conscious way a ‘discovery’ that suggests being ‘rediscovered’, because it is an open work. The junction of both interfaces, Parangolé and stream, makes it possible to look beyond the technical image. The incorporation (In-corporation = connection + transmission) starts to produce decipherable signs, as it suggests the presence of an individual who transmits what he sees and feels, minimizing the intermediate action provoked by the device (input, output). These images are suprasensorial maps of world transmitted exactly at the moment they are experienced.

Free software + Suprasensorial + Free platforms + Copyleft + Environmental Program + Creative Commons + Parangolé + Do It Yourself

What we do is nothing but a pirate appropriation, that is, we copy Parangolé in our own way and we make it our interface with the world, sharing the experience through the gaze of whoever sees it transmitted. The scope of the sensorial gains another dimension. What does the eye that scans the world see? The distance between the spaces where images are produced and those to which they are transmitted become inexistent, like the linear idea of temporality.

The transmitted time and space gain another space and another time in contrast with those from whoever receives them at home, in the gallery, in the streets. Superposition of space and time produces sensoriality through moving real-time images.

We can say that we pirated Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé and that we hacked the experience. When we rediscover the Eye parangolé, we open new possibilities to the sensorial experience of the in-corporation. We share it with the network, or, even better, with the “network society”.

We invite everyone to do the same, to hack Hélio’s work in the sense of in-corporating it in any way you want, make yourself your own Parangolé and share it.

Escalade in projection

Falls. Escalades. Skin (textures). Projections in large scale on building facades of and public monuments. While a performer conducts his actions in some space previously defined to the passer-bys' eyes, having the floor itself as a basis, his image will be captured and projected in large scale, vertically, in some building facade. The dimension of his body changes, it creates a new dimension. Similarly, we can see the horizontal action and the vertical projection. Simultaneously, the movements are created and recreated, released and sampled.

The body inside the dimension of the world-body (Espinozian concept [10]) gains new dimensions, enlarges its interface, its contact area. World-Body vs. Public-Space, relating to new interfaces, in new spaces. We propose the experimentation of new physicalities inside this body practice. The body will clearly be completed by what the interface proposes.

The process

Since the beginning, we have worked with Pure Data programming, we have used the Gem library, and the FreeFrame effects to manipulate the images in real time. The most interesting result was an urban intervention in the center of Belo Horizonte where we projected onto walls and facades. We used a filter with differential effect of background comparison in which a main image hid behind another one that was being captured and projected live. A superposed image would only be revealed when a pedestrian walked in front of the camera covering the projection with his silhouette and unveiling the hidden image. The hidden image in this intervention was a Parangolé, that, when revealed, covered the body of the person who disclosed it. From afar, one could see the person almost dancing in the attempt to reveal the covered image as if wearing his Parangolé.

The idea of making a large scale projection was less experimented because of a lack of technical devices; however, there was a survey directed to the use of filters in different performance situations. We even found inside the GISS streaming platform a mechanism that makes transmissions using Pd. So, we programmed the platform so that the FreeFrame filters were used as real-time effects.

My collaborators in this project were Júlio Braga, Parangolé and bohemian partner, and Bruno Vianna, who satisfied many times the needs of the project in relation to programming. My flatmate Fernando Rabello was also a collaborator, since he dedicated the first month to teach me the paths of Pd. programming.

The biggest difficulties of the BZI Project are related to the p.E and the search for theoretical concepts that justify it as an appropriation of Hélio Oiticica’s work and its extension through the use of technology. Indeed, I do not think that p.E is an extension of the work Parangolé, since this is an open work par excellence, of an anarchic nature. But I do believe that the technology in this case collaborates for the research of transmission platforms of live images that are directed to sensoriality. Presence or the sensation of presence is an important factor in the creation of these images transmitted live. An example given by Pedro Soler in a streaming class was the project “Nothing Happens”, by Nurit Bar-shai, a performance that lasts for one or two weeks. A robotized arm makes an object fall from a shelf. Each click received from an interaction at distance results in a micro movement of the robotized arm – until one day the object falls. “Zach Lieberman me habló de este proyecto y me describió la desconcertante sensación que provocan unas pequeñas máquinas reaccionando ante una acción remota - un día estás cenando en el apartamento de ella y el robot se mueve un poco, y sabes que alguien se ha conectado - una inquietante presencia anónima se ha convertido en algo real dentro de tu espacio íntimo, una intencionalidad, pero incorpórea, como un duende. Esta sensación de presencia, esta ilusoria sensación de que alguien está con nosotros aunque no sea así es uno de los elementos más fascinantes de las actividades de Internet en tiempo real.”

Our experience of the world today takes into account this new idea of presence, when the body is physically not there, but that virtually is a presence that even generates sensation, action, reverberation. A tele-presence, a presence-icon, a textual presence... I am not sure about which would be the best terms to use, but it is a fact: it is about presence that we speak in BZI-Body Zone of Intervention.

