I am against the idea of “ordering” in the sense of “putting into order (one or more things)”, because it necessarily leads us to the search for a certain class of organization, for a kind of structure, for a series of labels and names; it makes us establish classifications and, therefore, limit, annotate and confine ideas and concepts. But another meaning of the term exists: ” to channel and to direct [a thing] to its purpose “. In this second sense of the word “to order”, I make a presentation of my works, and, from them, of my intentions.
In 1997 I took part in a workshop directed by the digital artist Antoni Abad. The participants were asked to develop for the Internet small repetitive modules of maximum information. It took place in a small city near Barcelona, where nothing interesting was “happening”, so I devoted myself to walk along its streets, looking at the doors, the shops, the different advertisements and systems of codification and trying to get the real and the virtual world together. It looked like a complex work: we did not know much about the Internet tool, or what this information highway consisted of in a time in which it rather was a narrow and slow alley.
Going for a walk in that city looking for international “languages” of communication, it seemed to me that the highway code was one of the best known, and that it might represent appropriately the work that was shaping: routes and routes by car or walking in the day or in the night throughout the length and breadth of the city, recorded in video, digitalized and made into small animated gifs with a few frames. I began to be interested in the concept of physical, spatial and virtual tour, and in the labyrinth as the maximum expression of all tours.
Arlindo Machado, in his article Hypermedia: The Labyrinth as Metaphor (1), compares the concept of hypermedia and, thus, of the Internet, and the concept of labyrinth. In this essay three issues are clearly common to both ideas: the first one is that the subject is invited to make an exploration that cannot be pushed back; the second one, the nonexistence of a map or a guide to make the above mentioned exploration; and the third one, the use by the subject of a crafty intelligence to reach the end, not necessarily the center. I would like to add a fourth common issue: the playful aspect that both “worlds” enclose. A playful aspect I deal with in a Dionysian way, as a game and an enjoyment.
From the ideas of labyrinth and chaos I made the work references (1999), which presents the Internet as a world without references but filled with information. From the creation of this work the own nature of the medium, its specific conditions, the ideas of liquid space and time and its effect on certain socio-cultural patterns have turned my aims.
” From a plane to another, relations, nets get tied up immediately, in a wak that makes us understand better the differences between these planes, but then we will proceed treating everything on the same plane: someone who passes by, a nomad who that departs in order to conquer something … ” Gilles Deleuze
Referencias appears as a net art project which uses several approaches, recursive systems and fractals, plunging the user, as he surfs forward, into a series of stories which are told by themselves. Starting from an initial page - chaos we enter a labyrinth with a complex system of links. There are no visible buttons, only Ariadna’s threads (gif “warning”) we have to look for and follow to be able to find to the center and then go out. In the third level we come across different stories in which an honoring to Julio Verne and Around the World in 80 days - a black arrow made up by eighty smaller arrows, linked to eighty servers from the whole world-, is mixed with Arrow’s global economic theory- when a butterfly moves its wings in a part of the world, its flutter, its consequences are felt in the rest -flutter of interactive butterflies-, apart from cyborg-like images and animated gifs that represent the birth of nebulas of stars.
Ultimately, I have to admit that the page became a bit boring; it had too much information …;-))
Exploring the possibilities of the medium and its contradictions I came across the figure of the subject(2), the existence of a fragmented subject, the question of privacy versus the universality of the e-mail, the way in which the net and globalization are mutually influenced.
Ciber00 (2000), my following project, had as an aim the creation of a public - private space of meeting among users from which it was possible to send e-mails, erase them, modify them, copy them, download information and all what “owning” a mail allows; but in this case the mail was not private, but public. The idea started from the possibility of fusing different ” real individuals ” in a unique virtual profile. The project ciber00 lasted for six weeks. Every week, a series of e-mails was sent to a list of four hundred addresses in the whole world in order for them to take an active part in its development. The first message went out on Monday, the 23rd of October, 2000 with the following text: “Please, check my e-mail!!! ” The home-page evolved week by week, introducing with the word “please” every message sent.
Nowadays, some users who fully assumed their ciber profile have modified their password, so it is not possible to get into their Hotmail account. This way so, only the screens - advertisements of the project remain viewable. In this simulation society all of us are ciber …
In 2001, my interest for the specific conditions of the medium decreased; then I decided to use it as an expressive force for a critical speech. In 1989 Gail Pheterson, a sociologist, activist and been interested in the psychodynamics of the oppression and in the construction of alliances between women, published nosotras, las putas(3), where a series of writings are compiled: among them the summaries of both Prostitutes’ World Congresses (Amsterdam, 1985; Brussels, 1986) and a series of articles which had appeared in different publications. In these texts it is treated in depth the role that the prostitute plays inside the sexual - economic exchange in the bourgeois society, the stigmatizing of the prostitute, the freedom to choose, the “victimization” and “the bad woman”, the role of the man - male, the feminist and abolitionist movements and, in general, sexual trade considered as a job as any other one.
From the reading of this book two fundamental questions arise. The fist one, economic: the recognition of prostitutes as a group of hard-working women. The banner of the press conference , made by the prostitutes in the European Parliament (1986) said: “Ban poverty, not prostitutes. ”
And a social one: the respect to them and the need to modify a series of prejudices and laws that condemn prostitution morally and socially, aintroduce it in a hypocritical “illegality”. ” It is justice, not charity, which the world needs! ” Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792, in ” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman “.
Making the work we, the whores (2001) tried to be a recognition to the fight that these women lead, and a warning to society about this situation.
Elmundo.es (2001) is a project in which we try to criticize the use of information as an object of immediate consumption, which prevents to the receiver from thinking on the social, political, economic, ecological and other conflicts revealed by that information reveals. A series of questions arise this way. If a piece of news is defined, among other concepts, by belonging to the immediate present, what can be considered to be a piece of news in the age of the post-information in the Internet area? What happen when news stop being “new”? Do they go automatically to the sphere of information and, therefore, acquire a status of permanence, which, in any other case would be denied to them? If in the Internet time and space are “liquid”, understanding the term as perpetual non-permanence, what happens with the value of what “now” is news, but not in a second’s time? What happens with national disasters, social convulsions, local and tribal wars, environmental destructions … that in a given moment totally monopolize the attention of the audience and gather our economic and moral solidarity in millions for charity, but are rapidly buried by “latest news”? Should not news more than a mere object of immediate consumption, and therefore lead to reflection in depth to solve the economic, social, ecological problems in the long term?
To make this project I took a front page from the newspaper El Mundo Digital from certain date and hour ( El Mundo Digital updates every two hours), and made a database program which allowed the gradual disappearance of the page with the users’ log-ins. The “oblivion” of the news being made real on a colorless, insipid, non smelling, painless background in the end. Some time ago the links were kept, so it was possible to read the past news; nowadays, due to the development of the digital mass media, it is necessary to pay to check old news, so the consumer’s role as for the news is even more stressed.
Notes
1- Literatura y Multimedia. Ed. J. Romera Castillo et al. Madrid: Visor 1997
2- Sherry Turkle. Live on the Screen. Identity in the Age of Internet. Nueva York: Simon & Schuster, 1995
3. Gail Pheterson. Nosotras, las putas. Madrid: Talasa, 1989
