Entrevista...

Novos destinos, novos amigos. Pela internet, conheci um artista que mantem umblog sensacional sobre arte na Ásia...como estou indo para lá daqui a pouco, resolvi me apresentar e iniciou-se uma boa conversa. Esta entrevista será publicada em partes nos próximos dias.

Vejam o SIGHT do artista Rajinder Singh, de Singapura...

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A dialogue with Brazilian artist Isabel Lofgren

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Come Sept this year, we will have amongst us here in Singapore, a multimedia-artist-philosopher who was born into, and has lived the art systems of Rio De Janeiro Brazil. She will begin her sojourn here soon and we look forward to being enriched by the lessons she brings with her and her friendship. Isabel Lofgren is finishing her MFA and will complete it here. I had the amazing opportunity to engage her in a dialogue about her research. Here is the transcript of one of our chats:


RJ says: Tell us a little about your MFA research Isabel.

isabel says: I am doing an MFA in Rio de Janeiro with a focus on the theme of "Noise" in internet and multimedia art .

isabel says: With that i hope to cover aspects of telematics, art and digital imaging, which are issues that pertain to my artwork, in general.

isabel says: However, my discussion is not so centered on technique as it is in metaphor.

isabel says: As I have mixed background and international education I have always been interested in the codes of translation in every realm, language, culture, and now with multimedia art, it seems to become more concrete for me in visual form.

isabel says: Naturally the questions pertaining to noise, miscommunication, and being 'lost in translation', have a deeper metaphorical level for me.

isabel says: ...almost existential

RJ says: Explain 'noise' on the internet.

isabel says: Noise on the internet, as far as my own art work goes, surfaces as the 'glitch'.

isabel says: The noise, in my opinion happens in the transference of data, for example.

isabel says: The connections in the internet are extremely fragile.

isabel says: When you talk to someone over a webcam, for example, the image and sound tend to oscillate depending on the strength of your connection.

isabel says: Many times, the image that we see of the far-off "other" over a webcam is a really bad image that can crash, disappear, pixellize...these visual interferences in the digital image are the evidence of extraordinary fragility, both physical in terms of the network, and also in terms of human connection, since the "self" and the "other" are so extremely dislocated.

isabel says: Another aspect of noise is the constant processing and reprocessing of a singular image while it travels from site to site, while it is copied, pasted, reduced, resized, compressed and cropped into the virtual disappearance of what was once considered an image taken from 'reality'.

isabel says: We can also do this with sound...noise like static waves across these modem cables across the world. it's wonderful. the sounds seem to embody the distance they travel.

RJ says: Noise in physics is a disturbance, especially a random and persistent disturbance, that obscures or reduces the clarity of a signal. How does this definition fit in with your work?

isabel says: Well, my work consists of 'sampling' but with images. I use image searches on the web as my primary source of material. But rather than relying on the aura of the singular image, i am more interested in the flow of images that are activated through a single keyword on something as prosaic as Google.

isabel says: I have a series of works where i do photo mosaics using google image searches, and the result is sort of a "noisy" image...not a clean and pure auratic image, but a very jaggy and disturbed overall appearance.

isabel says: In other works, i capture all the results coming from a single image search and place them through copy/paste on a flat panel. The result is a sort of "weave" of this flow, resulting in an "ordered chaos". Sheer cacophony with constructive method.

RJ says: In common parlance, noise is sound that is loud, unpleasant, unexpected, or undesired. Are the images of the internet disturbing the signal of our lives and is this noise unexpected and undesired??

isabel says: It could be. Anyone searching for images will find that most of them are complete garbage. But i am more interested in the more semiotic definition of noise. Noise as that which stands between the emitter and receiver of the message. Like a glitch in the message.

isabel says: Noise could be loud, but noise can also be the constant humming of city sounds, for example...in any case, it has a sort of presence.

isabel says: It could be just a matter of volume..

