Debate | Imarte

Projects l: From the Spreading of Light

30 January, at 19.30

Montse Carreño, Joan Morey, Carmen Romero, lbon Sáenz de Olazagoitia
Presentation and Moderator: Alicia Vela
The exhibition catalogue was presented as part of this meeting.

This exhibition has been possible thanks to collaboration between the Institute of Culture – La Capella and the Faculty of Fine Arts. The works presented are a selection of projects carried out by postgraduate students on the course From the Printed to the Digital Impression I and II (1998-1999), led and coordinated jointly by Antonia Vilá and myself. The courses began as a result of the observation that we are living in a time where new technologies are transforming and extending the languages of art.

The title was chosen as a metaphor of time. Of the time of the speed of light in the Virilian sense of the term. Here we appropriate this spreading as a synonym of the duplication which runs throughout mythical thought, where Pliny, in his Natural History, writes about a girl “who was in love with a young man who was leaving the town. Using lines, the young girl fixed the outline of her loved one’s profile on the wall in candlelight”. Recording the absence of a body through light or by projecting a shadow form part of the first description of artistic representation. But this light is an imperfect light. It is that imperfect light which for centuries has impregnated the concepts of representation in the chiaroscuro tradition, pure optical illusions where the aesthetic of objects appears by means of a material substrate, be it sculptural, pictorial or graphic. In the words of Paul Virilio we have moved from “the persistence of a material – marble or the painter’s canvas – to the cognitive persistence of vision”. The possibility of taking photographs has speeded up the creation of an image and this favours the appearance of an aesthetic of disappearance. Seduced by the presence of the image and by its analogue or numerical perspectives, our most immediate responses are to capture and to save it. However, if what interests us about art is its birth then we reinterpret so that the persistence of the support maintains that essential part of the image which as appearance provokes a retention, a detainment: it seduces us – and implicit within every seduction is a solitary action. It is that essential solitude enveloping the entire creative space of a work of art and which Maurice Blanchot refers to when writing that “fascination is the gaze of solitude, the gaze of what is incessant and interminable, in which blindness is still vision. But why fascination? Seeing implies distance, the decision that causes separation, the power not to be in contact and to avoid the confusion of contact. Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter. But what happens when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance? Not an active contact, not the initiative and action that might still remain in a true touch; rather, the gaze is drawn, absorbed into an immobile movement and a depth without depth. What is given to us by contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image”.

The artists who I am going to introduce here do not consider themselves digital artists, but rather plastic artists who, through their knowledge of certain media, choose the one which is most appropriate for the interpretation of their various poetics. If there is one thing which unites their work it is perhaps the interest in narratives of fiction.

Joan Morey, STP SiderationSoft, experience of the real and hybrid processes in the rhetoric of the visual – fatal, nostalgic submission. Tell us a little about what interests you in these real experiences.

Joan Morey: I begin with a quote from Play Station, from the last advert of last year directed by Chris Cunningham, where this computer-generated girl, very digital, very weird says “forget progress by proxy, the time has come to experience things for yourself, and it has a name: mental wealth”, with the PlayStation slogan below “all the power is in your hands”. That is one of the particular aspects driving my work, what I do is direct, as I wish, people, models, situations, performances. If you have to situate my artistic practice in some way, you could cite its insistence on a self-reflexive staging of personal biography through the constant investigation of the network which disseminates trends and behaviour, of the various social contexts which go to make up the world of image, music, fashion and advertising. Thus, the intellectual discourse is completely linked to the world of fashion, clubbing, electronic music and fetish culture, to where dance floors bring together music, drugs and sex, providing a structure on which to hang the fashionable fantasies of young people. Within contemporary artistic production these things have produced a series of conceptual and formal displacements known as club culture.

