Summary
The EXPANDED PRINT symposium, held on June 5 and 6, has developed satisfactorily, fulfilling one of the important objectives within the activities programmed from the research project (HUM2007-64757/ARTE).
Expanded Impression, the statement of this Symposium, frames the research that we as a group have been developing in these years. The interest in knowing - from artistic productions - the repercussion of digital technologies in the field of Art and especially in the relationship Art-digital technology and printing, has constituted the working framework in which we have moved.
We would like to recall some references of the notion of Expanded that have transgressed the space and thought of art. On the one hand, Gene Youngblood's famous text on Expanded Cinema (1970), where the possibilities of holographic projections were predicted based on the alliance of cinema with video art and the computer. Of these combinations, the synesthetic character of the experiences stood out, that is to say, their ability to capture the audience sensorally and generate expanded states of consciousness. Rosalind Krauss also published the essay L'Escultura en el Camp Expandit (1978), where she emphasized the dissolution of borders between artistic practices and cultural activity. And Expanded is also the great rhizome in which we are immersed today, this notion called at the time Expanded Text and that today we call hypertext.
All simulated reality that we generate with computers operating from its visualization on the screen, can be susceptible to materialize in an impression. Thus, printers and plotters enter fully into cultural production. From the notion of Expanded Print, the methodologies of recombination, of fusion, of the dissolution of borders between disciplines and artistic practices are boldly opened. Let's not forget that from the moment the tool became an extension of the body, we have been constantly merging with technology for millennia.
Thus, focused on these premises, we can say that the results of both the conferences and the panel discussions have fulfilled part of the proposed interests. On the one hand, we invite four research artists, all of them unique, because of the interest that their work and the thinking that surrounds it arouses, and on the other, the proposal for panel discussions, inviting exalumn@s to participate and students whose productions have motivated our interest. We consider that important projects have been carried out over the years and behind them there is field work and research. We present here a small summary of the conferences and the projects of the participants in the tables.
COMPUTATION APPLIED TO ART
Elena Asins
Emblematic figure and solitary voice, a pioneer already in 1967 in research on computing in art. His way of doing art is a way of thinking and his thinking is linked to structuralism and numerical calculation, making an important conceptual contribution based on algorithms. In his lecture "Visual memory" he defines vision as a process formed from the images of the external world, which produce a useful description for the observer. A process that serves the author to reflect on the various mechanisms involved in visual perception and, in particular, on visual memory, with the intention of a better understanding of the subject and its representation.
READINGS IN SERIES
Yann Sèrandour
In his conference he highlighted his reflective and conceptual approach to the practical reception and reading of the works, where conceptual elements such as diversion, authorship, and other concepts related to reproducibility, acquire a strong position in the discourses on art that need to be re-thought through artistic practice, translating the visual codes that generate them to create new ones.
STYLUS
Verónica Aguilera
He based his presentation on the Stylus project, where he highlights the utopia of progress, using the photocopier as an exemplifying tool. Starting from this tool, it focuses its attention on the repetition of the Blue Pantone 307 C color to make machine errors widely visible.
]HETEROTOÍAS[
Imma Ávalos
She presented the project [heterotopias]. Book of riddles, questions starting from x and i, interior and exterior, your and I, word and thing. The city and its virtual ramifications form the stage where this enigma is projected in the search for the other, in the question about identity, and in communication in a hypermediatized era. ]heterotopias[ is a space of hybridization and cloning of the catalog of obsessions...opening altered spaces, others, in which contradictions can coexist and what is desired can be real.
HOSPITAL 106, 4t 1a
Jordi Canuda i Isabel Banal
They present their speech based on the work "Hospital 106, 4t 1ª". Place and time is the final result of a project that, over the course of 10 years, has directed its gaze, from artistic practice, to the urban and social transformations that have taken place in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona. This book collects and organizes the monitoring and comments that have been made of a precise place, and of its transformation as a result of the application of an urban plan. A book understood as a creative space and at the same time as a support for reflection and memory, an open testimony of a part of the city's history.
