ArtFutura 2012
Our Culture is Digital
November 7-11 / Muralla Abierta, Montevideo / Museo MALBA, Buenos Aires
FuturaCircuit: Aarhus, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Lima, Madrid, Montevideo, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Santiago de Chile
Theo Jansen, Paul Friedlander, Everything is a Remix, Metamoebius, Improv Everywhere
ArtFutura celebrates the main activities of its twenty-third edition between Montevideo and Buenos Aires with conferences, audiovisual screenings, and exhibitions. It will also be presented in Santiago de Chile, starting November 24 at the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center.
Technology has become ubiquitous and has naturally integrated into our everyday landscape. Like an invisible layer that spreads across the planet, we share a common culture based on our daily experiences.
The Museo Muralla Abierta in Montevideo hosts the “ArtFutura” exhibition, featuring prominent artists such as Paul Friedlander and Theo Jansen, along with a broad representation of Uruguayan artists.
The long-term project “Beasts of the Beach” (*Strandbeest*) by Dutch engineer and artist Theo Jansen is one of the most significant contributions in recent decades to the debate on the possible paths of convergence between art, science, and technology.
Paul Friedlander, for his part, has spent more than two decades researching all kinds of technologies and processes in order to make light a malleable and flexible material that can take on any shape and volume.
Friedlander presents in Montevideo a new series of sculptures titled “Spinning Cosmos,” inspired by the work of Michael Longo, a light installation that uses the astronomer’s database, including more than 25,000 galaxies.
ArtFutura 2012 also offers in its audiovisual program more than 8 hours of everything new in the field of digital creativity. Notable programs include “Everything is a Remix” by director Kirby Ferguson, as well as the documentary “Métamoebius,” directed by Damian Pettigrew, which describes the work of the artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) in an unprecedented and surprising way
The “Strandbeest” are immense robotic creatures with an organic structure and appearance that, when moving, evoke a strong impression of life in their movements.
From a distance, they could be mistaken for gigantic insects or skeletons of prehistoric mammoths, but they are made from industrial-era materials. They are born inside a computer as an algorithm and move thanks to the force of the wind and the wet sand they find in their habitat on the Dutch coast.
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The idea for the Strandbeest was an accident. It came about after I had been messing around with plastic tubes for a long time. It was the beach animals themselves that allowed me to build them. And the plastic tubes taught me how.
Theo Jansen
It may be difficult to express the emotion I felt when I first read about the discovery of the cosmic spin, I felt like dancing in the street. I immediately wrote to Michael Longo, its discoverer, and I was delighted when he responded.
He suggested the creation of a light installation on the subject and, very kindly, made his data available to me—a list of more than 25,000 galaxies.
Paul Friedlander