My projects are more to do with questions of design, fashion and artistic direction than with creation itself, and thus generate reflexive spaces which revolve around a central axis. Since 1997, none of my products has been the work of Joan Morey, but simply projects which are gathered together under the trade mark Soy Tu Puta (I am your whore) or the initials STP. This trade mark was born out of the fictions of cultural sub-groups. By means of a system of multidisciplinary production it offers, with respect to the art world, a positioning of fashion, club culture and sexuality, and explores the ambiguity of gender, techno-cyber culture and teenage relationships. STP as a work in progress has a direct link, both formally and conceptually, to submission and/or dependence. It could be said that my work touches upon the multiplicity of expressive systems, as well as on the ever increasing territory of fiction, and opens up lines of research linked to a wide conceptualisation of the creative act. STP SiderationSoft is like an unfurling or documentation of what would be the autumn/winter haute couture collection for the 2000-2001 season. According to Paul Virilio, SiderationSoft “means the sudden loss of vital functions in a state of apparent death under the effect of an intense emotional shock”. This was what defined the whole concept behind the collection. By means of strategies which fictionalise artistic practice, STP SiderationSoft/haute couture represents a constant feature (glamour trash) in which the gaze is turned towards the feminine and the darkest recesses of ourselves, thus defining the reality of the work itself. STP SiderationSoft is the name of an overall project in the form of a clothes collection which is formally represented through a series of photographs in the style of a fashion publication. The images show people photographed within a space, details of these people and/or reflections of them. Through this set of images I aim to represent a wide variety of strategic attitudes through models who appear both as victims of a process that creates dark illusions, that distorts individuality in favour of an idealised version of people immersed in fatal, nostalgic submission, and as a visual formula that becomes a referential and narrative device which is wide open to all manner of readings.

Alícia Vela: The interactive installation of Carmen Romero takes us into the world of games and invites us to play. Computer games, where the concepts – inspired by the word Okashi – are linked to the purest language of a digital studio. Okashi is a project of a lifetime, it is the construction of an autobiographical narrative, it is dying from glamour, and it is self-parody. Tell us about the installation.

Carmen Romero: As Alicia has said, Okashi: The Project of a Life Time is an interactive installation in the form of a computer game which, in order to function, requires the spectator to be more than just a spectator; it needs the spectator to be active and interact with the work. The term Okashi is a Japanese word which means sweets or snacks. My aim is to strike a parallel between these sweets and the electronic ‘sweets’ to be found nowadays in shops selling technological gadgets; the parallel concerns their colour, their compulsive consumption, the fact that people collect them, and that they are increasingly common (in the sense that people say “I’ve got X number of mobile phones” or “I’ve got X number of stickers from such-and-such a brand of chewing gum”). Although the Okashi phenomenon may not be so well known or as widespread in Spain, in Japan it is a genuine craze. There, people – and not only children, but the elderly as well – collect Okashi, wrappers, comics which are given away with Okashi, etc. One of the products which we consume as if it were Okashi is a video or computer game.

I decided to make a piece and install it in an exhibition hall that was in itself a computer game, in its entirety, that is, it wasn’t the simulation of a game, not simply a stage, an image.

The starting point was, at bottom, autobiographical with elements of self-parody. The characters in the video game were developed out of a tiny caricature made by my students in class, and I converted this into 3D to produce the final result you can see in the video game.

The spectator has a key role in this work. The aim is firstly to catch the attention of spectators, to draw them in. One aspect of this attraction comes from the colours used, something as simple as that, in the same way as would happen with a sweet wrapper. Obviously, the fact that it is a video game is also striking, it hooks spectators in the attempt to score more points, to see how far they can go, etc. The spectator is also a central element in the work with respect to the entire space of the installation. When spectators start to play they are kneeling before the image as if it were an altar. They move the little character and maybe identify with it. At the same time the spectator is also a character put there, in the installation, by the artist in order to play this specific role. I enjoy very much thinking about the ways in which interactive pieces place the spectator at a disadvantage, almost to the point of being fragile with respect to the work. Thus, Okashi: The Project of a Life Time could be seen as a work which speaks to us about control, about manipulation.

Alícia Vela: Montse Carreño talks to us about the epidermic nature of the surface of a screen, of a body without density, one which has become a trace. One can see many things in these traces. I would like you to tell us, Montse, about your intentions with respect to amorous responses, to other readings, to The Pillow Book, for example.

Montse Carreño: The two fictions I present are the outcome of some image libraries I am building. One thing which is easy about digital work is that it enables you to capture images consciously, there are many devices for doing this: cameras, scanners, videos, etc. One of my most extensive libraries concerns fragments of the body. This interest in the epidermis/skin comes from my original fascination with how the reading of the light in a scanner produces a hyperreal image of an object’s surface.

The first of the two pieces I present appears to be the work of a taxidermist but in reverse. The fish work is heavily influenced by the time during which it was made, when I was living in Iceland. The landscape there is so wonderful, and you feel very small before it. Using the salmon skin was a continuation of this fascination with skin, with this membrane that envelops us, that is touch par excellence. And as a taxidermist I covered my own body with that salmon skin, and to an extent this became like a nod to that place and that time, to that landscape which is so powerful and to the salmon which is so representative of it all.

