Installation – Sistema Operativo SO(S) Operating System

Guernica. Nichteinmischungsausschuss, 2012

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Theword Nichteinmischungsausschuss—German for the international
Non-intervention Committee that was set up in 1936 to prevent personnel
and material from reaching the parties involved in the Spanish
Civil War—is written in large graffiti-like letters on one of the walls
in the gallery space. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German representative
at the committee’s first meeting, would later write in his
memoirs, “It would have been better to call this the Intervention
Committee, for the whole activity of its members consisted in explaining
or concealing the participation of their countries in Spain.”
One of the most dreadful examples of this intervention was German
support for the carpet-bombing of the town of Guernica.

English

Guernica. Picasso Communist, 2012

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Recently, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declassified
the files it once maintained on Pablo Picasso. The files on display
in the exhibition show how the agency, concerned about Picasso’s
communist affiliations, followed the artist when he lived in Paris.
The declassification is only partial. Large parts of the information
are covered in black. Making sense of it all is more or less impossible.
The unredacted portions read as an “alternative” history of
Picasso as a political artist. Like art historians proper, the FBI gives
a detailed account of Picasso’s activities as well as his art. The account
includes a summary of an article published in connection with
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957.
According to the files, the article, from the communist magazine The
Worker, argues that “PICASSO cannot be understood unless his life
in art and his life in politics are seen as a synthesis of his guiding
philosophy and social outlook.” From an oppositional political perspective
the FBI (likely unaware of the irony) seems to have taken a
similar approach in its investigation of Picasso.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 2014

11 enero, 201510 febrero, 2015
por admin

Golpead a los blancos con la cuña roja, 2014

Impresión sobre papel

42 x 59,4 cm

Arquitecturas, 2014

32 impresiones sobre papel

33 x 48,3 cm c/u

Liberator, 2014

Impresiones 3D en plástico PLA

180 piezas en rojo, blanco y negro

Medidas variables

In 1919 El Lissitzky created Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. With this poster he sought to promote a form of political action using the basic forms of suprematism, the revolutionary avant-garde movement of which he was a part. In opposition to his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, who strove for a higher, immaterial reality, El Lissitzky wanted to apply suprematism to the reality of the streets. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is a contemporary realization of this call to arms. On display in two vitrines are the components of four Liberator guns, one of the first all-plastic “printable” pistols developed and promoted by the Texas-based nonprofit, peer-sponsored organization Defense Distributed in 2013. The components were produced using (illegal) open-source data found on the Internet and a regular 3-D printer. Each component is white, red, or black. A reproduction of El Lissitzky’s original poster is placed on the wall, thus allowing an open comparison between two abstract ideas of “liberation” and concrete objects across time, space, politics, and technologies.

The Liberator was the culmination of the Wiki Weapon Project dedicated to exploring the new possibilities that 3-D technology offered those who claim the right to bear arms as stated in the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Seen from that perspective, the pistol is a radical invention. The Liberator is cheap and simple to produce and also bypasses existing gun laws. A print of the Liberator is without a serial number and does not demand registration, which is why the U.S. State Department has labeled them “ghost guns.” No one knows they exist. Despite an ongoing conflict with the State Department, Defense Distributed has continued to develop so-called printable firearms, and their products now include data for printing an automatic rifle.

Installation

Armed Citizen, 1998-2006

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Questions of access are central to notions of the Internet as a new
space of freedom. The Chinese government is criticized when it blocks
certain websites, and the Internet is globally celebrated when activists
in the Middle East share their videos via social platforms like
Facebook. Most people will probably agree that accessing material
goods through online shopping is not only cheaper but easier than
going to the shopping mall. Armed Citizen is a series of images of one
hundred handguns that can be bought online like the millions of
other consumer goods the Internet has to offer. The images provide
no information about the guns, their type, price, or where they can be
bought. They simply present one gun after another as objects of desire
made available by the new economy of digitalized networked transactions.
The “armed citizens” that the title of the work refers to are,
regardless of why they buy the guns, the products of the commercial
logic embedded in contemporary access culture. The work furthermore
reflects a general loosening of the restrictions of gun control,
which most tragically has manifested itself in the many school shootings
in both Europe and the United States. The main argument for
more lenient gun laws is the need for personal protection, yet again
and again we are confronted with evidence that this object of security
primarily leads to an increase in violence and death.

