DECLARATION OF INTENT . BARBARA ALCALDE
My artistic proposal is of a mixed digital nature through which I intend to plastically encompass all the facets of a new born aesthetic to the digital age , where I paint with digital and traditional brushes on canvas and finally I add fractals, images generated as a result of a mathematical equation that reproduces infinite repetitive patterns and that in many cases we can see that they turn out to be very similar to nature, all thanks to the appearance of computers.
To aesthetically merge the previous elements, I integrate a plastic morphology so that it looks like traditional painting where humanity defeats the machine without regard.
Pop art in Latin America was practically not present, so I take the object, protagonist of this artistic current, through urban symbols that we all recognize in daily life and I reduce them to a smaller scale in comparison to the human figure, granting the human being the place that corresponds to this: to be the protagonist of one's life and not the object.
I am adding as I go these elements according to topics that interest me in life and I do a study on the symbols that represent them universally.
I am creating a virtual blackboard of new urban hieroglyphic signs where a new alphabet is generated as in the table of chemical elements that when combined together forms a new pictorial language.
By introducing these universal urban symbols in the human figure or leaving them in the external context, I intrinsically paint the individual as a recipient of information, the same thing happening with his environment; I invite a dialogue between the interior of the human psyche and its context, thus facilitating awareness of the interaction that is generated between one's own perception and contact with mundane external life.
I also work on the dichotomy that exists in frequencies, there are always two sides of the same concept, the contrast between opposites such as light and darkness is what makes us recognize them; This leads me to understand that the only way to move forward is by perceiving if the information we bring into the container that we are , is useful to manage the exterior for our objectives.
ABOUT THE HUMAN IN THE DIGITAL
Many people have questioned in the past years for the actual existence of the Art, we have left to choose between the longings for the traditional plastic representation and the exploration of new fields of aesthetics that has emerge through computer science.
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Like always in Art History, from new perceptive realities, new aesthetics forms are created. The technological interconnections and the media of our time corresponds many disciplines, and therefore, the evolution Art is related to these. We live in a control era; the personal computers affect every social structure we have: science, psychology, economy, finances, commerce, etc., impacting this way the consciousness and the visual perceptive structure. The optic sensitization of masses, urges for evolution inside the traditional world of Plastic Art, from the old formalities to the new perceptive concretions. Our time, therefore, demands a corresponding system between Art and other areas like genetics, topology, programming, cybernetics, electronics, media, etc.
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If we consider culture as an organic whole where each element has an organization, computers and their nets become an important cultural phenomena of our time. The fractal neoeuclidian geometry makes mathematics to incarnate through them in a new geometry system, a new reality, therefore a new aesthetics. Fractals are mathematical equations materialized in the screen, like fractioned geometries with properties of similarity in every part resembling to the geometrical and mathematical description of natural objects apparently irregular.
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To this point, computerized information looks like an ideal unanimated support of light, space and time, just like the early 1900’s vanguards wanted, without pretending to achieve in a definitive way, what after one century has not been fulfilled: their idea of Art going into life itself, since art will stop being a representation of like when this happens.
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Today’s real challenge for the artist is to understand the dangers of technocracy, to stop them by redeeming the plastic communication with today’s humankind, without letting escape the opportunities that may exist for digital art..
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The relation between art and technology has always been uncomfortable because, even thou every time there is more narrow and persistent connections among them, we are thought to consider them as two different worlds. Nevertheless, symmetry considerations, simplicity and elegance in symbolic representation, as well as any other form of mathematics aesthetics, play important attributions in both disciplines. The mix is more obvious every day; we can observe a Pythagoras landscape thru mathematic harmony both in fractals and in Nature.
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Even thou, inconveniences continue, since they are the unexpected bifurcations and contradictions that are interesting in every piece of art.
The art as a mental object of unexpected origin, which serves to establish a consciousness between man and his context, throw us an ambiguity in our time between technical art and artistically applied technology.
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The dilemma is not that art coins digital technology, but the capacity of the artist to communicate, since everybody can log into a computer and generate an digital image, but not everybody can create this consciousness and touch the souls with the image, and also, from the actual incapacity of art specialists to develop methods or models to evaluate the plastic talent in its new forms of expressions.
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As Martha Mayer Erlebacher said: “… Art is the most possible rationalization of our deepest fears, joys and instincts as human beings. The visual artists should try to explain life metaphorically and poetically …. The aesthetical dimension is the carrier of hope …”
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And, if this is true, digital art goes way beyond just a “Photoshop click”.
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The speech in this piece of art goes around the interaction that exists between the human being and the object, every relation between the material and the immaterial.
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The object as the primary subject in Pop Art (artistic proposal practically lost in Mexico during the sixties and seventies), is retaken in these pieces, reduced and inserted in the human being: main character and container of different universes. According to these different individual visions of the Cosmos, the relation between the outside and the inside perm, entwine, and relate in different ways creating different realities, as different as personal histories may be.
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In some occasions, the matter exceeds the no matter, and in other, most of them, the matter exceeds the human being. The object, since the 60’s and with the support of the powerful, took the place the belonged to us by right, becoming the main character in our own lives, giving to it our freedom, on the contrary of what that young generation idealized.
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The appraisal of the human being is mistaken with the financial value, leaving us with a system where the personal search is easy to forget...
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The perception is altered, and relationships get complicated, baptizing concepts and situations with names that semantically, do not correspond to their meaning.
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We are slaves of the object.