In the other work, I became very immersed in The Pillow Book. There was an aspect of the script of Greenaway’s film which had really caught my interest: how it associated two fascinations, the body and literature. These two fascinations became two projects, the second of which I’m presenting here; although it may not have the body of the book in terms of paper it does have an association between the body of the book and the human body. I return to that fusion between the epidermic and the written, where they merge. I was drawn to the figure of Narcissus because he succumbed to the impossibility of ever seeing the image he loved, his own. It’s that fascination with the image, and putting it on a screen, it’s something which appears to have a false third dimension, even though it’s all surface, like skin. There is always a game here with that attempt to show something with which you have lost touch, that has become an image, but which can be retained in a highly hyperreal state. This is why I wanted to have the image as tactile as possible, as are those of this animation.

Alícia Vela: Ibon Sáenz, you say you are playing to confuse, that you’d never entered this chapel, and that you didn’t take any of your photos. Since I’ve been familiar with your work I would say that it has a lot to do with seizure. And that the screen is your mirror and your container. What can you tell us about this interest in the staging of virtual galleries?

Ibon Sáenz: In a way, the representation of these virtual galleries provides a setting for what I produced in a work involving the compilation of images, to play games with them; my idea was, and I try, to create spaces out of these images. I’m not usually very interested in where the photographs come from, I generally take them myself, although this was not the case here. I’d never been here, in La Capella, before and I had to try to imagine what it was like. More than the building of scenes and the creation of spaces what interests me is the production of images that can function independently, to the extent that at times any trace of their origin is lost within them. As I didn’t know the space I didn’t have a clear idea of what I would be able to present, but I wanted to intervene, to try to show that here there could have been an exhibition that never took place, in which there was a series of exhibits and photographs. This proved possible and was easier to do using the digital medium.

The interventions in these virtual galleries are indeed that, virtual, but in real space. What I am seeking is to extract the dimension which they are lacking, that they go on being two-dimensional representations of a space, that I have created something that simply never took place here.

Carmen Romero spoke of her wish to involve spectators and make them participate in the work, obliging them to in fact, because if you don’t enter into the game you can’t see how it develops. I am also asking spectators to try to situate themselves in this space, a space that is not real but which can be moved through as in any exhibition.

Joan Morey: From the moment you involve spectators you want them to interact with the work, the strategy is to struggle with today’s audience, which tends to be pretty idle. Generally, the works are approached with a very lazy reading. In my case, I play with the spectacle or aim to hook spectators with some kind of motif, in this case with a sofa (if a person sits down on a sofa and puts the headphones on he or she will stay for at least three minutes) You have to be quite aggressive when it comes to dealing with spectators, quite selfish. The advantage is that we have the possibility of using all these strategies, that’s why we consider ourselves plastic artists. But there is something akin to an overbooking of information in our culture which competes with the little world of art, and this has to be overcome. Therefore, either you come up with ways of tricking spectators and giving them a shove so that they approach your work, or you get nowhere. The great thinker and strategist of visual art has a harder time than an art director who makes video clips. That is a game with the spectator, you are already predicting the reaction of the audience who will go to consume a given work, because in fact a work of art is a product.

Projects 2: Ways of Seeing

6 February, at 19.30

Bernat Cisneros, R.G. Bianchi, Anna Marin, Jessie Morin-Davy
Presentation and Moderator: Antònia Vilà

Antònia Vila: The title of today’s talk is Ways of Seeing. It makes reference to a book by John Berger which we use in order to reveal the different visions of the artists being presented today.

Berger’s ways of seeing, from almost thirty years ago, are different to the ways of seeing we understand today. His starting point was to reflect upon how art from the past became blended with the visual experience of everyday life, how all that was completely transcribed, impregnated in advertising, in printed visual culture, and how it had an increasing influence on new forms of artistic work. In the 1970s, new styles, such as North American Pop Art and Conceptual Art, etc., were already questioning art as a language and had begun to deconstruct the models used by advertising to link itself to art from the past. Berger’s text is still relevant in that it connects to the art of today; 30 years on we are much more swamped with advertising. In an attempt to interpret the relationships between art from the past and what was an increasingly democratised mass culture, advanced capitalist society has developed further and has strongly promoted new technology, technology that we are now beginning to make use of and which is opening up new horizons in what is nothing less than the continued expansion of the world of the image.