English

Infiltrators

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Infiltrators is an installation that takes its cue from the common police
tactic of infiltrating riots to spy on and eventually arrest rioters.
On display is a series of sketch-like drawings of known police
infiltrators. Spanish law prohibits showing or using photographs of
police infiltrators—despite the fact that they operate in public and
thus can be (accidently) photographed—by anyone documenting the
riots, because the authorities believe such actions will compromise
the infiltrators’ safety. The distribution of photographs of protestors,
however, is not illegal. The outfits worn by the police infiltrators are
based on standardized or stereotyped “models” of rioters that have
permeated the cultural imaginary for many years. On the wall are a
series of framed engravings of rioters from the end of the nineteenth
century that gives a historical perspective to the production of such
models. The engravings connect with a video that deconstructively
demonstrates software used by the contemporary gaming industry
to sculpt characters, including “bad” ones such as rioters. The video
shows how the workings of the software mimic the ways in which
traditional sculptors shaped their material. Another component of
the installation features sketches of rioters from games, as if they
were sketches from classical sculptures or simply sculptures in their
own digital right. In a montage of clips from the Internet, a second
video shows how these models are applied to game action that depicts
violent confrontations between police and public. The clips are
juxtaposed with footage of actual confrontations, encouraging reflection
on the relationship between what is happening in the game
and what is happening in the streets. The different material testifies
to the antagonistic construction of reality that the police and video
games take part in. But as documentary footage of rioters occupying
a building in Barcelona and raising a pirate flag on a rooftop reminds
us, the rioters themselves are constructing a different reality.

English

Not Found, 1000 Case Studies, 2014

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Not Found, 1000 Case Studies is an installation consisting of empty
white vitrines and ten boxes with one thousand photographs. Initially,
this might resemble the well-known modernist gesture of clearing
the gallery space of images and objects in the name of dematerialized
art. However, as the photographs numbered from one to one
thousand and stocked in the boxes indicate, the iconoclastic gesture
of the installation is a different one. Appropriating standardized
mock-up images used by advertising agencies, Daniel G. Andújar has
inserted computer error messages in the areas normally reserved for
commercial messages. The result is a visual dead-end (or maybe a
liberated zone?) and creates a strange, confusing overlap between
the information politics of the analog and digital worlds. With the
spread of LED screens in urban spaces, this overlap might soon be
the new reality. The infrastructure of publicity is rapidly changing as
new digital media emerge, and the visual character of any given city
will soon be programmed and shaped by agencies in remote places.
Site-specific billboards will become integrated into the global data
network, enforcing new mechanisms of control as well as opening
up new possibilities for hacking both the billboards and the messages
they display.

English

Notitĭa

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Two plasma screens—one for English and one for Spanish—display
news headlines from a selection of online media. The headlines continuously
change as a computer working in real time finds new headlines.
Under each headline is a section of text taken from a collection
of one hundred of the books in Daniel G. Andújar’s private (computer)
library. The selections are automatically chosen by a computer algorithm
each time a new headline is displayed.
The books in the collection relate to contemporary critical theory
by authors such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj
Žižek, who have been instrumental to the development of Andújar’s
work. The selections also serve as “answers” to the news. Notit˘ıa conceives
news as a question rather than a fact and emphasizes the importance
of seriously reflecting upon rather than passively consuming it.
The pace of changing headlines is often so fast that reflection is impossible.
Notit˘ıa thus shows them at a slower pace and offers tools and
vocabulary with which to engage the news critically.
The work updates a strong art-historical tradition of dealing with
the significance of news. Seminal work by artists such as Hans Haacke
and David Lamelas in the 1970s presented real-time news in the exhibition
space in order to demonstrate that the institution was not an
isolated aesthetic sphere but a structure inherently connected with
the surrounding society. Andújar develops this tradition further by
using the exhibition space as a space for reconceptualization and
reflection that is often impossible when news is displayed in its regular
formats.
The work is also accessible online at www.e-leaks.org.

