ArtFutura 1998
The Second Skin
8 – 11 October / Teatro Central, Sevilla
Derrick de Kerckhove, Gerfried Stoker, Eduardo Punset, Eduardo Kac, José Luis Brea, Laura Baigorri, Ramón López de Mántaras
The Second Skin refers to a phrase form Marshall McLuhan: “In the Electronic Age we will wear humanity as our second skin”.
It was the ninth edition of ArtFutura and the festival moved to Seville where it dealt with the increasing incorporations of the new technologies that was displacing the real world towards the virtual world, the ubiquity of information technologies, its acceleration and its unforeseen consequences.
ArtFutura also played with the idea imagine the future. We asked what sort of computer and Virtual Reality systems would be in store for us in the future. We speculated with the suggestion of a new type of robot – receptive to our facial expressions and attentive to the most insignificant of our gestures – and we spoke about machines comprising a non-rational component (kansei).
The festival also indicated that the last frontier between man and machine was to design interfaces able to perceive the mood of the users and threw out a question to the quests, “Are humans doomed to exist between real and virtual life or will there be alternatives in the future?
In order to answer this and other disturbing questions, ArtFutura invited along artists and theorists such as Derrick de Kerckhove, Gerfried Stoker (Ars Elctronica), Eduardo Punset and Eduardo Kac.
That same year, the program “Interaction and Second Skin” included works by FABRICATORS, such as “Multi Mega Book in the Cave”, an ‘electronic’ sculpture, that transported us back in time to the Renaissance itself.
Carolina Cruz Neira presented her “Virtual Architecture” of the Parthenon and Spica, Hisham Bizri, Maria Roussos, Dave Pape, Joseph Alexander, Alan Cruz, Tomoko Imai and Alan Millman invited us to contemplate their works.
Antonio Mayo wrote in the catalogue: “Internet is “Second Skin”. ‘Intelligent’ clothes are Second Skin. Virtual architecture is Second Skin. Computers with ‘Kansei’ are Second Skin”.
“In the electric age we wear all humankind as our second skin“.
Marshall McLuhan
“The “second skin” is the electrical grid around the planet.
Structurally, electricity joins the inside and the outside of the body and it works like touch. Networks extend the central nervous system and multimedia extend the senses. Even the psychosensorial synthesis which we call “imagination” is now emigrating from mind to screen since the beginning of TV and from screens to networks since the beginning of Internet“.
Derrick de Kerckhove
