COLLATERAL AFFECTIONS

Collateral Affections

The present edition of Transitio_MX is based on the notion of technology as affection, a concept which, in philosophical terms, opens up a broad discussion regarding perceptual phenomena. Its definitions encompass the notions of affliction, impact, and trauma, as well as inclination or tendency, opposing concepts which refer to the philia-phobia condition inherent to techno-scientific culture: an opposition which arises, on one hand, from the need for technological tools and, on the other, from the cognitive and perceptual challenges implicit in their use, particularly in artistic production. In other words, the problems inherent to artistic production using technology: its limitations, its idiosyncrasies, as well as the particular ideological burdens that are consequence of their historical development.
Hence, the proposed subject matter is approached from the effects of this polarity, identified within three registers or categories distinguished by: their incidence in subjects—as individual experiences—codes contained in technological devices or organisms, and collective perceptual phenomena or realities.
Affected subjects
Machinic dependency, prosthetic connections to technological devices, software and applications, all have an impact on subjects, creating lives assisted and molded by technology. Works such as Eric Siu’s Optical Handlers—a portable device that assists/alters the perception of the user by hampering mobility, coordination, and navigation skills— critically approach the symbiotic relationship between machinic prosthetic device and user, thus opening up a reflexive interstice , a possible distance between subject and device. In the case of Breathing, by Guto Nobrega—a work in which a plant is to an interface that visibly translates the process of photosynthesis into electrical impulses which trigger the activation and movement of a metallic structure—the allusion to mechanical dependency is evident.
Affected Codes
The possibility of subverting codes, whether numeric or genetic; of ‘bending the rules’ to adjust to individual and collective needs, enables the generation of new platforms and devices, or reinvents uses for old ones –occasionally annulling or balancing the ideological and historical burdens that arise with the emergence of certain technologies. Woody and Steina Vasulka, Don Buchla—pioneers in the generation and use of devices that permit code alteration—Kathy High, whose work with biogenetics is at the crux of ethical and medical discussions, are some examples of artists and works found within this register.

Affected realities
The capability to incorporate technological tools into daily life and the collective experience we share due to their widespread use,  opens up the possibilities for remote social imaginaries that are replicated and multiply —twisting, altering, and enhancing realities whilst generating historically unprecedented modes of socialization.
Lorena Mal’s World Wide Scroll, a generative artwork created online simultaneously and remotely by multiple users; the audiovisual works of Susan Collins which superimpose virtual landscapes on real ones using telematic technology; and the interactive work by Andres Padilla Domene which operates in an interstitial zone of blurred boundaries between memory and image, reality and representation; all of these pose questions regarding the effects of technology on these ‘shared realities’ that intermingle with virtual imaginaries, incorporating them into the perceptual experience of users with the status of the ‘real’.
Affections
If technology is an affection, or a condition, what are its symptoms? What are its effects, affects, and disaffects? Collateral Affections alludes to these symptoms, dividing them into 5 major issues or theoretical premises that articulate the discourse of this festival:

• Hostile paradigms

This section refers to the act of confronting user unfriendly devices or software, hence forcing the postulation of new technological paradigms. The critiques of existing technologies, technology as a hostile environment, malaise, or necessary evil, are some of the thematic lines derived from this concept.
There are major trends within electronic and sound art that represent the rejection of harmful technologies or sound pollution, as well as the recovery of natural environments. Barry Traux, as a representative of the World Soundscape Project and the Acoustic Ecology movement; the work Labyrinthitis, by Jacob Kierkegaard, commissioned for the Medical Museum of Copenhagen, a work based on auditory illnesses and phenomena; and Miller Puckette, creator of MaxMSP as well as Pure Data—standards in freeware sound programming—are examples of three very different approaches to this dilemma.

• Agency, negotiation, and dilution

The close collaboration of different agents which has as end result a determined artwork implies, in many cases, the need to resort to experts in fields of knowledge different from those of the artist initiating a project; this entails the translation of seminal artistic conception, thus affecting the final result of the works whilst also questioning traditional notions of authorship that still prevail in the art sphere and which oppose that of science. In the specific case of devices that enable experimentation within a specific media, the resulting works are molded by the device’s own properties and possibilities; such is the case of the visual experiments carried out with the Rutt/Etra synthesizer in the origins of video art history in the 1970s.

• Software, hardware, condition of possibilities

The limitations of technology itself, of the devices created with a specific end in mind, such as the packages of software with their errors or glitches, generate infinite possibilities for manipulation, hardware hacking, circuit bending and other types of retro-engineering that imply subverting technology in order to serve different ends, broadening not only their instrumental potentialities, but also their poetic and discursive possibilities. Device art and robotic works by Joe Paradiso, the work with design errors in the archetypical Macbook by Hans Koch, and the relationship between high resolution and minimum image definition in the work of Jim Campbell, inventor of HDTV, underline this elasticity of the hard circuit and its representative and instrumental possibilities.

• Education, norm demands, communities of knowledge

The public demand for the spread of knowledge surpasses the academic and corporate worlds, triggering the articulation of communities independent to either sphere that freely generate and broadcast information and technological tools. They propose collective, socialized, and horizontal forms of construction and dissemination of knowledge by defending models of distribution such as freeware, copyleft, and DIY culture. This trend is represented by Dream Addictive, an art collective dedicated to integrating OpenSource hardware and software. Their participation will encourage  dialogue between various communities dedicated to techno-science and art.

• Interdiscipline

The constant search for collaborative models in new media art implies the integration of interdisciplinary structures and operative proposals from various perspectives that allow flexibility for the conceptualization and execution of diverse projects. These collaborative organizational, operative and conceptual structures are ideally suited to the formats of hybrid art and intermedia, and are central to electronic arts and the disciplinary and scientific crossroads they represent in works that encompass a broad range of human activity. Proposals such as Transdiciones, collective project that involves live cinema, electronic processes and improvisation with guitar, voice, and saxophone; Esthel Vogrig and her work El hipergesto (The Hypergesture), located somewhere between dance, performance, and technology assisted improvisation, exemplify the interdisciplinary possibilities essential to the conception of electronic arts.

These theses articulate our vision of the festival as a whole in each of the participating venues, and are cross-referential guidelines constituting a complex circuit that intends to instigate reflection upon the impact of technology in art, and to transpose this exercise to the everyday life of our audiences, not as passive spectators, but rather a complex, conglomerate construct of the accumulated experiences that we call perceptions and that are enhanced/transformed/warped by the technological tools available to us today.

Roberto Morales
Director Artístico del Festival

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