International Festival of Electronic Language (FILE), 2004. To Infinity and Beyond
Roberta Alvarenga
File exhibition entrance. Photo by Joao Bacellar
"Yes with all enthusiasm, to this new cultural-digital mentality, as it brings huge democratic potential as well as collective creativity potential so far unseen?Yes to digital, unvendible, unstable, unarchivable, untameable, unseizable, anonymous, incomprehensible, unending, desacralised, incomplete, unresigned, ‘trans-shared’, ‘trans-potentialized’, heterocritical digital works."?FILE festival catalogue
It?s 8pm. The building of the Sesi Cultural Center at a famous Paulista Avenue in S?o Paulo. Computers working well?projectors turned on?internet distributed and connected…robots properly positioned.
Welcome to the opening of FILE. The time passes. The media and the concepts change, but the famous and traditional commemoration, the vernissage accomplished by champagne continues being the social excuse in this gradually "vitual world."
If the technologies are abundant, diverse and innovative, why shouldn?t the calendar of a Festival be too?
After more than 3 years since its conception and actualization by Paula Perissinoto and Ricardo Barreto, FILE is today a Brazilian initiative, a nongovernmental organization, without lucrative ends, that promotes an artistic-technological innovation and embraces the new and several digital medias/languages.
Through these years, FILE has constituted the only collection of Latin America art "with approximately 800 national and international digital works from 40 countries." For this year?s event, the Festival selected 185 projects for computers (desktop), 2 robots, 15 games, 5 installations, 13 interactive videos and 11 photographic panoramas, whose descriptions and links for on-line access are in the website of the festival (www.file.org.br).
This year, the FILE Symposium invited 45 speakers (theoreticians, artists, activists and researchers) who talked about "Different subjects related to studies and researches on media arts and digital culture as well as new media?" Responsible for the indispensable night programming, FILE Hipers�nica is the commemorative module of the Festival. In a known space named "Casa das Caldeiras", as integral part of the patrimony of the old and dead Matarazzo Industries of S?o Paulo, the production chose this construction to be the "house" of the cultural underground party-celebration.
FILE dedicated part of the programming to honor the "multimedia artist," director/actor/performer/professor/researcher Renato Cohen, who died in 2003. Like many of my age, I didn’t know him personally, I just heard, read and saw (documentations) about his work. Artists and friends, (artist-friends) creaed an homage to Cohen, so that the present public could remember his performances, happenings and multimedia shows. The homage to Cohen was presented in performative format (of course!) was unforgettable (like him).
As a synthesis of the central idea of the festival, the "local exhibition" was filled with works that varied from desktop displays to installations to high tech objects. Some highlights included Code Up, by Gisele Bieguelman (Brazil) and Pre Hysterical Machine (2002), by Bill Vorn (Canada).
The Brazilian artist, professor and theorist, Gisele Bieguelman developed a project that questions the code (specialty) of a digital image as media. The piece was created in dialogue with the Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous film, Blow-up, 1966, in which an "accidental" photographer registers a crime that happened a few meters of distance from his lens; the investigation that ensues is concluded through the use of his photographic recordings. In Code-Up, Bieguelman, explores the limits of the digital picture by artfully playing on the algorithmic calculations of the code. In the exhibition, the visitor could interact with her work, taking pictures by him/her self through a cellular-camera. This device was also responsible for sending and revealing the image on a desktop installed at the front of the exhibition. What did the visitor see? Certainly a picture, but not a simple visual documentation. Or perhaps a much simpler one: altitude levels, mathematically made by calculations and only proportionate for the media, the digital code. (http://www.desvirtual.com)
To understand the potency of Bill Vorn?s Pre Hysterical Machine you must imagine a robot-creature with a spherical body of eight arms made of aluminum pipes. Now imagine a dark room, in which the lonely, suspended machine in the roof can demonstrate life signs (artificial) when feeling the presence and human warmth. When working their cylinders, pneumatic valves and lamps, in way to demonstrate an aberrant behavior, the "hysterical machine" scared the Brazilian public by moving its long arms. (www.billvorn.com)
Aside from the "local exhibition" there were stimuli and incentives to explore everywhere?artists and curators played with new dimensions and frequencies; visual, sensorial and resonant. The visitor could check the work of 73 Djs/Vjs and several groups of artists/performers by the sound of electronic and experimental music. While Djs and Vjs made their performances in and around the "halls" of the entrance (1� and 2� floors), the artists made their performances and exposed their works in the underground docks (tunnels) of the magnificent construction.
