011000 Creative
Possibilities between Cartemas and Hypermedia
Master’s degree in
Visual Arts. São Paulo
State University Júlio de Mesquita Filho, UNESP
Post-graduate in Hypermedia Design. Anhembi-Morumbi University
e-mail: eweiz@uol.com.br
MARINHO, Fernando
Post-graduate in Hypermedia Design. Anhembi-Morumbi University
e-mail: f_marinho@uol.com.br
SAMPAIO NETO, Leocádio
Post-graduate in Hypermedia Design. Anhembi-Morumbi University
e-mail: _leocadio@uol.com.br
Abstract
This article treats of the
relationships between Aloísio Magalhães' cartemas and the hypermedia. The
cartemas represent, inside of Aloísio's production, his experience as designer
mixed to the artist's inquietude. In the hypermedia the constructive
characteristics of the cartemas are potentialized and they make possible
countless interactive associations.
(Cartema is a neologism representing collage graphical experiments using postcards).
011000 Creative Possibilities between Cartemas and
Hypermedia
“...in
the evolution process of a culture, there is nothing really “new”. The new is
only a changed form of the past, enriched in the process continuity, or
revealed again, of a latent repertoire. In reality, the elements are always the
same: only the vision can be enriched by new incidences of light, on the
different sides of the same crystal.”[1]
Aloísio
Magalhães was, in chronological and simplified order, an artist, a designer and
a mentor of cultural policy in Brazil. He was restless in his search for a way
to exist, adding up all experiences in an “open and flexible process of
constant re-feeding”[2]. As a natural consequence of this particularity, he
moved freely and confidently through the various creative territories.
Acknowledged
as a major icon of Brazilian design history, Aloísio left us some expressive
art works, extremely particular, coherent and modern, through a strict
methodology of "systematisation of procedures for the issuance of visual
messages"[3], as well as of its construction, on the conceptual level.
As
an artist, his main quality was the appreciation of visuality. This
characteristic permeated all his actions. Aloísio Magalhães added free
associations of form and plasticity to the strict technical requirements of the
profession of a designer. Even when he acted on the public level, he was an
artist and a man of broad vision, who could not accept the precarious way of
dealing with the country’s cultural issues. Design was his choice at a time
when he no longer believed in art as an individual expression, and this new
language, resulting from the new techniques of serial production, was the path
to society’s sensitisation.
This
research has its start in a cutting of the work of the designer-artist (or
artist-designer). The historian Antônio Houaiss called that work Cartema in the
70’s. For many people, Cartema is Aloísio Magalhães’ most original work, a
result of the author’s visual sensibility and maturity, representing the
exchange between the fields of art and design.
Cartema
is assembled from a series of postcards, placed side by side, following a
previous analysis of combinations, fixed on a firm support. The postcard is the
minimum structural unit, the base-module, from which the composition is
organised.
Having
a postcard as the composition unit of Cartema was entirely in accordance with
the Brazilian artistic context at the time, which, since the 60’s, had been
bringing objects of daily life into the artistic discourse. The intention to
formally research on the creative possibilities resulting from the use of
postcards as artistic matter emerged when Aloísio Magalhães, author of the
national monetary standard at the time, observed the printing tests of the new
“Cruzeiro” notes” in the Netherlands, in 1970. While observing these
tests, he realised that in the configuration formed by the repetition of notes
of one Cruzeiro, there was a potentially rich theme to be developed.
Cartemas,
easily made and of great visual effect, result from some formal procedures such
as image repetition, rotation and mirroring, widely used by Aloísio Magalhães
in his projects, mainly those of corporate image, in the 60’s and 70’s.
In
Cartemas, the mirroring effect has its correspondent in rotation. After
rotation, the postcards are overlapped, grouping together areas of equivalent
visual value. New formal units originate from this process, that on the whole,
result in a new image, which is different from the one contained in the
postcard. The base-module is not lost within this process, since it can still
be recognised, but its unique character is completely destroyed; the
base-module is the generator of the structure that enables new visualisations.