English

Leaders, 2014

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Completely covering the walls in the room, Leaders is a massive compilation
of found images that uses the faces of historical and contemporary
political leaders—with or without their consent—to promote a
certain cause or product. From Adolf Hitler with an afro wig to Fidel
Castro as a cake, the images are bizarre, and the installation comes
to resemble a baroque curiosity cabinet. The wall is a direct reflection
of a contemporary society heavily polluted by images and an
excess of information that leaves little room for analysis. Moreover,
it reflects the transgressive tactics and increasing political power of
advertising as well as the disillusioning mutation of the face of politics.
Like avant-garde advertising, it challenges the culture of political
correctness. However, it does so in the name of market shares
rather than social progress, and in its use of archival material it not
only turns history into a joke but also decontextualizes and depoliticizes
it.
The installation also demonstrates how the focus of politicians
and politics in general has shifted from debate to publicity, from
arguments in parliament to visibility in the media. Politicians have
become as highly invested in the popularity contest of celebrity culture
as sports and rock stars. What is cancelled out or at least dramatically
narrowed by this shift of focus is the space for democratic
discussion of political principles. In its place a theatrical stage spotlighting
the personality of politicians has been erected.

English

Objects of desire, 2010

11 enero, 2015
por admin

A model of a glass building sits in a model of a hilly landscape onto
which is printed ¤100 and ¤500 bills. The model refers to an actual
corruption scandal in the northern Catalonian countryside involving
businessman Fèlix Millet i Tusell, who for more than thirty years was
the president of the Palau de la Música Catalana (Palace of Catalan
Music) and member of close to one hundred foundations. In 2009
he resigned after admitting his involvement in the “disappearance”
of several million euros of public money, the biggest ever corruption
scandal involving a cultural institution. The money was partly
used to build an opera-like environment in his private residence—
which the media called a “casa billet” (“bill house”). Tusell’s residence
is the symbolic reference for the model. The work thus addresses the
well-documented culture of corruption in Spanish politics, a culture
that undermines the democratic system and destabilizes the economy
to the detriment of every citizen. The new generation of culture-promoting
politicians have exchanged their political ideals and visions
for banal consumerist greed and pretention. They spend the stolen
money on luxury objects such as Louis Vuitton bags and Rolex watches
to flash their illegally acquired upper-class status. The model was
originally shown along with a series of lightboxes displaying advertisements
for some of these objects.

English

Individual Citizen Republic Project ™: THE SYSTEM (x-devian), 2003

11 enero, 2015
por admin

x-devian is part of an installation promoting the fictive operating
system x-devian, which is a conceptual repackaging of Ubuntu’s latest
desktop version of the Linux distribution Debian. However, while
the installation distributes an actual piece of free software, it does
not simply distribute the source code and functionalities of x-devian
so much as the cultural vocabulary, discourses, and ideas of free
software—in particular, free software operating systems. Judging by
the “front end” of the installation, x-devian looks like standard
commercial proprietary software. Presented in a setting that resembles
a stand at a fair and with a design appropriated from Apple’s Mac
OSX Panther operating system, it epitomizes the image of a desirable
consumer product in the field of technology. In a poster covering an
entire wall, a larger-than-life hand holds out a disk with the logo of
the operating system written on it, suggesting that x-devian is a gift—
or, perhaps, an offer—from the gods of the IT industry. Thus, the setting
encourages the user to be in awe of the wonders of the operating
system and accept the gift as a unique opportunity to be included in
the next technological “evolution of the species.”
However, behind this seductive surface, the “back end” of the installation
tells a different story, one in which the wonders of x-devian
are not the creation of the IT industry but of free software culture.
In a darkened space resembling a cave or secret lab, the installation
discloses the true content of the system and how it is really involved
with economics of a rather different kind; namely, those of free software.
Through a diversity of material related to free software culture,
this part of the installation not only presents x-devian as an operating
system supporting creative practices that resist prepackaged product
thinking but also explore hacks, continuous speculation, and processes
of experimentation.
Rather than emphasizing the disconnect between the front and
back end of the x-devian, the installation suggests that the development
of an aesthetics or even poetics of free software is inherent to
an understanding and development of its unique form of progressive
resistance. The significance and capabilities of free software need to
be developed not only on the code level but also on the cultural level
and must be communicated in new imaginary and visionary ways
that trump the myths of proprietary software.

Categoría: <span>Installation</span>