When walking among the congested tunnels of the underground, the visitor could expereince the work of the Brazilian artist, Anaisa Franco, who took advantage of the architecture of the old historical space to expose her spider robot, Ssspiderrr. (www.ssspiderrr.com.br). An artificial creature of six paws, controlled by a connected interface to a surreal virtual 3D world; where chairs with legs walks and runs, helicopters flies over the infinite, screens with movement, robots died, missiles, oil tankers and biological virus live together in her habitat waiting of her deglutition. While the robot spider is moved in the physical world, inside of her space-dock in the house of the tunnels, her avatar "hand-spider," walks in her own virtual world?a result of the dreams that came from of the artist’s unconscious while she sleeps.
The arachnid robot can still be tele-controlled, through the web, where the participant, at the distance, using webcams, can observe it in her own habitat, in the artist’s residence. After a visit to the house of the spider robot, the 23 year-old artist, Anaisa Franco, spoke with NYArts Magazine:
Roberta Alvarenga: How was the experience of launching a project at FILE Hipers�nica?
Anaisa Franco: The last version of FILE Hypers�nica was great! It is impressive to see Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinoto developing and producing the FILE festival by themselves, to make a vanguard electronic art festival happen in a country as Brazil, where there are more barriers than supports.
RA: What did you think about the public’s feedback?
AF: I Thought the public demonstrated a certain distance at the moment of interacting. They preferred to watch. Maybe that was because the interactive performance of spider robot was located in an underground tunnel: It was dark and dirty, and the technology (robotics, virtual reality and interface-carpet for interaction) totally filled out the space. I noticed that the people were satisfied by just watching instead of playing or interacting. I thought the contrast scared them.
RA: Why a spider?
AF: It is not a simple spider. It is an analogy to the futures genetically modified beings, it?s a mixed being of spider plus human hand. I use the spider in the project as a symbolic, aesthetic and historical referent. The female spider kills the male soon after the sexual intercourse. She builds her own web, she looks for her own food and she is bigger of size in relation to males in the spider species. We lived in an extremely masculine and futile world; the spider represents the woman at the peak of her power, an individual of independence, autonomy.
Now, I don’t think the women should kill their husbands after intercourse. But I struggle so that one day, women can be respected and recognized. And women do have the power to assert themselves and their rights: not faking orgasms, denouncing sexual abuses, rapes, not inflicting violence on others. Women do not need men in order to feel protected and validated.
RA: How do you feel being one of the few female artists working with robotics?such masculine area?
AF: In most of the professions we see that the masculine sex dominates. However in Brazil, we have a small emerging group of women artists that works in with the interface of art, science and technology, like Daniela Kutschat, Rejane Cantoni, L�cia Santaella, Diana Domingues, T?nia Fraga, Suzete Venturelli, and others. Women’s acceptance in the world of art, inside of museums and institutions it is extremely recent. I thank a lot the feminist art of the 70s for opening a space for us. But activists groups continue, and must continue, "fighting for us!"
In relation to the acceptance in the robotics area, it was very difficult to find subsidies to develop a robot. I sought laboratories to guide me in the development, and I just found people laughing in my face. Then I met programmer Norberto Tsoulefski in a forum about virtual reality?he helped me develop the robot (finally!) at my house. I like to exercise myself in areas where the women are not well accepted. It is a personal way to help revert that situation!
RA: If you had the necessary money, materials and facilities, what would you make or build?
AF: First of all, I would be completely devoted to research?I would be a crazy and disheveled scientist. I would build a counter that would be my laboratory. I would hire a team of scientists, biologists, engineers, all revolutionary minds. Create a biological species of robots. The central idea would be to produce beings that were self-programmed, self-developed, self-reproducing, beings that lack patterns and rules to control them. I would also like to "mix" a spider with a human hand, to produce a "spider-hand" or create a chair or table with organic legs. The objects could have own life. I would build an alive house, where all inanimate things would be alive and genetically modified. In this new world new forms of life could evolve.