We should ask ourselves what printmaking has to do with all these things, with Without Matrix, with graphic work, with digital impression, with interactives, etc. What we are seeing is the natural consequence of the extension of visual communication. Printmaking has, in essence, always been a hybrid discipline; it enjoyed its status as an art, but also drew from science, biology, philosophy, knowledge in general, and has played the role of a transmitting medium. In one way or another, all these labels (graphic work, digital impression, etc.) are linked to three basic elements in graphic art: its reproducibility, its capacity for multiplication, and its capacity for extension.

The postgraduate courses began following the visit to Barcelona of an Icelandic lithographer who was keen to inject new life into the printmaking studios. The initial proposal was an Internet-based distance learning course which would enable the exchange and development of the work of both students and teaching staff. This was back in 1994 and at that time the Faculty of Fine Arts didn’t even have e-mail. At a general level those postgraduate courses took shape around the work of students using a graphic art studio which was extended through a print room and digital laboratory. This lead to a great variety of work being produced, including static images, images with diaporama and projected images, images linked to interactives and installations.

Installations have made their mark on contemporary ways of thinking as a result of their ability to break down borders between disciplines. Nowadays, artists don’t choose to produce an image according to a discipline, but rather in terms of the possibility of using different methods to express an idea; in some ways this approach has been driven by what is termed postmodern thinking and culture. In this exhibition we can see how this eclecticism of approaches has become a natural feature of today’s art. The postgraduate courses took shape around different working genres: work about place, landscape, the environment; and work about the issue of identity understood in a wide variety of ways ranging from social perspectives to more personal, psychological and corporal points of view.

The people sitting at this table are exhibiting installations, three of which have a matrix (based on an interpretation of the moulds they have used), while the work of Anna Marín transforms her imaginary world through a digital impression.

Bernat Cisneros: I am the author of the work Gypsy Family at the end of the hall, it’s a circular sheet. The sheet represents a family tree of a gypsy family living in Barcelona. All the people shown with a portrait are still alive, while deceased family members are covered with a piece of sheet, as requested by the family. The circular form of the sheet is designed to represent a section of a centenary tree, where you would see the rings indicating the tree’s age, the oldest ones being at the centre. The trunk is taken up by the adults and married couples who have an active role in the family. Moving toward the centre we find the children of these couples, the sons and daughters, who, being younger, have a less active role than the adults. Finally, at the centre we find the elderly family members, who obviously have an important role, as do the deceased relatives. As these form the nucleus of the family they structure the form of the group. The family thus comprises the three large areas which make up the circle.

The work has been developed over the last three years or so, but my relationship with the gypsy family goes back six years. At that time I was in the final year of my degree course and the proposal was to produce a work about large prints. I wanted to link the study requirements with my personal interest in flamenco music. I was keen to meet a gypsy family and I found them by wandering around the outlying neighbourhoods of Barcelona. There was no need to create a fictitious situation and the family, very openly, let me enter their homes, which were very basic. The relationship developed and I got to know all the different parts of the family. I tried to separate the two aspects of my interest: firstly, to focus on the music as a study of flamenco, and secondly, to study the gypsy family. In order to lay the foundations for the subsequent graphic project I read a number of anthropological studies of other gypsy families. Consequently, I began to think that the best approach would be to combine what for me (due to my culture and ethnicity) was a strange family context with my own. I thought it would be interesting if the sheets came from my own family and that is indeed the case.

Everything you see printed on the sheet, the result of a photogravure process, was done using traditional techniques and involved engraving the copper plates one at a time. My work reflected the philosophy of life that I found in the family, a more relaxed attitude, calmer. These copper plates also form part of the work as objects and show the unique and individual aspect of each family member, whereas the sheet reflects their role in the group.

The third part of the work involved the making of two videos, one lasting 90 min which is more of a documentary, and another, that was the last stage of my project, in which the children of the family appear and act spontaneously in the recreation of a TV serial. In this video the most important aspect to highlight is that they take on the role as any of us would.

Jessie Morin: My work consists of two pieces: Kiss and End of Tale. I chose to leave the original title of the latter in French (Fin de conte) so that it could be read as both end of tale and end of the account. This work originated from a series of experiments with objects upon which I projected light in order to explore the theme of shadow. This piece is a fairly simple optical game made of a bent piece of perspex upon which a light is shone at 45º producing a shadow on the right and a reflection on the left. The three figures are like three points of view of the same person. The silhouette is like my own figure as James Bond on the perspex. In the studio I discovered that through bending the shadow became inverted, and I wanted to give this optical effect a purpose, a narrative. The poppy field evokes blood stains, blended with the poetic air of the flower, which is like genitalia exposed to the sun. These two sides also suggest the duel between the reflection, which moves, that results from a changing world, and the shadow, which is fixed. This is the internal duel between three people who are in fact one (silhouette, reflection and shadow). In fact, the double is to an extent linked to the shadow, every physical object has a double in its shadow. Another hidden game is that the silhouette of the perspex is pointing a gun at the person who is looking on, who is contemplating the scene.

