Duration: January 18th / March 5th, 2008
Curated by: Antonio Franco

Author(s): Iván Marino

The project The Disasters is included within the generative audiovisual format, in the domain of programming images. There are six pictures modelling the visual compositions: Goya’s Imagery, Gallows, The Cudgel, Sangue, Lingua and Pn=n!, which are articulated through algorithms. Instead of occupying fixed positions in a sequential order—as happens with standard filming—the frames are stored in data bases which allow to order them through open associative systems. The minimal units of image and sound switch their positions and give different meanings to the piece, just as morphemes and lexemes do in conventional languages. The mathematical formulae execute visual and sound behaviours which are placed on the limit between randomness and determination.

Generative audiovisuals articulate its minimal units (frames/pixels) in a dynamic fashion, upon a mesh of data that can be constantly modified. These structures may alter the order of temporal or spatial presentation of its units depending on some parameters that are predefined by the author: self-generative algorithms for all the works comprising The Disasters. The series addresses images of violence which are related to the recording of reality and are usually shown in news reports, in order to break the apparent objectivity of that documental eye, stressing on the implicit conventionalisms that come about in the elaboration of those images and the political discourse of representation.

In the whole series of works comprising The Disasters, the computer displaces both the author and the user of the narrative construction. By using self-generating algorithms, the artist designs pieces that evolve visually according to their own logics, a mathematical plan which, paradoxically, gives life to highly intense accounts.

• Publication