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I understand electricity as a complex and chaotic network, as the primary vehicle for the generating of cartographies, physical as well as virtual, that connects us daily and instantaneously to any place in the world. With electricity we are capable of globally extending our central nervous system and linking it immediately with the rest of humanity. I understand electricity as a process, a continual process of creation and relational transformation of material, data and information which we feed on in order to exercise communicative action. I also understand it as being responsible for automation; with electricity a machine becomes autonomous, independent, ceasing to be a simple medium for the artist, and as such becoming the feasible vehicle that allows it to carry out the transformation of the representational paradigm. And, lastly, I understand it as the cause of our ‘electrical being’, the being that avoids the heavy blow of new technology and contains that violence with full knowledge (McLuhan, 1964), the being that flows with its use and, also, is capable of reflecting on its impact.
Electricity as a phenomenon, of comparable antiquity to basic life material or energy itself, that went from being an element which for centuries was only visible -through small scientific experiments- to being used as an indispensable media, installing itself definitively in the daily lives of human beings after the Industrial Revolution, with the arrival of digital technologies –even more so and due to its extreme assimilation from its habitual use- it situates itself in an elevated stratus of visibility and consciousness then, at the same time, it is one of the main causes of a radical change in sensory perception. And it is here that the artist, due to their experience, is obliged to reflect, to generate questions, to establish dialogues and propose answers to the endless issue of representation, an undertaking that indispensably happens by the use of the new medias, current resources, contemporaries, with which the digital native, mainly, is found linked, then a technique is meaningful expression of a society and therefore determinants for these practices (Alsina, 2007:24).
Electrical pulses establish conceptual links between the human being and electricity, between speed and network, between light and sound, between physicality and virtuality, all of which are unavoidable links for the artist that integrates the use of new technologies in their work as a plan of action, as a continuous process of the now, as a natural extension of doing, as an indivisible part of their thought. In this way, a constant dialogue is constructed between the automatic machine and the electrical concept; a continual battle to force the machine to amplify the capacity of its techno-functional principles, to warp those principles farther than what has been pre- established by industry and engineering, to force it as such to act in the creative context.
Through installations formed by audiovisual projections and bi- and tridimensional digital printings on large pieces of plastic –a material which does not conduct electricity and which allows for space- time fixation of an image before the viewer-, from urban registries accumulated during the mapping developed by different sectors of the city –guided by the continuous meeting of chaotic entanglements generated by the connecting cables of powerlines-, and mechanical registers from the extrusion of a 3D printer which, located in a vertical position, moves its non-retinal gaze in the form of a filament from the electrical landscape to the screen of the scanner, it refers to the multitude of layers and networks of knowledge and information that day to day generates said electricity, breaking up the topographical map of its connections and nodes. And our machine, guided by electricity, generates sound. Loud noise and iconographic noise, making themselves visible in a coherent and interrelational way in each of the processes presented.
A multimedia project that aims to give a representational form to the electric imaginary of the 21st century, so ever changing and in a continual process of transformation, employing for this the very latest perceptual-sensory elements that are directly linked to the concept of electricity: light, image, noise, movement and magnetic fields.