The other piece, The Kiss, also makes use of shadow. The definition of kiss according to a French dictionary I have is apply, put one’s lips on and an example given is kiss the crucifix before dying. Kiss in colloquial French has two meanings: to deceive and to have sexual relations. There are many different kinds of kiss: kissing the hand of a feudal lord, the kiss as a symbolic ritual of submission with respect to social status, etc. Other definitions include: a kiss is the contact of two skins and the fusion of two fantasies; it is important to highlight the role played in love by physiognomy and gestures such as a kiss, for they reveal the true being of the person being loved; A kiss? A charming trick used to stop talking when words become superfluous.

For me, the kiss is above all a history of epidermic contact, a show of desire and involvement in excitement. It is not only a head movement, for the whole body moves forward until the space between two profiles is crushed. The kiss represents tension as it is an urge which transgresses the bubble of each individual’s autonomy, their privacy.

I decided to create a visual metaphor of what a kiss represents: it was to be something round but tense. Starting from an image I cut out profiles with cardboard, filled a condom with plaster and joined the two profiles together. That is modelling emptiness, taking from an image what it has in terms of density and transforming it into volume, that projects a shadow over the image creating an emptiness, a hole into which people fall.

Rafael Bianchi: My work is First Collectable. In order to define this image I would have to say that my intention was to question the welfare state via systems of representing it. The aim was to produce the image in an ironic and satirical way, with an element of the grotesque. It is important that people realise it has been made with a certain sense of humour, and I hope that it is indeed read in this way.

The references of this work are to be found in what could be called American or Hollywood glamour, specifically melodrama or illustrated romances. I would like the characters which appear to be identified with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. That glamour is linked to a way of selling things which persists to this day: it is that commercial concept, that advertising strategy which sells fantasy. In addition, the connotation of the past in my images is related to my interest in aesthetics, which for me has always had an air of the past about it; however, I’ve also used it as a way of expressing the present.

Ana Marín: The title of my piece is Memory of Air. It is an attempt to formulate a paradox about memory, that memory which is full of recollections, stories, but which here is full of air, of something that it doesn’t contain. This piece is the continuation of the work that I began in the Miró Foundation. I talk about emigration in a more intimate way, how someone who has left their homeland could be asleep in a poppy field, how the body can merge with the earth, with the desire of returning to the earth. It suggests the dreams and nightmares of someone who is far away, who has left, and at the same time it speaks of a transparent body, one which is empty inside.

One aspect which I always attempt to represent is the articulation of opposites, in this case the iron – something hard and strong – and a tulle, that is the digital impression; and I’m interested in how this tension, which is the tension lived out in our society in terms of emigration, can come to be broken.

My original idea was to make an elastic bed, but when I began to work on the idea I discovered that it would be interesting to try to encourage spectators to throw themselves onto the bed – of course if they did so they would break it, just as our dreams of a far-off land are broken into pieces when we finally arrive.

Digital Image and New Fictions

20 February, at 19.30

Round Table: Orit Kruglanski, Eloi Puig, Joan Urrios
Presentation and Moderator: Martí Peran

Martí Peran: In this final session of Without Matrix the speakers are not artists involved in the exhibition but rather three authors, three creators who will address the issue concerning us today from a point of view outside the exhibition itself.

Firstly, and in order to situate the debate, I would like to mention certain considerations that were borne in mind when choosing the title, Digital Image and New Fictions, for this round table. The main reason was the suspicion that behind digital art there lie three ideas or core concepts which, taken together, form a fiction. The idea which has probably received most theoretical attention is that behind all digital work there lies a world of simulation, and as such it is a world which compensates for its irreality with a large amount of hyperreality. In addition to this notion of simulation there are two other ideas which lead us toward a concept of fiction. One is the idea of temporalization, that is, that most forms of digital art enable the creation of an image with an active parameter of time, with an effective narrativity. The other is the absence of interpretation, the literalness of the digital image or of the narrations developed using the strategies of digital art. These create a device that has to be consumed relatively immediately, without its basis being subjected to decoding, reading or interpretation.

