The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a vital story that can be recognized from birth to death, rises out of biological life. This individual life differs from everything else by the rectilinear course of its movement, which cuts across the cycle of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a line in a universe where everything that moves does it in cycles.
Hannah Arendt
The proposed projects have an inherent hybrid nature. They combine scientific knowledge and elements of artistic creation. The former joins in to generate conditions for the production of accurate values; the latter join in to put these values into an organic, poetical and affective background, for which at first they had no direct application.
I remember some ideas raised by Deleuze and Guattari that propose the existence of two kinds of “science” adopted by their analysis groups: the nomad science and the sedentary science. Each one of them presents different strategies and principals, achieving a quality of intellectual conflict in their connecting points that I would really like to have in these projects.
The characteristics of this nomadic science would be the following: its primary model would be based in fluidity and dynamism, the propagation of fluids and the hydraulic theory, as opposed to a sedentary science, which is based in the theory of solids. Consequently, it’s opposed to the stable, the eternal and the identical, becoming an example of becoming and heterogeneity. It would be a problematic and not a theorematic model, with no projections, deductions or generalizations, but a coincidence of furtive accidents that would present particular properties to solve a specific problem. The operations would happen more through deformations, transmutations and passages than through the search of an essence. It’s possible to say that one of the procedures consists of “following” while the other consists of “reproducing”. Nomadic science would be a set of itinerant practices that freely conform to the problem aiming to learn with it, more than to solve it. On the other hand, the sedentary model would be the one that classifies and groups the differences in sets of common procedures, in principles and rules capable to homogenize distinct events, generating models and abstractions.
What we have here are two formally different conceptions of science; one is almost eccentric and vague while the other is accurate and technical. However, both keep a common interaction field where stability and movement become linked in a boundary in continuous movement. There, hostile deals between the two models occur. On one side we have the royal science, taking over and at the same time holding back the advance of the nomadic science; on the other side, we have the nomadic science, which keeps subverting and questioning the premises of the former. But why does it happen? The truth is one depends on the other to continue existing. The state science will always need the inspiration and the nomadic fantasy games since it, as a practice prior to normal science, is the place for all the questioning and all the inquietude, showing it its intuition, its procedure, its taste for singularity and its itinerancy, whereas the minor science will never stop growing rich with the major, facing and defying itself with its axioms, its rigidness and its high requirements and proofs in the search of knowledge. While the theorem belongs to the class of reason, the problem is affective and inseparable from the metamorphoses.
There’s a great chance that this competition is paranoid, since nomadic science is not motivated to take the power or to follow an independent development, even because it lacks means for that and it sees itself as attached to its rival. Maybe that’s why it represents a threat, because it suggests means to operate and to fortify a kind of fertile movement for empirical solutions and with eccentric methods inside a world that tries to withhold attitudes like this all the time, since this strategy doesn’t solve problems – but instead it causes them. In this opposition, that is to say, in this limit-tension lays the ideal environment for the creation of concepts that enjoy what’s more enriching between the two models.
Being between two points seems fruitful. Could mechanical systems, presented here for evaluation, be a structure that aims to be the association of aspects of the royal science with the becoming of the eccentric science within the artistic practice? The intention here is not to establish ratings but to perceive the contact edges between the sorts of reasoning we deal all the time. In fact, the current opinion seems to be that, in particular cases, affective impulses far from more rational ponderings act as motives for beginning processes that later will be adjusted and better structuralized inside a more rigid tradition or technique, not to domesticate them, but to extract their essence from the confusing environment where they lie, without, however, losing the risk and the taste for adventure that these impulses incite.
Perhaps the best way for us to get close to the environment again starts in the communion and consensus between these two positions. Through technique and science we have the chance to better understand what surrounds us and remove not only the subsistence but also a new sort of knowledge from its interior. Maybe that’s why artists, more familiar to sensorial questions, have been considered excellent partners in science. Research in art features more libertarian procedures that allow the exploration without committing to rigid hypotheses and methodologies. This flexibility allows exploring data in non-semantic ways, looking for semiotic qualities; providing a new understanding on the very data that, in turn, can contribute for new discoveries in accurate studies.
Art must be the way you lead your life. For a creator, professional activity and personal behavior are alike. I’m not saying this with the intent of creating an aphorism, but because I notice each day an increasing number of individuals who take part in this field for several reasons – sometimes even for “Art”.
Monetary reward and social recognition are aspects we don’t control; in case we do, they often come out at the cost of serious work. We must understand that the commitment behind working with Art is, above all, the commitment of polishing the soul.
Hierarchy is a three-dimensional piece created out of the inversion of an aspect which is inherent of the sculptural language, particularly of outdoor sculpture.
Any physical body in the presence of a light source casts a shadow. If this body remains still while under the sunlight, its shadow will show different positions and shapes during the day due to the movement of the Earth relative to the Sun. Even if its setting is arranged so that it faces the sun at a certain time on a certain side, a monument exposed to the environment doesn’t escape the shadow transformation phenomenon. The intention of the Hierarchy project is exactly to modify this cause and effect relation. The shadow of the sculpture will not be what remains of the object’s shape and position, but its generating factor.
An approximately two meters high monolith will be installed at an open space and will naturally get sunlight. Its peculiarity lies in the continuous adjustment of its position in the three existing axes for the projection of a shadow with a constant shape. There will be a robot capable of identifying the drawing created by its shade and updating its position. This pursuit must last while the sun is up.
