REPROGRAMMING
FAU USP professor Giselle Beiguelman is the author of several texts and books, being a reference when it comes to art, cities and digital culture. For her, the central issue today is no longer how to give access to technology as it was in the 1990s, but how to enhance the critical and creative use of technology beyond its consumption promotion.
“Social movements are not, however, mere groups of individuals. These are groups that work in the public space; and, as Castells showed, this public space, today, in the network society, is that of communication networks. From this perspective, 'cultural change demands the reprogramming of communication networks' (Castells, 2009, p.302) from the contestation of the images they project in the public space.” [1]
As the Brazilian professor, Arlindo Machado, defends in his book “Artemídia”, Beiguelman also believes that the artist should take his work to the “exhaustion of the program”, seeking to interfere in the very logic of machines and technological processes. From this “exhaustion”, they would no longer be mere employees of their programmed equipment based on the productivity objectives of the technological society. They would deprogram the technique, distort its symbolic functions and force them to function outside their known parameters.
The fact that certain artistic forms are created within these restrictive and automated production regimes, using supports and software developed for the mass entertainment industry, does not mean that they sustain and promote these structures and powers. His performance would be what Arlindo Machado calls an “attack from within” and an “internal contamination” because his works were being produced in the prevailing economic models, however, in the opposite direction of them. Consequently, it would make this work a powerful critical instrument that could generate alternatives to the current models of regulation and control of society.
Krzysztof Wodiczko , a Polish artist who works on these parameters, is brought as an example by Giselle Beiguelman: What their works have in common is that, from a critical and creative problematization of the media devices associated with mobility as a social, economic and cultural phenomenon , he creates products and technology for needs that shouldn't exist, designed specifically with the purpose of allowing people's voices to be heard and, thus, to emerge in the public space.
Another artist mentioned by Beiguelman is the Spaniard Antoni Abad , with his work “megafone.net”: “invites groups of people at risk of social exclusion to express their experiences in face-to-face meetings and via cell phones, recording sounds and images, publishing them on the web, turning telephones into digital megaphones that amplify the voices of people and minorities ignored by the mainstream media. Social networks are no longer serving personal marketing to be platforms for action and management of cultural change.” [1]
That said, I agree with Professor Arlindo Machado that the artist, when unable to develop his own equipment or deprogram it, is reduced to existing support options and to their already known possibilities, and may fall into a homogeneity and predictability of the results. Currently, the analysis of these works should ask whether technology is introducing qualitative differences to the work, seeking new policies of the body and new expressions of cultural identities.
“From the isotopic space of classical figuration, based on the continuity and homogeneity of the represented elements, we now move on to the polytopic space, in which the constitutive elements of the picture migrate from different spatial and temporal contexts and fit, overlap, overlap each other. others in hybrid configurations.” [two]
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
BEIGUELMAN, Giselle; LA FERLA, Jorge. Technological nomads . São Paulo: Editora Senac São Paulo, 2011.
MACHADO, Arlindo. Artemida . Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2007.
BEIGUELMAN, Giselle. From the interactive city to corrupted memories: art, design and historical heritage in contemporary urban culture. 2016. Thesis (Free Teaching in Language and Visual Poetics) - Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2016.