BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Monday, May 25, 2009
When most of us peer inside electronics and survey the tangles of tubing, wires and plates, we shudder with fear of the unknown. Some kick broken appliances to the curb when jammed buttons or sudden stoppages leave us unsatisfied.
Arcángel Constantini, however, sees a different potential in the circuits, an aura patiently waiting to escape.
The Mexican Web artist, who lives in Mexico City's Colonia Roma, has helped pioneer "net-art" in Latin America, a genre that combines animation, sound, graphic design and video clips via live installations or online databases.
He's also the curator for the Transitio_MX International Video and Electronic Arts Festival, which will take place in October in the city's Centro Nacional de las Artes. The event will present creative designs in media such as radio frequency, GPS, computer hardware and software, and Bluetooth technology.
Constantini's prominence in the net-art scene first began without Internet, when he spent his formative years in Cuautitlán, State of Mexico, tinkering with "chácharas," a local term for castaway used electronics and yard sale trinkets.
His broken Atari video game console, though, first sparked his idea that abandoned objects could take on new meanings.
During the 39-year-old artist's youth, his mother brought home an Atari after visiting the United States. While switching video games, he ripped out the cartridge before turning off the console, filling his television screen with the ominous colors of vertical bars.
"I left it like this in my room, I liked the aesthetics," he recounted last week after giving a guest lecture at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in the city's Centro Histórico.
"Many of my projects try to understand the aura of objects .it gives them a significance beyond a simple object, and the artistic value protects it from obsolescence," he said. "I try to see them as living and communicative beings that have the possibility to transform our perception of our surroundings."
ONLINE ART
Constantini channeled the retro game console again in 2000 when he opened up its insides to create varying stripes and color patterns projected onto six flat-paneled TVs. The "Atari Noise" exhibit is displayed online and has shown in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Argentina and, in 2006, in Guadalajara.
Another online project, "Unos, unos y unos ceros" ("Ones, ones and some zeros") also revisits the cháchara as a gallery of 16 individual works. The site's name refers to the construction of reality as a series of ones and zeros, like those in a binary matrix.
"BasurO ("Garbage"), for example, displays a series of videos from his live installations created around the world. In New York City, he took photographs as he placed small strips of paper reading "garbage" next to plastic containers, near an upturned umbrella and under a rice cooker. In Bilbao, Spain, he applied the same paper to translucent glass mosaics in the tiles of a lobby floor.
The online element is a collection of still images blinking back and forth between trash items in a nonlinear sequence.
"Garbage is constantly accumulated in public space[s], waiting to be recovered by the cleaning services, generating fortuitous installations, which I appropriate by placing a garbage strip that transforms this garbage to a new context," he explained on the project's Web site.
The "123456789px" piece opens up to a black screen with rows of dots.
Clicking on the row of six dots opens up a second screen with a dizzying ticker streaming and blinking rapidly from right to left, repeating images of the numeral 6 and "seis" as a monotone beat thumps in the background.
The project in 1999 earned Constantini the bronze at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts competition in Japan. The same year, he earned the Vid@arte prize in multimedia at the Video and Electronic Arts festival in Mexico.
Installations from "Unos, unos y unos, ceros" have exhibited throughout Mexico and in Spain, Greece, Portugal, England, Holland, Canada, Japan, Brazil and Argentina.
Constantini's "Spark-un-Plug" installation creates physical and conceptual feedback, consisting of 300 independently controlled spark plugs that emit high-voltage energy when a block of ice is placed near the plugs. The electrical reaction creates sequences of visual and sound patterns, and the project's aim is to encourage conscious awareness of energy use. The project first exhibited in La Constancia, Pue-bla, in 2006, and was also shown in el Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City in 2007.
His most recent effort, "Nanodrizas," combines multimedia with the environment, a concept he calls "tactical eco-technology." The project involves Web artists, biologists, engineers and architects to design 13 floating robotic devices that analyze and communicate information in real time, such as contaminating agents and chemicals, and acoustics of their surroundings. They also clear out bacteria and enzymes as they float along the water.
In the works since 2006, Nanodrizas received a grant to develop Web designs and architectural drafts and is now seeking patron support to further develop and implement the project. The robots would be placed in the Xochimilco canals, Chapultepec Lake, Texcoco Lake, Valle de Bravo and near a textile factory in Puebla.
DIGITAL GENERATION
Constantini said he considers himself among the "lost generation" of artists who came of age before everything analogue became everything digital. He said most artists in the net-art genre, including himself, are self-taught in Web design and computer programming, although more courses and workshops are opening up at universities and museums around Mexico City.
"We definitely have a history here, our own trajectory," he said of the local digital art scene. "But it's still establishing itself, it's still growing."
As he continues developing his own net-art, Constantini remains involved in bringing others' fresh creations into the artistic spotlight. In addition to curating the Transitio exhibit in June, he also runs the Cyber-lounge gallery in the Rufino Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Chapultepec Park, as well as Galería Cuarto, an exposition room inside his Colonia Roma home.
MORE INFO
To explore Constantini's works online, visit:
-www.arc-data.net
-www.unosunosyunosceros.com
-www.bakteria.org
-www.nanodrizas.org
· For more info on the 2009 Transitio_MX International Video and Electronic Arts Festival, visit www.transitiomx.net.
· To learn about "Spark-un-plug," watch Constantini's YouTube video about it at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=USlUKzIvWMo.
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