Photography
re-dimensioned the concept of space and, through the photographic image printed
on the postcard; the space came to meet the observer, making the postcard a
window of access to several worlds. The postcard is included in the image game
of Cartemas and therein the cutting of reality only exists when one perceives
the composition base-module on the whole of the work. This reality forms other
abstract realities in a sheer game of images.
Our proposal is to continue with this image game in the digital environment with the Net Art work entitled 011000. This work was inspired in the Cartemas and no longer uses postcards; instead it uses what this team has elected as their match on cyberspace, namely, webcam flux images, on-line radios and newspapers. These three base-modules will form compositions in which, at times the images of the webcams will be manipulated, pasted, mirrored, rotated, overlapped, and at other times they will be the “letter-news” of newspapers and the sounds of on-line radios, forming endless information and visual textures meshes.
Appropriation
The
use of postcards as composition matter of Cartemas takes us to a recurring
topic now a day: appropriation. The
displacement of design objects to the artistic field comes from the avant-garde
movements at the beginning of the 20th century. The ready-mades of
Marcel Duchamp, created as from 1913, are what one could call genuine art of
appropriation, for he used to extract, from daily life, objects produced in
series to bring them to the art context, without any or almost any
intervention. This action well illustrates what the German philosopher Walter
Benjamin (1892-1940) wrote in The work of art at the time of its technical
reproducibility, with reference to the authenticity and sole existence of a
piece of artwork disappearing with its technical reproduction, a process that
takes shape in the 19th century, after the industrial revolution,
and accelerates in the 20th century.
In
Cartemas, the postcard is obtained from daily life, possessed by the artist,
and its use is subverted by the artistic making. The postcard, despite still
being able to be identified as such, has become the artwork’s composition unit.
The artist’s action over the appropriated object rescales its meaning. The
postcard – previously restricted to a single meaning related to mail and,
obviously, recognised by its form and use –
when inserted into the work of art system, has its interpretative field
expanded and is also paradoxically interpreted as a novelty.
This
study carries out an analysis between appropriation, according to Aloísio
Magalhães’ initiative with postcards, and the hypermedia project 011000 that,
in turn, takes possession of webcams, on-line newspapers and radios to create
an interactive work of art in real time. With this in view, we make use of a
text by George P. Landow [4], which establishes a very interesting relationship
between hypermedia and appropriation. With reference to hypertext and collage,
he approximates the characteristics of these languages and builds a bridge
between them, legitimating thus the hypothesis of this team as to the
connections between Cartemas and the hypermediatic language.
The connection between hypertext virtuality and appropriation becomes clear when we go over the history of collage and appropriation and the importance of the artists who made use of these techniques in their process of artwork creation.
Hypermedia and media art
All
technology used in surveys that determined the features of hypertext,
hypermedia, and their ramifications is based on binary codes of zeros and ones
and of how their combinations generate information.
The
concept of computer-generated image, text and sound is completely different
from what it was in the traditional media previous to digital languages. The
computer operates with numbers, not images; it is the plastic representation of
mathematical expressions.
Today,
with new technologies, they are intelligent images that transform themselves,
change and interact among themselves and with their interactors. They are no
longer images to be passively contemplated and admired. They are objects of
manipulation and pure performance.
These
images are manipulated ad infinitum; updating an image does not drain the
possibilities of visualising it. The numeric image, now, has a specific
behaviour – it is an image-event process. The event, in this case, is the
metamorphosis, the transformation, the invention. It is the transformative
movement in time and, for existing only in time, the electronic image is pure
duration; it is the process duration. Updating images is less important than
their potentialities.
Edmond
Couchot [5] considers as a peculiar trait of numeric technologies their
capacity to function in this new temporal modality: real time. In his opinion,
real time changes the mechanisms of treatment and circulation of information,
and its characteristic is the interactive connection between man and computer.
