Raquel Rennó-Rafael Marchetti
(spanish)
Influenza is a research project that began by combining the studies in Semiotics on culture and communication in urban spaces, developed by Raquel Rennó and experiments in sculpture, painting, digital interfaces and digital programming proposed by Rafael Marchetti. The name of the project was inspired by the title of Laurie Anderson’s song “Language is a virus”, which comes as well from the reflections of the beat writer William Burroughs (Electronic Revolution – 1984), who thought that the only way to fight against media domination would be by creating language viruses.
The initial proposal of the Influenza wants to show the effects of communicative pollution, the inclusion of the noise or the elements of the entropy system in the communicative system, which continuously change the information code, making it more complex and rich in meanings.
In this sense it is a political project, because it is against fastly assimilated and spread closed information, that has a very low informative level and makes the media something “invisible” and meant to be absorbed by people without establishing critical reflections.
Instead of adding more senses to the media, Influenza projects try to undo the excess of senses.
Initially the works employed mass use software and hardware, suggesting new readings and interfaces for them. All works are the result of an investigation that includes both theory and practice.
At the moment Influenza’s projects are trying to explore the media environment and the city. The idea of environment here was taken from its meaning in ancient Greek word, perivello , which means “to strike from all sides at the same time “. That does not have to do with the relation with the natural world, but with simultaneity, which includes constant processing.
In the urban spaces, there are always working mechanisms of foreseeability and unforeseeability that walk together to create indivisible connections between apparently distant (architectonic, cultural, social) groups that control or subvert the organization of the big city. They are directly related to the notion of adding noise as a communicative strategy from a bottom-up point of view. In this sense, the city and the media, illegal salesmen, favela inhabitants and warchalkers, amateur radio operators or open source language programmers work from certain similar concepts. As a result, in our projects we are set to examine the systems of (public or corporate) control and imposition in the city and the media, and how they are attached to the mobile, nomadic ways of life. These emergences or stimuli endlessly reconstruct the metropolis, with a high quantity of information and consequently its available remains, which are elaborated in different levels creating unexpected results.
The first experiment was the Influenza Skin (the Influenza homepage), a skin that sticks to the desktop, uses the Quicktime to find an alternative for Windows, the traditional metaphor to enter virtual sites. Quicktime is a plug in commonly used in interfaces which create simulated screens and radio dials. The Influenza homepage, on the other hand, aims to create a both fragmented and simple result, an opaque graphical representation which does not make reference immediately to “physical space”.
The media are fragmented and participate in the daily life of the city. People have palm tops, cellular telephones and gameboys which transform the physical space of the individual to make it work in connection to the computer.
On the other hand, there are machines that are sold and used as a way to connect people and the most distant places in the world through a single network. Web cams are explored as points of connection between several parts of the world. There’s therefore the creation of a non-place, where all the spaces lose their particular features. The idea of simply capture the external environment by a webcam as an eye without a brain leaves the medium empty and does not explore its potentialities. McLuhan says that the media start as prostheses, extensions of the human body, but at the same time, the saturation with the presence of new media in environments, generates what he called “Narcissus narcosis”, the general oblivion of their psychic and social effects. Basing the Logcam project on these assumptions, we propose a system where a web cam captures - not referential images - but motions that generate abstract drawings.
In fact the images generated by the computer become signs that do not represent any external object. They are a visual project in themselves. It is game based on mathematical algorithms and procedures. The time and the space lose their coordinates, in an action which can be modified continuously.
Non_sensor (the site displays the concept and a video on the installation)
The project explores interactivity making visible the physical environment by combining the principle of propagation of electromagnetic waves and their distortion, thanks to certain elements of different natures that create aesthetic results on the interface.
Non_sensor was developed in an artistic residence, at Cyprès (Centre for the research into technologies, culture and arts), in France. This centre had a motion capture system used for 3D animation and we used it the opposite way: the sensors that normally are attached to a performer’s body are fixed to a table and the distortions, the elements that must be eliminated from the original system, are the ones which generate the movement and graphic patterns on the interface.
