Uruguay Cultural » Travelling (chapter 3)

Travelling (chapter 3)

Landscape and New Media – A chat with Juliana Rosales

- A little while ago you were telling me about your beginnings with New Media and how they influenced your post-scic work.*

- Yes, I attended the Southern Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles (California), where the interaction of disciplines was particularly

welcome. That was where I had my first contact with the digital environment. When I started working on my thesis, which dealt with Water and Architecture, the digital tools seemed to me the most appropriate to work with. The topic of the thesis was to explore the boundary between Water and Architecture, and the way in which one medium is submerged into the other, as superimposition in a way changes the perception of things. This was something that attracted me long before the LA times, it comes from my childhood in the city of Mercedes, in relation to the floodings and my relation with that environment.

- The subject of this interview is Paisaje y Nuevos Medios (Landscape and New Media), something you have been working on for some time. Tell me about the beginnings.

- Paisaje y Nuevos Medios, well, a number of years ago and from a different viewpoint, Fernando Álvarez Cozzi and Carlos Pellegrino had come up with videos (3 from Colonia) that also related to this topic. I also used those contents for some works of mine but I don’t see myself as an artist of New Media (which is no longer the case because they are media that have been around for a number of years now). In any case, I would see myself as an artist-architect who uses this tool with an important lack of prejudice, I reveal the tool’s capability every time I use it. What fascinates me is the universe that arises from data digitalization: images, sounds, spaces, that is what captivates me, the immersion within a dimension to be discovered. The logic in it, and the beauty in that logic attract me because I see it as the cold beauty of numbers, in a sense linked to the beauty of crystals and the music of the spheres of the Renaissance. I am not so much interested in New Media because I see them as something contained within itself. In LA I visited a place called CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation) – I recommend you to visit the site www.clui.org – a place where you cannot tell if what you see is art, science, technology or history. And the truth is that what you see IS all that at once. They study the use of land, or better yet, unusual uses of land, like things referring to their landscape, abandoned military bases, traditional constructions in caves, radioactive sites, etc. They are currently working on the constructions of the Mississipi River delta, with constructions that were erected after the floods. And this work is not done based on regular, journalistic documentation or artistic interpretation but from a place where it is seen as a whole, and considering how we react before all that. Indeed, getting to know this project and their working methods, and how they managed and combined disciplines (art, geographic documents, history) was something that marked me. And considering the physical resources I had (materials, technology, etc.) y chose the digital means to work with. Today I see it as a tool for generating territory, a means capable of generating different perceptions and I like that. If I had a chopper the story would be really different (laughs)

Juliana Rosales

I would like to know more about your referents, I mean, beyond this group you mentioned. Someone who has marked you with his/her experience.

- Yes, I studied with the architect Neil Denari, who works with self-generated forms that make reference to biological and mechanical models. He used to talk about the change of the modern paradigm, that is the change in the construction of spaces, and we studied in depth the issue of time. For example: time in the movies of Antonioni, and how to transfer that faded time into the generation of space, and the devices that were generated from this turned out to be fascinating. What I mean is that what I am most interested in from the digital territory is that something that has to do with a new dimension, a random path capable of generating things. When I was back in Montevideo I met Brian, who has a wonderful archive of works in the Internet, where I found a very important source of knowledge. I then read Lev Manovich and identified with his analysis of digital environments.

- An exhibit of your work is currently taking place at Subte, where you show the convergence of the filmic support and the digital environment, and this is a topic on which Manovich has written much also.

- I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. What Manovich does is analyze issues of the Russian avant-garde, which I also consider the most interesting one. He analyzes precepts that have turned from manifests into tools and wonders about the new manifest in these tools. What I am interested in doing in this work is to confront the issue of perception. The eye, the central vision of the eye, which is the most accurate document we have while our bodies remain still, as opposed to the other perception: going through the location with the body, that is: follow the path of the body as we feel its movements by capturing its volume in the territory with a GPS device. For instance, now that I am working on it, someone was telling me about the link between this and worldview, with the way in which we can control the other … (Internet also started like this, but it is a parallel world where pirate elements coexist with this control). Now, going back to the GPS, when I started working with this tool I did not think of that. What I thought was that it was like artificial stars created by man, and what I wanted to do was dance with those stars. Then comes the rest… And that’s why all about immersion and random search is what attracts me the most in all this subject.

Works that can be visited in the Internet
http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/07/24/live-stage-juliana-rosales-locative-media-montevideo/

Chapter V

An affectionate tribute:

http://www.portaluruguaycultural.gub.uy/wp-content/uploads/video/veronica-alcides.flv

Links

Sites of Uruguayan artists mentioned by the individuals interviewed:

Edgardo Acosta Bentos: http://boek861.blog.com.es/2009/03/15/acosta-bentos-poesia-visual-5762354/

Fernando Alvarez Cozzi: http://netart.org.uy/vintage/flyers/interfaces/interface.swf

Alvaro Cassinelli: http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/works/

Osvaldo Cibils: http://osvaldocibils.com/

Tomás Laurenzo: http://laurenzo.net/

Roberto Mascaró: http://www.robertomascaro.com/

Biographical data of the individuals interviewed:

Clemente Padín: http://clementepadin.blogspot.com/

Enrique Aguerre: http://www.enriqueaguerre.com/sinretorno/

Brian Mackern: http://netart.org.uy/brian.html

Pincho Casanova: http://elmonitorplastico.com/Pincho_Casanova.html

Juliana Rosales: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2093

Teresa Puppo: http://teresapuppo.com/

Epilog:

“For the first time in history, images are ephemeral, ubiquitous, lacking corporeal aspects, accessible, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way that language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life, on which they can exert no power on their own”. John Berger “Ways of Seeing”

My gratefulness to all those interviewed for their time, which made this article possible.

Ángela López Ruiz

Índice

Travelling. Introducción

Travelling (parte 1). Capítulo I y II

Travelling (parte 2). Capítulo III y IV

Travelling (parte 3). Continuación capítulo IV, capítulo V y enlaces

Contenidos relacionados:

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