Real time puts people in another place, another reality, that is simultaneous
to palpable reality. It is a space whose continuous data flow breaks
territorial barriers and social hierarchies.
This
real time is potentialized by cyberspace; “the space of communication is open
by the global interconnection of computers and computer memories”[6]. The characteristic
of cyberspace is the digital codification that gives the flowing character to
information, which can be treated hypertextually and interactively in real
time.
This
is the time of digital technologies. Artists, always in touch with their time, could
not let these new technical possibilities go by unnoticed and, right from the
very beginning, they saw huge creative potential opening up with the computer:
“Art exists to remove us from habits, routine, established codes, their rules,
making us feel that we are still free to adopt them, but equally free to
transform, surpass and reinvent them.”[7]
When
a digital work of interactivity is proposed, whether as manipulation of image,
sound and text, or as construction of senses, the work is considered as a flow
of connection and disconnection of temporary updates, works whose images are
pieces of a potential composition that will only be updated upon the action of
an interactor. It is the artist transgressing the computer environment for
something that was not previously thought of.
For
Arlindo Machado[8], the work of art now is accomplished exclusively when
reading takes place, and in each one of these reading actions it assumes a
different form. Each reading is, in a certain way, the first and the last.
Works like Timescape and !C!, by the French Reinald Drouhin or Riot and P-soup,
by the American Mark Napier, are examples of works of art that can be
simultaneously updated in real time.
On
site 011000, just as in Aloísio Magalhães’ work, the intersection between art
and design characterises the project. The conception and execution of the site
could not do without this intersection. Site 011000 gives continuity to
Aloísio’s proposal of touching society.
Just
as Aloísio appropriated postcards to create artistic compositions, site 011000
appropriates data available in the worldwide web to generate compositions that
maintain a dialogue with their own environment. They are compositions that
renew themselves all the time as they happen in real time; they are in constant
metamorphosis, and, besides, the work of art only takes place upon the
interactor’s action: he is the one determining the meaning of the artwork.
In
postcards (formal unit of Cartemas), photography allowed the space to meet the
observer. On site 011000 the interactor manipulates and creates images from
this reality.
On
site 011000, formal procedures of rotation and overlapping used in Cartemas are
associated with other possible formal procedures in the digital environment, as
image overlapping and mirroring.
Each
of these media (zero1thousand e zero2thousandl) used suggest a path always
inspired in Cartemas: repetition, cutting, overlapping, mirroring,
simultaneity, game and composition are key words in the preparation of this
research and, consequently, the digital piece.
On
site 011000, real time, a characteristic of cyberspace, is an element of
composition.
The
simultaneity provided by computer interface allows for extremely rich
relationships, unthinkable then. Combinations of sounds, images and texts of
several locations establish multiple readings in a potential cybertrip.
References
[1-3] LEITE, João
de Souza (org.). A herança do olhar: o design de Aloísio Magalhães.
Rio de Janeiro : Artviva, 2003. P. 11, 11, 156.
[4] LANDOW, George P. Hypertext as Collage-Writing.
In LUNENFELD, Peter editor, The digital Dialetic New Essays on New Media.
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, Englad: The MIT Press, 1999, p.151-170.
[5] COUCHOT,
Edmond. O real time nos dispositivos artísticos. In LEÃO, Lucia (org.). Interlab. Trad. Renata Cordeiro. São Paulo:
Iluminuras, 2002, p.101-106.
[6] LEVY, Pierre. Cibercultura. Trad. Carlos
Ireneu da Costa. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1999.
[7] OLIVEIRA, Ana
Claudia M. A. de. Arte e tecnologia, uma nova relação? In DOMINGUES, Diana
(org.). A arte no século XXI; A humanização das tecnologias.
São Paulo:
Unesp, 1997, p.216-225.
[8] MACHADO, Arlindo. A máquina e imaginário. São Paulo: Edusp, 2.ed., 1996.