Reynaldo Thompson, Jorge A. Martinez-Puente, Diana Marañon, Jessica Andrea Sanchez
School of Digital Arts, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. Email: thompson@ugto.mx
Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.18
Abstract
Political ideology is now made manifest and even palpable with a perverse articulation of digital technique, for once on its own, and without the need of any kind of narrative. Art by itself is enough. The ideologue is relegated to an unimportant location following a praxis that evades primordial dependence on the conventions of any discourse. Starting from a discussion of two important video installations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, this article proposes how the critical use of technology in contemporary art establishes a space, in an interpretive manner. The first section of the paper deals with the notion of subversion of technological devices deriving partially from Lozano-Hemmer’s exploitation of technological praxis as a means of unmediated valorization of ideology. We analyze the metamorphosis of symbols into “fact” within the image, as a detonator of the simulacrum. The second section deals with Justicia Infinita of Alfredo Salomon, based in Puebla, Mexico and perhaps the most ingenious ideologue and artist of the digital era. In Salomon, just as in Lozano-Hemmer the process of subversion of technological devices and its bizarre yet comical inversion is still so powerfully visible. To conclude we shall turn to the implications of the critical use of technology in contemporary art and their ability to allow us to assume their ontological consequences.
Keywords: Contemporary art, metamorphic image, simulacrum, digital art, video installation, control societies, visibility, critical space, individuals, relational architecture.