NOTES

1. Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age , Nova York, Random House, 2001.

2. giss.hackitectura.net. A ring of servers is a series of servers connected among themselves; once the brand width of one of them is completed occupied, the client connection goes directly to the next server.

3. Yoko Ono's quotation taken from Helio Oiticica’s manuscrispts, Experimentar o Experimental, NYC, 22 de março de 1972. pag1

4. Cf. Vilém Flusser. Filosofia da Caixa Preta. Ensaios para uma Futura Filosofia da Fotografia. Editora Hicitec, São Paulo, 1985

5. Décio Pignatari, Essay published in Revista Código 4, Salvador/Bahia, August 1980.

6. comprehension and reason to be of the artist not anymore as a creator for the contemplation but as a motivator for the creation – the creation as such is completed by the dynamic participation of the ‘spectator’, now considered a‘participator’. H.O, Manuscrito, Posição e Programa, Programa Ambiental e Posição e Ética, Julho de 1966, pag1.

7. HO|ME Hélio Oiticica e Mircéa Eliade. Tendência para o concreto: mitologia radical de padrão iniciático. Suzana Vaz. Junho/Agosto de 2006.

8. The Position in reference to the ambiance and the consequent crash of all the old types of expression: picture—painting, sculpture, etc. proposes a complete, full manifestation of the artist in his creations that could be propositions for the participation of the spectator. Environmental is for me the indivisible union of all the types owned by artist when he creates – the ones which are already known: color, word, light, action, construction, etc. and those that emerge at each moment in the artist’s inventive craving or from the participator himself when he is in contact with the work. H.O, Manuscrito, Posição e Programa, Programa Ambiental e Posição e Ética, Julho de 1966, pag1.

9. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works such as computer software, documents, music and art.

10. “Bodies that are routes, means, which are defined by the affections they are capable of generating, managing, receiving, and touching. According to Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Espinoza defines body as an infinite group of particles that relate by stopping and moving, they are interactive forces. Espinoza proposed that a body is not separable from its relations with the world, for it is exactly a relational entity. The Espinozian body is not, and never will be, completely formed because it is permanently informed by the world, part of the world that it is. Unfinished, or still, endless, provisional, partial, participant, it is, incessantly, not only transforming but being generated. If from the understanding of the shape, function, substance and subject we move to the notions of infinitude, movement, affection, and inter-means, we become a body-output even before we are bodies, because the "body" "is" not. Teatro e Performance, essay by Eleonora Fabião, available on http://proximoato.wordpress.com/textos/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age . Pekka Himanen, Linus Torvalds ("Prólogo") & Manuel Castells ("Epílogo"), Nova York, Random House, 2001.

Cibercultura Pierre Lévy. Editora 34, 1999.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991)

Pedro Soler. Millor en directe: visita guiada al concepte i la pràctica del streaming. Barcelona,18 d'abril 2009.

A cibercultura e seu espelho campo de conhecimento e nova vivencia na era da imersão interativa.

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Estalella, A. (2005). De la cultura de la remezcla a la creatividad colectiva. En Zemos98 (Ed.), Creación e inteligencia colectiva (pp. 111-116): Asociación Cultural Comenzemos Empezemos, Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. http://estalella.wordpress.com/articulos-academicos/

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Para “O Globo” 14 de agosto de 1966

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cínthia Mendonça graduated in Theatre Direction at the School of Communications of UFRJ, and works with dance and performance. As actress and performer, has participated of many internacional festivals, such as Riocenacontemporanea and Mip2. In 2009, won the award Interações Estéticas (Brazilian Ministry of Culture and Funarte). In Belo Horizonte, developed the project CZI - Corpo Zona de Intervenção at Marginalia+Lab. In 2010 collaborated at the Open Up, at Medialab-Prado, in Madrid, for the creation of images for the digital facade of the Medialab. At Hangar, in Barcelona, participates of the project Re:farm in the city and participated of activities at MINIPIMER.TV(streaming)-Barcelona.

COLLABORATORS

Julio Braga: a radio producer graduated by UFRJ, he also studied cinema at UFF, where he researched about cinema and education. Musician and co-director of the film Como você ouve o mundo, he works today with soundtrack and capture of direct sound involving new technologies. He has researched Helio Oiticica for some years. He currently participates in the film Poço da Pedra, the first short film shot by a culture spot from Minc.

Bruno Vianna: works with cinema, portable means, and installations. He directed four shor films between 1994 and 2003, and launched his first feature film Cafuné, in 2006. In 2008 he launched a feature film edited live, Ressaca, that uses an interface especially developed for the project. He has works in portable supports such as Palm Poetry and Invisíveis. He is graduated and has a master in cinema by ITP-NYU.