The sum of these three core concepts constitutes an invitation to think about fiction as the end point which may unite all these practices. The exhibition in itself aims to resolve and comment on these questions, each of the works in its own particular way.

Eloi Puig: I’m going to present my latest piece in video format, by way of segmenting the general work I’m usually engaged in. It’s titled Key Stage, and, from an initial segment, involves figures being created and uncreated. Rather than speak in detail about the work I would prefer to talk about an issue which is more common to all of us: the language used by those of us working in this medium.

Having worked for a long time on this issue I see how today we can end up in a struggle to define ourselves as digital artists, or multimedia artists, etc., but if we look at the history of art we can see that when photography appeared there was a similar disjuncture between artists who defined themselves as pictorialist photographers and others who called themselves pure photographers. This struggle lasted for a considerable time and created a very unsettling situation, in that it led to the appearance of a new way of representing reality, which is what photography became.

My position now is to try to move beyond this unsettled stage, the initial stage of exploring new ways of using new media such as computers or other digital media, and aim to develop types of work which are structured according to the language of their own media, just as photography has done.

Joan Urrios: I’m going to use my work to explain what is implied by the digital image and the fictions which have come about through new technology. I don’t believe that technology is neutral, it enables a series of languages that other approaches do not.

In the same way that, for example, oil enables one kind of work, digital technology enables another. Therefore, I don’t like the concept of digital artist because I don’t believe the medium makes the artist.

Digital technology, more than providing something new, enables you to work with languages that already exist. What is new about digital images is not really new, I think it is falsely new. Digital manipulation enables us to work without the stitching showing through. In that sense it opens up a world of possibilities, although it doesn’t do artists’ work for them. The important thing about digital work is that there are things which can be done much more easily than before, as retouch has made it popular. The computer in itself does not provide a new language, as digital retouch makes use of languages that have more to do with painting, it makes use of traditional tools. We sometimes think that the computer does everything, but in some cases what it does is imitate optical phenomena. In other words, what new technology is doing is imitate old technology with resources that are much easier. I don’t want to be too radical in this sense, if I use a computer it’s because I believe it has something to offer, but I want to point out that it is not neutral. However, I don’t believe a technique is a place for research. I’m not interested in the technique in itself, what I’m after is what it has to offer on an artistic level. A technique is not good or bad in itself, that is, I prefer a good comic to a bad book.

It can seem that the manipulation and the lie which the retouched image offers us is something exclusive to computers, when in fact there have been deceptions throughout the history of photography. What it does is enable an audience, it is a tool within reach of many more people. The computer image has made the people who look at it more incredulous.

It’s interesting, because in other cases if you see the instrument, if you see the medium, it appears more authentic. With digital work, however, there is an attempt to conceal the medium. But what I would like to defend is that behind this retouch lies a communication, a work. Moreover, I think that digital retouch takes us closer to painting: when I see a retouched photograph I think more of a manual work, in the work involved in the retouch, of layers and this makes me feel closer to the world of painting than to photography.

Orit Kruglanski: In my project I try to bring together two of my interests: the digital medium and literature. I experiment with them and use the interaction as a poetic resource. In my work, the idea of a game is there as the basis for showing users how to interact, but also as a metaphor. Through my digital creations I aim to show the relationship between the way of interacting and the textual meaning of the poems. When I began to work with computers there was a clear separation between content and interaction, the interface. The interface was like a door that opened and behind which lay the content, but the interaction was a very short action, like a mouse click in order to see a video. I was interested in exploring the interaction as a tool in order to try to transmit meaning with it, not just to arrive at a meaning produced as a text or a video. That’s why I began to search for alternative interactions such as the computer.

Martí Peran: Through the three presentations an attempt has been made to illustrate a range of possibilities and questions that are open to debate. In terms of the present debate regarding these types of practice, Joan put it very clearly when he said that there are insufficient data, insufficient elements to suggest that the contributions of this technique are able to generate in themselves new ways of thinking, experiences which should be understood as truly novel.

The basis question is: is it only a technique or is it an experience containing something new? Joan has argued that it is only a technique. I think that from what Orit has said the idea of interaction, which is frequently used as a synonym for interpretation itself, becomes an element that is fundamental for the appearance of the work.

Indeed, the debate is centred around these two positions, those of Joan and Orit; whether what we are dealing with here is only a technique or whether it is a technique capable of generating new experiences. From these two examples various positions can be taken up.