[-empyre-] "The Phenomenological and the Fantastic in South American new media"

["arteonline" <arteonline@arteonline.arq.br>]

Dear all,

At first I would like to thank the Empyre team for this opportunity to show
my work. To Jim Andrews, who has encouraged me since 2001, when I met him in
on the net, all my gratefulness.

I'm Regina Célia Pinto. I'm Brazilian, and I was born and still live -
perplexed but with pleasure - in the splendid city of São Sebastião do Rio
de Janeiro. I'm a visual//web artist and researcher. Some of you may already
know me through the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, where I try to
work with virtual reality - in other words, with virtual architectures.

But what I'd like to introduce to this forum is the Library of Marvels.
Through this project, I'm interested among other things, in examining the
cultural impact and possibilities created by computers as machines that can
generate books and libraries.

The Library of Marvels is a collection of  "artists' books" on the web.
These books are electronic narratives that use several media and processes:
pictures, sound, texts, movement, games, simulation, programming, and
interactivity or a simulation thereof. The library contains five volumes,
the most recent of which is "Viewing Axolotls" (2004) (
http://arteonline.arq.br/viewing_axolotls ) , which I've just completed and
offer for discussion.

"Viewing Axolotls," is based on the Fantastic Realism of Argentine author
Julio Cortazar and "Dúvida de Flusser - Filosofia e Literatura" (Flusser's
Question - Philosophy and Literature) by Brazilian essayist Gustavo
Bernardo.

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to
see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours
watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am
an axolotl."

(from Axolotl / The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar)

 According to Merleau-Ponty, the world is what we see, but we must learn to
see it. In this sense, my occupation is learning to see. And yet...

Everyone sees the world in his or her own likeness and therefore the
dialogue between "Me and the World" is different from person to person. We
can illustrate this best with the metaphor of colors: Who is right?
Color-blind people who see red as green and vice versa, or so-called normal
people who see red as red and green as green? Do we side with the latter
because they are the majority? It's said that some animals see the world in
black and white. What colors would an extraterrestrial see in our world?
What are the colors of things?

It seems we have established an impasse: Is reality possible? Can it be
possible, as phenomenology has suggested, for art to make the invisible
visible? Could Reality be a Fantastic Fantasy?

"I began to go every morning, moming and aftemoon some days. The aquarium
guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron
bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange
in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that
something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together."

(from Axolotl / The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar)

The pixels light up and a caption appears: "Viewing Axolotls."
The magic of a narrative is recreated in this world, and immediately
everyone takes on the appropriate stance to follow it: the "view" of the
spectator-subject (with all his/her blindness) and the gaze emitted from the
electronic book-object (with all its slyness) clash in a duel of
interpretation, simulation and interactivity. A woman who, because she loved
so much or looked so much, turns into an axolotl. "Dreams are a point of
view. They are a place from where one sees. Nightmares are a way of looking
at the world in the eyes of the dreamer." In other words, dreams let us see
otherness, while in our nightmares we find the fear the "other" can inspire.
In the fictional world, the narrator can direct our gaze to the viewpoint of
dreams, while simultaneously turning that gaze to the nightmare of  entering
an aquarium, an unknown watery world. This move could bring an end to the
blindness inherent to all views, enabling them to distance themselves
reflexively and see themselves while looking (or not).

"And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no
other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of
transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be
penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose
itself in a diaphanous interior mystery."

(from Axolotl / The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar)

I hope you will venture into the aquarium and send me back your TEXT-VIEW or
IMAGE-VIEW from there. With the help of all of you, I would very much like
to add a new page to my new book: the "Empyre Viewing Axolotls"..
To help you compose that view, here are some added reflections:

>Seeking another view. Can the imagination create worlds beyond our
realities? Unreal? Virtual? A sand woman opens her eyes, shows us her
smile...

>"Escher's lizards leave the paper and run onto the table.
These lizards are realistic: their heads are real; their tails are
simulacra. They are chimeras."

>Is every image a fraud, like a dragon sculpted in sand? Sensible visual
reality or tangible virtual reality? Is virtual reality more attractive than
reality itself? Dragon tattooed in the bytes.

>"After 500 years of printing, 150 years of photography, a century of film
and 50 years of television, reality programming has reached maturity.
Consumers live scripted lives, while reality-creating machines predict all
their movements. This phenomenon is so powerful that everyone actually has
two bodies: one real and another fictitious (shaped by received data)."
How can we change the bundles of pictures that falsify reality? Is this a
desirable "reality"?

>So the next revolutionaries could be "imaginers" who create fiction and
take pride in what they do - whether they are artists, writers,
photographers or software programmers - people who have rediscovered the
silent pleasure of handcrafted creation combined with the stimulating
pleasure of a game? Lifting fog or seeing through it - what would their task
be?

>"Humankind is divided into two types: people who like diffused light, and
those who don't. Mystery fans and crossword puzzlers. The profound and the
enlightened. The inspired and the skeptical. Those interested in the
differences that set things apart. In short, metaphysicists and
phenomenologists. The first type tries to see through the fog and the second
type tries to lift it."

>Which type are you?

http://arteonline.arq.br/viewing_axolotls


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I would like to invite you to browser other works at:

I - Library of Marvels:
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm

The library got started in 1999, and contains five volumes:

1- "The White and the Black, Reflections on Fog" (1999) - only for
download - PC only, the. See there the review by Jorge Luiz Antonio.

2- "Book of Sand" (2001),

3- "The Psychiatrist, Net.art / Web.art and other stories" (2002)

4- "The Newest Song of Exile: Sabiá Virtuality" (2003),

5- "Viewing Axolotls" (2004).


II) Works shorter than the books:

1- Paris - Rio de Janeiro Gallery  (looking at culture)
http://www.arteonline.arq.br/paris_riodejaneiro/

It is a virtual architecture: an art and culture gallery (9137 km) crossing
the cyberspace > work in progress - 9,250 meters up to now! Among other
things you will find there some small movies of the last Carnival in Rio.
Paris - Rio de Janeiro Gallery is Anthropofagic and  Tropicalist .


2- Seven Demons Got Out
http://www.arteonline.arq.br/pecadoscapitais/

It is a collaborative work with Marcelo Frazão and Paulo Villela, both
brazilian. The seven deadly sins are seen under an erotic point of view. My
sins are ;-): Gluttony and Sloth.

III- My work as a curator/artist

The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That
http://arteonline.arq.br

This project consists of the creation of virtual architectures: a museum
with its libraries and galleries that have no brick-and-mortar counterparts.
It is common for real museums and libraries to have websites, but the
process underway in our "museum" is rather uncommon. A museum that does not
exist in the real world, and whose architecture and collections are formed
by a string of digits: 01010101. Is it just an electronic clearinghouse for
bits and bytes?
The museum started out as a "work in progress": so is it information
architecture? But it is also an imaginary three-story pixel-building with a
basement, an attic and a terrace. The building's architectural design can be
changed at any time, whether by constructing another story or changing part
of its shape - a Niemeyer design , constellation, space station, Piranesi
engraving: creative interface?. This museum was conceived as an open
structure in which information is spread out in a number of spaces; a
machine that can travel infinitely in all directions.

Enjoy,

Regina