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THIS IS THE YASMIN-DISCUSSIONS DIGEST
Today's Topics:
1. Tania Fraga sends us these Unforgettable Memories of Arlindo
Machado (YASMIN DISCUSSIONS)
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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 09:37:32 -0500
From: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@ntlab.gr>
To: yasmin_discussions@ntlab.gr
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Tania Fraga sends us these Unforgettable
Memories of Arlindo Machado
Message-ID:
<mailman.1.1595441792.37226.yasmin_discussions_ntlab.gr@ntlab.gr>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Yasminer friends,
Tania Fraga sends us these Unforgettable Memories of Arlindo Machado:
? Virtuality, Visuality & Reality
We encourage all those who knew Arlindo to share with us their memories
as part of reinventing how we remember for the future in this digital age,
when post people who are dying during the pandemic will be un-remembered
Roger Malina
The fragments of memories I have of Arlindo Machado are memorable. I
met him in 1989, at the first meeting of Art and Technology at the
University of Brasilia, a time when I was looking for ways to express
myself using the computer, what we now call computer art.
His reflections on art and technology enchanted me. They brought to me
the theories of Vil?m Flusser about the role of the artist and the
philosopher when working with technical images. Such a purpose is to
glimpse the contents of semiotic machines as devices programmed with
"stupid automation" in a world of "empty symbols," that constrain the
"space for freedom."[1]
There is a need to learn to "think with images,"[2] sounds, and words.
The exponential combination of possibilities ? explained in the
Mallarm? dice game and potentially found in the computer-generated
images ? emerges from the mysterious world of computer graphics as an
infinite universe of options, making the pure mathematical abstraction
concrete, visible. This meeting was a sublime moment that made me
inquire about what the "thingness" of things consists of and what
reality is.
Arlindo taught me that video-graphic images permit "writing the
movement," allowing the artist to "interfere in the construction of
the image," subvert them, play and experiment with them, manage signs
in languages of sensitivity and imagination, making the sensitive
intelligible. He had the miraculous ability to bring these themes to
life, making me fall in love with such possible fields. It also could
make me envision the possibility of creating a visual and virtual
language with numbers.
In his classes and lectures, he showed us that the sign and symbolic
space is revealed in the poetic flashes of what happens, presenting
itself, showing off as an experiment that allows experimentation with
language. An investigation that led me to embark on a creative act
that carries in its popular name ? virtual reality ? an apparent
paradox. Any work that expresses itself as visual and virtual realms
presents the virtual giving it visibility, and therefore reality. In
this way, it made the act of thinking and conceiving language an
adventure that allows us to realize and experience this something.
I learned from Arlindo to observe the signs and signals emanating from
the things and beings surrounding us; to face the enormous complexity
of the perceptual field, its objects, its energies. Its peculiar
creatures and its multiple aspects allow an immediate knowledge
entwined in psychic activity, as an intersection of the world with the
inner, subjective states, characterizing it as data of experience in
the consciousness of the individual who interprets them and gives them
meanings. The mirror of the mind reflects fragments of a world outside
that mind, but which passes through it, presenting itself as
reflections of a complex totality. We give meanings to these reflexes,
interpreting them from the mythopoetic configurations available in our
repertoires of cognitive and sensory beings.
I take this moment to arouse the readers' curiosity and invite them to
enjoy discovering Arlindo's texts. There are many, and I will not list
them here. I highlight, however, those who influenced me the most:
"The Art of Video," "The Fourth Iconoclasm," "Machines and Imaginary,"
and "The Subject on the Screen," which, according to him, I was the
"inspiring muse of many parts of this book." When Arlindo talked about
the sensual character of stereoscopic images and the eroticism of
their look, I remember that he irreverently provoked me and made me
say to full auditoriums the (private) name of one of this stereoscopic
work: red butt torus. In the book "The Fourth Iconoclasm," we will
find an extensive discussion on the importance of non-verbal
communication and expression languages as being perfectly adequate for
the production of knowledge and reflection.
I learned from Arlindo to observe the signs and signals emanating from
the things and beings surrounding us; to face the enormous complexity
of the perceptual field, its objects, its energies. Its peculiar
creatures and its multiple aspects allow an immediate knowledge
entwined in psychic activity, as an intersection of the world with the
inner, subjective states, characterizing it as data of experience in
the consciousness of the individual who interprets them and gives them
meanings. The mirror of the mind reflects fragments of a world outside
that mind, but which passes through it, presenting itself as
reflections of a complex totality. We give meanings to these reflexes,
interpreting them from the mythopoetic configurations available in our
repertoires of cognitive and sensory beings.
