martin bonadeo | texts | indoor windows

The expression low tech is implicitly paradoxical. In modern times, technology is always identified with progress and future, all those major technical developments and advanced knowledge of its society from where it has arisen. "Low" technology does not seem to have the right to be called this way. According to this logic, low tech is practically an archaeological waste, something like nuclear waste which can be only left there to disintegrate.

What is it that attracts artists to explore those low tech systems? In this context of hyper-technological performances: Don´t they consider by chance the risk of disintegration or disarticulation of their reasoning, eventually risking lack of interest caused by a product which does not enjoy social prestige?

Primacy of technology is certainly not an innate condition of society. On the contrary, its development is new and replies to a very specific type of social construction, namely the one where technological and scientific expansion pulses at the rhythm of economic circulation. The third stage of capital as it has been called by Fredric Jameson, capital is no longer bound to means of production but linked to reproduction. Technical superdimension determines this postmodern technological sublime and the author refers to this declaring: "Technology of contemporary society itself is neither hypnotic nor fascinating, but fascinates because it seems to offer us an easy and quick way to be able to understand and imagine the whole decentralized global net of the third stage of capital."

The adoption of low tech by the artists introduces under these circumstances a necessarily political aspect. Any proposal based on this includes indirectly the tensions between the occidental example shaped with heat of technological expansion and other alternative ways of considering reality. First of all, the use of low tech practices critical distance allowing us to take a decentralized look at the world where we are destined for living in.

It would be wrong to think that one can reflect on social and cultural impact of technology only from a technological position. If one understands the interdependent logic of the circuit, it is easy to see that relations between art and technology are defined both from inside and outside this circuit. On the way from a decentralized position towards reforming the tech universe it would be definitively unfeasible and less interesting to raise technological deficiency to failure. On the contrary, the real challenge can be found in the question how to maintain one´s own reasoning position on the fields of art and technology, especially when you are adopting an alternative position and accepting the unavoidable reality of a universe with hyper technology and technologically depending on contemporary art reasoning.

To choose low tech means to open a conclusive discussion about political and aesthetic superiority which pretends to be based on supposedly higher technique. By using elementary technology, the low-tech-works stress aesthetic reasoning, avoiding seduction and expiration dates of hardware which have converted so many works in art and technology into mere aesthetic intents incapable of surviving the course of time.

Low tech opens a promising path for contemporary art and particularly for Argentine art. It allows you to work on borderlines, which is always one of the most recurrent characteristics of highly provocative art. On the other hand, it helps to avoid getting tied up in technical conditions at the moment of work creation or projection. Finally it offers the chance to put an end to myths regarding devices, mechanisms, support and techniques. It proposes a true dialogue with art work and most of all a renewed commitment with creation.

Notes:
1. The present reflection is part of a current investigation about art and technology in Latin America. The first results have been published in the book "Hipercubo(ok)", Bogota 2002
2. Jameson Fredric: "The hysterical sublime" in Essays about Postmodernism, Buenos Aires, Imago Mundi 1991

low tech/hi fi
by valeria gonzález, collective exhibition curator / translation by uschi groppel

High conceptual accuracy developed with low tech resources: this is the concept which unites the pieces of 12 contemporary Argentine artists whose works are being presented in this exhibition. The apparent binomial paradox wants to highlight that artistic creation is possible in a surrounding of increasing socio-economic crisis. Lack of resources or material limitations mean in these works not only context but also origin itself of creative thinking and productive strategies.

Daniel Tubio and Laura Glusman obtain their images with cameras built with found objects. Technical failures help them to break the coherent thread of photographic illusion and to turn reality in something strange. The city becomes mysterious, a kaleidoscope of fragments. On the other hand, Lucas Engel sews those urban fragments up and produces the illusion of a continuous filming by using stills. The Futuristic movement wanted to reflect the speedy entrance of their country into industrial era. Engel builds the image of feverish acceleration based on a city imprisoned in paralyzation and regression.

Time plays an important role in the works of Esteban Pastorino, Andrea Ostera and Silvia Diehl. Pastorino associates the photographic shot with different mobile mechanisms, in this case the "scientific" character of air photography is being parodied by the use of a childlike homemade kite.
As to conceptualism the documentation of the course of time is a possible way in art. Both the ticket series by Ostera and the registration of salt lines by Diehl retake this procedure in first person. The subject may not be more than ephemeral and contingent trace but it is his pace that can provide sense to the empty coordinates of time and space.

Zicarello, just like Ostera, uses the photogram technique to capture street objects without camera. Alejo Petrucci retakes the manual procedure of collage. Other artists add "poor" techniques: x-ray plates by Gustavo Romano, still slide projection by Martin Bonadeo and the intervened images by Ana Gilligan printed on plates of street numbers. Aesthetic aspects form no longer object features but part of a glance capable to transfer daily things.

Last but not least, Augusto Zanela´s anamorphosis materializes the words "Low Tech / Hi-Fi" in the exhibition space itself. Those words work as title and exhibition concept and his work encloses therefore the whole work group in an impossible tautology which is being retained by photography from the same point of view where the visual illusion has been fulfilled.

The present works tell us of their reality in which they have been produced. They can be interpreted as symbolic answers in front of a context full of limitations and crisis. In none of the cases this bond with the surroundings is being resolved according to well-known local principles, pauperism iconography or literal references. They testify Argentine reality with constructive processes and conceptual remaking. In these works the context proves to be impression or material trace and not an icon easy to consume from periphery. A second hypothesis encourages this exposition: Maybe we are witnesses of the exhaustion of the aesthetic call which characterized Argentine contemporary art in the Nineties. The call that replied to the Menem party with shrill colors and decorative glitter looking for intimate shelter in house decoration or child memories.

español