The goal, apart from deconstructing the technological equipment, was to work with the concept of environment in the media. Once again, the relation between man and machine often replaces the traditionally rigid relation of communication between an emitter and receiver. The relation continues being dualist and excludes what it is in the environment, which also takes part in the interaction.
In order to make this “first environment”, the physical one, visible, we used the electromagnetic waves as the construction material of the aesthetic work. In this way, all the elements take part in the process - which in fact already exists in nature and is modified by men as a way to control the noise. We think noise must take part in communication (reflected in the interface), as a way to make it more complex and less single-vectorial.
The development of an interface, on the other hand, always implies the choosing of some elements to create display effects and, consequently, the exclusion of other, in a combination of analysis and synthesis. This transforms the interface into a channel that connects hardware, user and environment, a connection that starts outside the mechanical system.
The idea is showing a way for deconstruction, more than creating an eye-catching false effect. The machine should be shown in a way as open as possible. Unlike the traditional use of motion capture systems, Non_sensor creates a wider connection system, using daily objects for interacting and making the electromagnetic distortion a constituent part of the work.
We think that if the substance of electronic art is information, the study of the interface is the study of the forms given to this incorporeal flow.
The information does not only have to do with code meaning, but also with impulses, patterns of energy in motion. In the case of artificial language, it is possible to change it, generating aesthetic results, even on the lowest level of the machine.
Projects on the urban space
The map is a soundtoy, a game (or a non-game) that was created taking into account the idea of urban maps and virtual maps. The intention is to get a bit lost, and then to find again places from where different games/geometric drawings can be created or deconstructed. It is a first approach to the idea of urban spaces and the net (www).
Trade is the oldest form of geographic and cultural interchange. In spite of its disruption as a genuine system, influenced by Capitalism, in the post - war period and its extrapolation to several fields, from the so-called “Marketing” vision, commerce went on and continues being important for the survival and the sustained development of vendors and buyers. And it is not necessarily limited to the actions of great multinational corporations. For instance, we can mention the Sumerians, who represented the word market by means of the ideogram Y, which is shaped by two merging lines united. Commerce is encounter, more than anything else.
As well as the Situationists believed in the importance of the Les Halles Market (already destroyed) as a creative space of daily interactions against the media spectacle, we noticed in a Sao Paulo market, in Brazil (Mercado da Lapa) a point of a very strong node of cultural exchange, where different geographies and times cross. The same as the Les Halles Market, this market was on the verge of being destroyed, to build a great transports station, to prioritise the idea of the city made for automobiles and ignores the places of social contact.
So we developed an investigation project that will be published in 2006 in Brazil (Do Mármore ao Píxel mercados públicos e supermercados, curva e reta sobre a cidade, Sao Paulo: Annablume). It analyzes the cultural and aesthetic importance of the practices related to the “Mercado da Lapa”, in order to assure its permanence and non-alteration by an architectonic project which would transform it into something similar to a supermarket, which would turn it into a completely controlled space, something opposite to the festive and playful nature of Brazilian popular markets.
After our investigation on urban and technological communicational spaces, we developed the project From Marble to Pixel. The metropolitan city was the primary subject. A city like Sao Paulo, with 15 million inhabitants, can only be lived in a fragmented way and these experiences are the ones the project wanted to retrieve, beyond postcards and media references, which simplified the set by means of often stereotyped conceptions. It is an intense, violent, overpopulated city which has a history of continuous destruction and reconstruction. The daily and accelerated time of the inhabitant, the city which is not lived any longer and is already leaving, the place where there is a car for each 2 inhabitants, the economic heart of the country, the global city and, at the same time, the one where violence and economic exclusion are in the street, the freeways, the houses.
This is what we tried to reconstruct virtually in a non-map, a map to approach chaos, a map where the relation with space is not objective or rational, but subjective and personal.