With his enormous generosity, during my doctorate, which he
supervised, Arlindo gave me a copy of his book still in press,
"Machines and Imaginary." In this book, Arlindo discusses the
importance of the process in itself for the creation of artworks, of
simulation, Mallarm?'s dream, the status of reality, and the hegemony
of electronic image, among many other related subjects. For Arlindo,
the virtual signs conquer the regime of becoming realities: tangible
and intangible, virtual, visual, immaterial, and material, inherent,
possible, interior, psychic, transcendent realities. Realms that are
interpreted by the sensors available in the neural system and are
translated and evaluated, configuring themselves as mental processes,
presenting themselves as perceptions that take the form of thoughts.
Therefore, we infer that thought expresses itself through signs, and,
through them, represents, remembers, and presents the objects that
exist in the world outside of it ? thought ? and that with them ?
objects ? establish relations.
Thoughts are worthy things. Artists usually characterize them as
visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and intuitive
thoughts. They enable discernment and the ability to unveil, in all
their fullness, a corresponding character, of a different order from
that achieved through discursive or analytical knowledge, used by
philosophers and scientists.
The direct, immediate, and current apprehension of a
sign?thing?symbol, in its reality, is one of the physical
characteristics of the contemporary artist's work. In this, the
material realm presents itself as phenomenal fields composed of
possibilities updated through visual, aural, tactile, taste, and
olfactory experimentation. This characteristic is what makes virtual
domains present themselves as reality.
How many hours of discussions and provocations about Flusser's
statements related to the artist's need, or not, to penetrate the
"interior of the black box, interfering in its internal workings (?)
since all criticism of the technical image must aim at whitening that
box."[3]
At that time, there were countless questions formed in my mind: the
artist's role is the act of organizing experiments with the things
that presented and represented something, being present because they
exist to become the experience of those who experience them and
interact with them? How does something that presents itself virtual,
identify itself as numbers, appear perceptible gaining existence as a
thing or potential to be a thing? Are these artistic virtual realities
something more than experimental reflections of a mathematical world?
Although they capture the attention of the participants, impose
themselves on their sensations, and transform vague feelings ?
qualities intertwined in the nebulous here and now ? into a dominant
perceptual process, are these processes expressions of the artist's
sensitive and sensory universe? Are they also characterized as
hypermedia, mediating interdependent and plural signs?
Arlindo challenged me frequently. One of those challenges was to work
with whites. This challenge required years of research, and it took a
long time to get a bold result. Computer graphics domains result
through the manipulation of light and achieving white variations
within the environment created a problematic situation. Therefore, I
photographed snowy landscapes in countless ways, with different
lighting and points of view, until I could understand how to
accomplish something meaningful with withes, using computer graphics.
The virtual worlds Branqueza (Whiteness) and Negreza (Blackness),
resulted from this experimental process and are part of the
interactive virtual scenarios of the MindFluctuations brain-computer
dance spectacle[4].
My relationship with Arlindo led me to consider the artist as one who
explores, discovers, and realizes virtual realms of which they are not
sure. Therefore, the artist aims to exercise sensitivities, arouse
curiosities, and boost actions for themselves and others. The artist
is the individual who delivers universes of possibilities, provoking,
in the other, a quality of apprehension of something, leading the
consciousness to a state of availability emptied of everything, except
the pure sensation resulting from the effect that this something
produced. It blurs the boundaries between the quality that presents
itself and the reaction that it provides in the mind of the individual
who experiences it[5].
To conclude, I tell that the unforgettable memories I have from my
contact with Arlindo lead me to oscillate with malleability in a
flexible universe of multiplicities and numbers. Sometimes I recall a
sensitive fact, other times another. There are many incomplete
memories, resulting in a discontinuous becoming of sensations and
emotions.
In Brazil, Arlindo Machado was one of the most influential theorists,
defining the parameters for the evolution of techniques and languages
related to technical images. He outlined guidelines for developing new
poetic possibilities, encouraging experimentation, and influencing
more than one generation of artists, producers, and thinkers working
with video art, and computer art. Arlindo has always supported the
experimental adventure of creating poetic assemblages in the process
of becoming, allowing artists to organize, disorganize, reorganize,
and transform space-time environments, experiencing their endless and
unpredictable possibilities.
For me, Arlindo continues and will continue alive in my work since my
ways of thinking, and my world views entwine with his ideas.
________________________________
[1] The expressions in quotes are by Flusser in the book The
Philosophy of the Black Box.
[2] The quotes are from Arlindo's book, The Fourth Iconoclasm.
[3] The quotes are from Arlindo's book, The Fourth Iconoclasm, pages from 37?52.
[4] Spectacle performed by the American dance group, Maida Withers
Dance Construction Company, in Washington, DC, on March 19th, 2015.
See video in:
https://vimeo.com/126002412
https://vimeo.com/129893299
[5] See Fraga, Tania. (1995). Simula??es Estereosc?picas Interativas
(Interactive Stereoscopic Simulations). PhD thesis, PUC-SP, available
at:
http://taniafraga.art.br/arquivos_html/tese.html
Roger in Dallas, please phone/txt/ +15108532007 if urgent
http://yurisnightdfw.com/
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End of Yasmin_discussions Digest, Vol 29, Issue 2
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