Associação Cultural Videobrasil

You have studied psychology and film. Your videos approach society as a living system; it is as if viewers were able to “dissect” the dysfunctions of everyday life through your images. Do you believe that video art is capable of illustrating the “unclassifiable,” of bringing up sensations and identifications possible only through images that viewers cannot typify?

It is a “hybridunclassifiable,” I would say, whose story is told from the United States, as all other things in between the earth and the sky are forgotten. Video art is like a laboratory of hybrids, in which Paik and Larcher continue to move me. Paik inside a taxi with his Sony in New York, and Larcher doing renderings along with Zanoli. The living and the process. The living to feed the process, and the process to lead to the living. That is how I worked on Das Kapital and added up processed dead bodies that are “invisible to the eyes”; therefore, nothing to feel, nothing to understand. Perhaps uncover or try to go back to seeing that which one believes is being seen. The eyes become cynical, they believe that they have seen it all. Surprise is everything. One must resort to work, to misleading, to rushing as a method for having viewers look at corpses and foetuses for twenty minutes without complaining! Plus years of scholarships and renderings! 

Technology, science, the human body, progress in genetic manipulation, and capitalism without borders all appear to be key elements in your work. Is that so?

I believe in microbes, transducers,* and “adjusters.” I call “adjusters” the theoreticians who did not create great theses; they are but destroyers or resystematizers (Gödel, Marx, Calvin). I am enthused about the theoretical-organic information transfer process by means of multiple borrowings and extractions of DNA in living systems. That includes the possibility of biohealing art, of building upon metainformation, such as genetic information, and of going back to seeing from other perspectives. “I like to see,” as Chauncey Gardner used to say. Now, what do I see and how much can I see? Abstraction. I am interested in this mass of information that is broadcast/renewed and makes us neither superior nor inferior, neither first nor last, just alive and waiting for changes.[* Wikipedia dixit: A transducer is a device ... that converts one type of energy or physical attribute to another... ” (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transdutor).] 

Your works are often comprised of a vertiginous succession of images, which result from an intervention of a scientific and artistic nature. How was the creative process for works such as The Chemical and Physical Perception in the Eye of the Cat, in the Moment of the Cut and Das Kapital? 

In 1998, I met David Larcher at Videobrasil, and he invited me to work at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. That was where my production system changed. In Argentina, I used to work at home, on a PC, and then I would rent a studio for postproduction. In Germany, the technology that I used allowed me to do what I wanted and much more. The academy would stay open twenty-four hours a day, and to work there was sheer happiness; however, learning to handle all of those machines with manuals written in German was also a huge source of distress. The most complicated thing was having a hub-idea, a central idea that would join together the pieces of the other ideas. In other words, building a system, my system. I have always believed in what Blake used to say: “I must build my own system, otherwise I will be enslaved by the system of others.” And machines are always making mermaid’s promises, with their menus, submenus, plug-ins, and settings. The method that I used was to write down and to draw constantly, without respecting any particular line. From the writings/drawings, I would move on to the computer, and then to the media library at the academy, in order to view works that I had never viewed. Fortunately, I already worked with animation and I was not afraid of the machines, but it took work in order to control them, to have them answer the proposal I was formulating, and not the other way around. I believe I did not explain the working process enough. Therefore, I would like to add, in here, a photograph from a video that is part of the Das Kapital series, entitled: “Of how I manipulated foetal landscapes,” made in 1999. It is the graphical explanation for the 3D in The Chemical and Physical Perception in the Eye of the Cat, in the Moment of the Cut, and in Das Kapital. The process happened by accident. I was working with the Flint software, by Discreet Logic. At times, it would present unstable behavior: the system would crash and, when I recovered the frames, some of them would get mixed up. That was how the frames of foetuses’ heads ended up amidst the abstract animations that I was doing. Upon processing them, I noticed that the foetuses would disappear and turn into landscapes. As I multiplied the processing, they were completely erased. Afterwards, I applied colors and worked on twenty-five screens at the same time. I animated the landscapes. The final images show fragments processed on top of fragments of intermediate processes. I work in the same way with images of corpses. That was when I realized the advantages of “invisibility.” 

Your interest on and knowledge of mathematical and medical concepts—and the relation that you establish with the history, politics, economy, culture, and society of our times—are evident throughout your work. What prompts you to seek and cause, at the moment when you conceive a new artistic proposal? 

One thing that I have learned is that, if I am interested in seeking something, that something will not go very far; and also that the miseries are the same and do not change much. I rather place a bet on inconsistence, using links, using slightly out-of-course ideas: 

How does the Inconsistence work, practically?, 2007
http://www.khm.de/~marcello/html/Net-Art/m3.htm

36.the field of battle becomes two-fold:
http://www.khm.de/~marcello/html/Net-Art/m/m40.htm

Your first works were done in Argentina in the 1980s. Videos such as The Torment Zone tackle aspects of the country such as corruption, red tape, religiosity, and a flawed health system. How do you regard Argentina today? 

I no longer know Argentina. It is weird. People talk in a different way now. Important facts occurred when I was no longer living there, and I get lost amidst these references in habits and language. On the other hand, I have also put myself in my own world, which is neither here nor there. There is a disagreement nowadays. Ever since I have been living in Germany, I returned to Argentina very few times; adding up all trips, I did not stay there for even a month. Returning is always a sort of shock. I get the feeling that I have died and come back, and I can see how people went on without me, without problems. It is a nice exercise for any Argentine with an ego. Imagine what it is like for those that have two [egos]. The issues that you mentioned really used to occupy an important position within my work. As the years went by—and I lived outside of my country—, I felt that percentages of my attention shifted, and I started focusing on my artistic project itself. And I feel good this way. I recovered my time, my eyes, my calm, my percentages. I have very few cells left in my body from ten-and-a-half years ago. I do keep the cassettes, though. 

What projects are you working on now?

I am working on four different fronts: 
A.    Prequel: I am reediting my early works, done from 1989 to about 1995. There is going to be a total of twenty-five videos from the Argentine days, i.e., corpses and sex.
B.    A week ago, I finished seven new parts of Das Kapital, or eighty new minutes. In them, I continue to reinterpret Marx based on digital and biological points of view.
C.    I am editing my current works, to which I should add performance and bioart pieces under development, drawings, installations, public interventions, and experimental paintings.
D.    I am putting together installation work for next year that combines everything that I mentioned before. I am going to work on a new bioart-performance project that should be ready in mid-2009. It will be done in a high-technology laboratory.

One of your statements is: “I am headed towards an ecosystem ruled by microbes.” Is that the future?

The virulence of microbes combined with the virulence of our ignorance is a possible future. We are thousands of years, and microbes are a form of eternity. In other words, deep down, I am an optimistic.