RJ says: Your noise it seems to me forms the 'larger picture' as well as get in the way of it. Meaning to say if you consider the randomly chosen images from a google-find as noise, the larger pattern or picture it forms is constructed by these images and confused by these images. Noise is a building block as well as an impediment?

isabel says: Exactly. It interferes with the directness of a given photograph and transforms this image taken from reality as pure information.

isabel says: What it does, visually and conceptually, is to distance the image from its primordial physical source and transforms it into information.

isabel says: Basically, i put images through a "food-processor" which is the Internet.

isabel says: and in other words transmitter --> (channel : noise ) --> receiver

RJ says: Tell me more about the make up of these images. When you pull all the disparate images together to make the larger image, you are making a choice, ( this image rather than another etc) and you arrange them according to a grand narrative of some sort- a script that builds a recognisable ordered image.

isabel says: correct. Everything is based on 'selection' except for the resulting images coming from the Internet - which i have no control over. I construct the method, i select the base image, i select the word. But i have no idea what will come out from my chosen keyword. I did a work with the keyword "voyeur" that resulted in all porn images, for example. This tells me that the Internet and especially all the user that input images into it, classify their images very subjectively. And that, for me, is where the fun begins.

isabel says: this subjectivity is very interesting and is what makes the Internet so unique.

isabel says: The classification of data in the Internet is not logical at all! A search mechanism, for example, will look for identical matches for the keyword you inputted...if you search for "dog", you get a stream of information that responds to "dog", but you may get all sorts of images that were uploaded as "dog" that are actually pictures of cats. It is all dependent on how the user interprets the information he uploads to the net - it is not scientific at all.

isabel says: (cont.) -- it is cultural.

RJ says: But I believe that you for one pander to the believe that there is all seemingly chaotic systems are ordered- can I also say that you also then believe that there is no true randomness on the internet; in our lives.

isabel says: i actually believe the opposite - i am actually a fan of entropy. for me internet is chaos, a highly classifiable chaos. No matter how much we try to 'tame' information, it always ends up in cacophony, complete unorderliness...we tend to think that machines are ordering devices, we have this belief in science and its ordering principles...then we confront it with culture and interesting things begin to happen.

isabel says: I think that we also tend to look at science and culture in a very cartesian way. The findings of contemporary physics tell us the exact opposite - there is no division between the functioning of elements in the universe...it is all part of the same system with different manifestations.

isabel says: which leads me to conclude that we live our entire lives in these artificial divisions of knowledge (science vs. culture, etc...) and that even carries on to our personal lives: there is the emotional life, the professional life, the this and that life...at bottom, everything is related and cannot be separated from the whole...it is a more buddhist approach to things which makes more sense to me...

isabel says: but, as a westerner, these artificial divisions are so ingrained into the fundamental aspects of European culture that it seems very hard to depart from. in my work, i see this very clearly, i have this impulse to order things...such a useless effort...then i fall back in love with the flows...it is all about flows...

isabel says: well, i like physics as a layperson, i am not a scientist at all, but i am interested in ways of thinking of the 'state of the world' , different world views that seem to change with science and especially philosophy...

isabel says: everyone i have been reading lately has some relationship to quantum thinking. going back to my work, the Internet is very much into this realm of 'quantum thinking'.

isabel says: maybe i am too influenced by todays' findings in popular science...i don't know.

isabel says: yet as an artist, and an artist of this time (because we can never escape our own time), i think quantum thinking is more accurate than lets' say, a more hegelian take on things.

RJ says: But it is about the times Isabel - take this quote by Hayles in here book : The postmodern context catalyzed the formation of the new science by providing a cultural and technological milieu in which the component parts came together and mutually reinforced each other until they were no longer isolated events but an emergent awareness of the constructive roles that disorder, nonlinearity, and noise play in complex systems. The science of chaos is new not in the sense of having no antecedents in the scientific tradition, but of only having recently coalesced sufficiently to articulate a vision of the world.

isabel says: Exactly! this quantum thinking goes back to the greeks!

isabel says: that's what's so brilliant about it! Peter Sloterdijk writes a lot about this. It's so fun.

isabel says: We can go back to Kant AND Plato.

isabel says: it's returning to a vision of a cyclic nature, which is not necessary evolutionary as the illuminists tended to lean towards.

RJ says: But don’t you think we need to be somewhat cautions in making these connections?

isabel says: Definitely. I am sure that some specialist will read this and say: what a bunch of nonsense this girl is saying!

isabel says: These are very fragile connections...

To be continued...