Madrid Mousaic
A (developing) project in collaboration with the Resources Center of Medialab Madrid
For Couchot, creation in the digital medium has to do directly with the fragmented subject. The creation of the interface is more a ptrajectory than a object. In the same way, the experience in the city takes place by means of sign systems which are interwoven. A big city such as Madrid can only be lived in a fragmented, multiple way. It is possible to belong to one or more nuclei and this creates different narratives (and different meanings) of the city. Canclini points out that “all interaction takes an imagination toll, but even more, in these evasive and fleeting interactions it offers a megalópolis “. The city, by means of streets, paths, freeways and telecommunication environments allows the construction and strengthening of these flows. Madrid’s urban centre, has a huge communication network (both telecommunication and transport) which makes it possible that millions of people in this city (including fluctuating population and inhabitants, Madrilenians and foreigners, tourists and illegal immigrants) to be contacted and go inside and outside their perimeter, which also includes many magnetic waves from radios, mobile telephones and other types of residual transmission. It’s an heterogeneous ensemble that makes this city unique.
The project aims at showing the relation between the urban space and the communicational networks from the point of view of fragmentation, which allows the continuous reconstruction of new narratives. A lot has been spoken about the great amount of data which are generated and fragmented by the media at the moment. However, the more information is generated, the more remains will be created. The cognitive saturation or the limitations of the reception devices, makes us perceive much less than the amount available around us today.
After becoming conscious of this process, we can define and separate noise from “information”. Therefore, it would be possible to change the pick up process and to recover the things we would have discarded before and find new uses for it, including them in informational flows.
The present project makes uses about 500 photographic images of the city of Madrid that show different points of view, combined with each other, to create several narrative possibilities. Each group of images generates a whole, which is re-elaborated as other images are added and altered, using the data flow generated by the sound recorded in the streets and underground lines of Madrid, mixed with the sound taken from the environment when the installation is displayed. Other urban network sources are going to be part of the project, as mobile phone activities to create aesthetic results.
The project aims at working on the most abstract level of urban information, a gross mass which allows us to create an aesthetic and semantic set, mixing “real” sounds and images into new combinations that generate a result between the symbol and the abstraction (which generated the neologism Mousaic, something between the mosaics and the muses - two words that share their root, in fact). The purpose is to emphasize the perception of the fragmented and residual character of the urban spaces and the digital environment.
Biographies:
Rafael Marchetti (Argentina) is a Bachelor of Fine Arts and works as a programmer since 1996 and as creator for digital media since 2000. Raquel Rennó (Brazil) teaches at Master and graduate courses about urban communication and is currently developing a PHD thesis about residual communication in the urban spaces.
In 2004 Raquel and Rafael were artists in resident (with an UNESCO grant and the support from the Ministry of Culture of Brazil) in the Cyprès Institute - Pratiques Artistiques et Sciences Cognitives in France to develop the project Non_sensor, which is a part of the European project Alterne. In 2005 they develop the project Madrid Mousaic at Medialabmadrid Resources Centre.
The artistic projects of Influenza have won of the prizes Sergio Motta of Digital Art, (2003), FILE (2004), Prog: me (2005) and in 2005, they have been displayed in festivales such as ARS Electronica (Linz), File (São Paulo), 404 (Rosario), Viper Festival (Basel), ACM Multimedia (Singapur), Nuevas Geografías (Mexico DF), Havana Biennial, Soundtoys.net, Runme.org, Break 2.3 (Ljubljiana), Accea (Armenia), among other ones. In 2005 they made an individual exhibition in the Galeria Tohu Bohu in Marseilles, France and a retrospective exhibition at the centre Comafosca Nod de Arts i Pensament a Alella (Barcelona). The theoretical works of Influenza have been published in books and academic magazines and presented in congresses at the University of São Paulo, University of Buenos Aires, Sussex University and Plymouth University (The Planetary Collegium), among others.
