Fecha: 3 Octubre, 2013
Horario: 10:00 a 06:00
Lugar: Salón José Miguel Blanco, MNBA.
Art, science and technology are three major areas of interaction and mutual enhancement. Faced to the exponential technical growth of the 20th century, Chilean artists from different fields of specialization, mostly filmmakers, visual artists and architects, explored the convergence between three specific areas of analysis: the vinculation between artists and scientific research centers; the massification of interfaces incorporating virtual and physical spaces; and the integration of various energy resources. Questioning, in this way, the boundaries between different artistic disciplines, and the confluence of different academic traditions and cultural policy issues.
From an historical analysis this colloquium will address current Chilean conflicts such as: the inexistence of research centers for the investigation of the relationships between science, technology and art; the lack of contents about these topics at art schools learning plans; the emerging connections between the different cultural funds; and the permanent changes on the requirements for their application.
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SPEAKERS:
Margit Rosen: International historical context about the use of computers and new digital technologies as an artistic medium and concerning their social impact.
David Maulen: National historic context about the relationship between art, technology, design and craftsmanship, considering the foundation of the School of Applied Arts at Universidad de Chile. This talk highlights the importance of the combination of local arts and crafts traditions with European education in our current globalized and interconnected world.
Demian Schopf: How has the relationship between language and new technologies been understood through art history? What role does automatic writing and meta communication play in the work's context in our current technological context?
Carlos Perez : Reflection about the social history of science and technology, and its impact on our present artistc context. It also studies the relationship and modifications between the audiovisual and the linguistic fields over the past century.
Graciela Taquini: Review of the history of Argentine videoart and his own career as a new media artist. Prelorán influence on her training contributed to her interest in the possibilities of creative uses of technology. How the current multimedia and interactivity of digital devices, understood as energy consumers, is related to nature's cycles.
MODERATOR: Enrique Rivera
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ABSTRACTS:
Will there be art after the revolution?: about computing technologies and the arts for 1960 and 1970 by Margit Rose
The visual arts compared to music and poetry, responded with a significant delay to the "invisible revolution" described by Abraham Moles, which corresponds to the invention and spread of the use of computers. Focusing on computer technology, the presentation examines the different models of the relationship between art, science and technology, as it is was made in Europe and America in the sixties. Given the energy shortage due to the quik development of technology and science, perceived as an uncontrollable and independent social force, artists were confronted with high expectations and forced to redefine their role. How do the artists use new technologies nowadays? What do philosophers, curators and art historians respond to this development? The discourse and practice of computing and the arts, and the selection of individuals who contributed to it, were determined largely by the difficulties to access to technologies and a technical institutional level. The autonomy of the arts was questioned from this new perspective.
Vernacularity and functionalism: the new School of Art , 1928 by David Maulen
During the twenties to the beginning of the seventies of the past century, Chile and most Latin American countries were embedded in the Developmental State model, whose bases were consolidated after the questions rised from the First World War. During the beginning of this period, the idea of progress was deeply questioned after these great advance in science and technology. Humans used this developments for (self-) destruction. These fundamental questions forced to rethink the process of constructing reality from a zero situation. Also for the first time, since the Spanish arrival to the continent, the huge European power declined in comparison to former colonies. It was a unique time to develop positions about identity and the construction fo meaning. The Schools of Frankfurt and Vienna, among others, tried to rebuild the link between different areas of knowledge fragmented by the previous model of progress. Ultimately, artists ask what type of practice may be related to the construction of a new society, not by way of illustration, but specifically as meaning constructors. For these reasons, the historical avant-garde approach, based on the participation on the latest developments in all areas of knowledge, becomes effective. Through a review of the western-modern concept of design, the link to the latest technological theories is studied. The construction of knowledge is based on variable cultural characteristics. Teachers and social movements attempted to structure a new constitution, which sought to implement a radical educational reform in 1928. This was a time when the major trends in art, applied to new technologies, were crossed by deep questions related to popular culture and indigenous art. And also the real possibility or impossibility of a Chilean contemporary art. This transformative and complex juncture was buried in oblivion for decades, but at the same time, drew the horizons of the main events that happened the next decades and set challenges that are still in the process of reformulation.
