Chilean Artists and Institutions at the Ars Electronica Festival

Cristo Riffo (CL)

Sistema Cinco: Non-Human Determinations

Sistema Cinco explores through technology the interdependencies and relationships of microorganisms, opposing nature’s molecular technologies with the human made ones.

It consists of a hacked microscope with robotic components that allow movement and exploration of vectors over microbial samples. The images that are projected live from the microscope are in opposition to the mapping of large terrains with the use of drones, where viewers can find connections and similarities between the microcosmos in manners of scale, forms and shape.

The microscope is connected to A.I to imagine realities of cybernetic management with algorithmic governance. Control algorithms will be based on Stafford’s Beer Viable System, a non-hierarchical organization structure inspired by the nervous system of biological organisms. The Viable System was the heart of the project Cybersyn, used for the management of Chilean state companies during the government of President Salvador Allende, from 1971 to 1973.

UC Chile (CL), University of Chile (CL), National University of Tres de Febrero (AR)

FUTURE ANCESTORS

PRISMA – Art, Science, Technology

Matter is empowered in performative acts: objects exercise forms of power and intra-material actions produce different materializations of the world. The emergence of alternative paradigms for thinking about the problem of materiality has many expressions in contemporary art. This exhibition displays those that recuperate ancestral techniques from today’s poetic, scientific and technological imaginaries. Particularly, crossovers between technologies belonging to different temporal and spatial spheres entail a recurring practice in the electronic arts produced in Latin America.

The three works stage a series of transformation processes of matter from the natural world into new materials that intertwine ancestral ways of making and contemporary technologies. Their artists investigate the encounter of macro and micro worlds through combinations of scales, modular constructions and alternations of different views on objects, materials and processes: Fragments of the Jungle by Angel Salazar proposes the coexistence of satellite views of geoglyphs and volumetric data visualizations; in Holobiont, Diego Silva combines the general structure of the installation with the infinite details of the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts on a large scale; in WEAVES, Vivian Vergara´s minimal repetitive gesture of weaving is materialized and multiplied, amplified from a machine that is located between the serial and the handicraft.

The study of our ancestral cultures presents itself as a respectful approach towards our natural environment but is also a reminder of the challenges that we face in this new and hardly classifiable era that we often refer to as the Anthropocene, where almost every practice instantly becomes obsolete.

Diego Silva (CL)

Holobiont

Site-specific installation made up of two wide tin pools, which contain a SCOBY crop (a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts). The exhibition space is entirely connected to various sensors controlled by Arduino. While the public walks around the room, a series of water pumps and sounds are activated as response of the crop to those space stimuli. The Holobiont concept refers to beings formed by the association of different species, which in this case give rise to techno-ecological relations. Holobiont´s main objective is to build a space where different degrees of living and technological complexity coexist and interconnect with each other.

Ángel Salazar (AR)

Jungle Fragments

Installation that consists of a series of 3D objects and audiovisual displays that are based on aerial images of the geoglyphs. These images were made by civilizations of the Amazon in different areas of the jungle and later discovered from the massive deforestation of these territories. The ancient geoglyphs, understood as Biodesign’s of ancestral Latin American thought, are converted by the artist into visualizations of digital volumetric reconstruction -“speculative reconstruction”, in the words of Salazar-. The creative process comprises learning patterns of the forms found in the jungle and the production of sculptural objects using digital fabrication techniques.

Viviana Vergara (CL)

WEAVES: From Humans to Living Machines

Weaving bio machine in which craft techniques rooted in different pre-Hispanic cultures come together with scientific and technological knowledge. The artist uses mechanisms built based on biomaterials to design a machine that produces a fabric over time. The work is made up of two main articulations: one that weaves and the other that winds; each of them comprises a series of interlocking mechanisms that configure the main action of each work cycle. In this way, Vergara investigates the materials, techniques and biotechnological relationships involved in human-machine associations.