NAVEGAR ENTRE FRAGMENTS
Eugenio Tisselli
In this brilliant conference Tiselli exposes his interest in the field of programming and the involvement between art and technology. These implications become the source of research for new layouts and relationships that generate interaction programs between the machine and man. One of the axes of positioning of his work, concentrates on the capacity of creative use of the computer.
Daniel Jacoby
A language is the arrangement of an enormous number of words according to arbitrary grammatical rules known by a group of people. A paragraph is the ordering of a series of characters following another set of equally arbitrary rules. And a character is again the arrangement of one or more lines and points in a certain, of course, arbitrary order. adenOrr is a series of (re)arrangements of things, following criteria that, by not adapting to their purpose, generate unintelligible results. Not disorder but absurd orders that seek to demonstrate the arbitrariness of their nature, to which we are accustomed.
72.024 MIL·LÈSIMA
Marcel Pie
The presentation at the symposium focused on the work La 72,024 thousandths of a year, an experimental animation project based on a simple work strategy: Create a daily animation of 15 frames for an entire year. The search to find the ideal support that could show the work in its entirety, concluded with an interactive web space: www.365animacions.net. This works as the conclusion of a long elaboration process in which the final result has been as important as the path chosen to get there. For this reason, the website shows all the elements that have intervened, voluntarily and involuntarily, throughout the entire year of production, making available to the user all the information related to the project (day, location, technique, etc). It is here, outside the device of the cinema and outside the exhibition space, where the project has been able to find its appropriate space.
INNOSENSE
Esteban de la Monja
Presentation of the Innosense project. The use of information and databases in the creation of audiovisual and printed pieces can give rise to techno-conceptual systems that have in their formal resolution, inherently, the procedural feature of conceptual art. Also, it is through the reorganization and reinterpretation of large amounts of information that the construction of self-sufficient narratives is affordable, a universe given rules within which the medium and its content behave. The work Innosense draws light from these parameters and by basing itself on the chromatic values - which are a direct result of the framing, lighting and filtering decisions of a cinematographic photographer - creates its own narrative. A narrative that is the result of a series of parameters imposed by the author, but that in the time space of the video and in the two-dimensionality of the print have their own behavior.
PROCESS / FORM
Casey Reas
R=FMI
Luz Broto
It presents the r=fmi project, a derived formula that represents the variables that influence the construction process of a work. This process refers to the one developed in a pre-Romanesque chapel from the moment when the proposition "remove a stone from the wall of the chapel" is raised. As if it were a reactant in a chemical experiment, the proposition begins a story within the institutional and social framework of the small town in which the peculiar exhibition hall is located, which will remain empty pending the resolution of the conflict. If, on the one hand, in the journal of proceedings (www.luzbroto.net/10-RFMI.html) it was possible to follow the consequences of this proposal for a year, the symposium presents all the documentary material up to the resolution of the formula.
MEDIACITY
Efraín Foglia
Through the presentation of artistic projects and theoretical lines, the possibilities offered by portable communication systems and digital networks are explored in the context of MediaCity. Issues that are still being embodied in society are analysed, such as: new ways of inhabiting urban space using these technologies; new socio-political maps and social movements; altervative communications creating personalized and self-configurable networks; interfaces for visualizing abstract information in physical space; recognition of spatio-temporal contexts and questioning of the control systems implicit in these technologies.
INTERACTIVE TOBOGAN
Joan Soler
The Interactive Slide is a new platform in the field of interactive playgrounds. The main objective of the slide project is to help counteract the lack of physical activity and socialization in children and adolescents. In this paper we present some conclusions in terms of interaction design, drawn from the experience with the second application that has been created for the slide: Robot Factory. These conclusions, beyond being specific to this particular platform, aim to be generalizable to collaborative and large-format interactive experiences. Building on the classic concepts of feedback consistency and intuitive interaction, and based on observations made during extensive use of the app on the slide, we offer some ideas on how to design interactive experiences aimed at both individual enjoyment and collaboration in group, in the context of applications with a very large potential user flow.