Art, technique and catastrophe by Carlos Perez
Capitalist society has been one of the the most dynamic and revolutionary societies throughout human history. It grew at the rate of an enormous economic, political and social upheaval. It created his science and technique in the heat of war, the general economic crisis, and the systematic looting of its periphery. His art expressed both his promises for the future, souless realism and commercial motivations. Many times art was the testing ground of their techniques. any times, it revolutionized artistic techniques. Now, at the beginning of the XXI century, when the classically understood capitalist society is dying, overcome by his own vices and grays officials who thrived in its shade; commodification, both of knowledge and art; and its intermingle with formalisms and growing bureaucracies. In the midst of this maelstrom, everything points to a better, freer world, but it also points, in much the same way, to the increase of slavery and other ominous disasters. The catastrophe, which has been the main feature of its development, seems to be the sign of his death. Art, technique and catastrophe have share today a common destiny.
Sewing machines by Demian Schopf
The first section of the talk presents a comparative reading between some works of art that deal with algorithmic generation of texts, and theories of definite descriptions clusters, such as those thought some time ago by some analytic philosophers, particularly Peter F. Strawson (1919-2006) and John R. Searle (1932). The turning point is the strong criticism to that theory of meaning proposed by Saul A. Kripke (1940). An analysis of first-order logic is needed, precisely because of the notion of a logical machine that receives a set of objects and returns a single logical object. However, its constant may carry different a posteriori variables as the ones of the algorithm. At this point is where the machines in question are opened to the unknown. The notion of language games of t Wittgenstein's second period are studied from three devices: the same language game, repeated ad nauseum algorithmically, can cause it to disclose contingent language games whose genetic chain is not able to be grasped from the notion of algorithm (if it truly is even able to be grasped). Finally, in a second section, the notions of natural language processing (NLP), such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) are reviewed. The first step of this investigation is in development, and seeks to expand the criteria by which a "machine" can " sew" words and "sentences" without using exclusively a single model, but a multiplicity of them.
Metaphors of survival by Graciela Taquini
From FASE, a meeting of art and technology held in Buenos Aires since 2009 at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, where Graciela Taquini works a s General Curator, this talk review the artistic and technological production in Argentina, along with an exchange of visits of artists and theorists from other latitudes. This year following last year tenor, the focus is on the debate of the metaphors of survival. As a background to the fifth version of PHASE, Graciela reflects on the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution of the late XIX century, which finally led to a culture still dependent on the rhythms of nature to other civilization that was able to transform night into day and day into night. An increasingly artificial, urban and populated world, governed by the laws of capital market and finance, positivism, modernity and progress, is the ideological motor that protects the developing of this society. Futurism celebrated the machine, speed, light and electricity. Later, kinetic art aimed to enhance the concepts of on and off. In the 40's, Gyula Kosice used water and energy, not as representations but as creative materials to inaugurate an utopia, whose counterpart is the political event of Peronism in Argentina. The northern hemisphere neo-vanguardia, represented by Nam June Paik, was despite its optimism going to the apocalyptic metaphor Candle TV (1975). STEP 5 honors the 70's artist Victor Grippo, who opposes an American response to the dystopian worldview of postmodernism in his work. Spurred by natural and social disasters of unbridled capitalism in crisis, the post nuclear fall of the Berlin wall, and the new world order. Representative of Latin American conceptualism, potatoes as noble materials are used to build other forms of energy. A possible theoretical framework that could be installed is the work of the anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch, who reflects from his immersion in the American heartland and not from the Western ontological conception of being. At the same time, a number of current works explore the relationship of life, death and resurrection that, perhaps, may face the pessimism of postmodernism.