II Atibaia Art & Technology Festival
Incubadora de Artistas
Curatorship: Paloma Oliveira & Josy Panão

Artists:
Thiago Hersan
Mateus Knelsen
Juliana França
OHMS (Dado Sutter, Mariana Salles, Antonio Lutfi)
Paloma Oliveira
Production: Cybelle Oliveira
Site
GitHub
Catalog

How does technology affect us and can make us more sensitive in our daily relationships? What place does it occupy in our lives? And what does art have to do with all this?

In addition to occupying a concrete place in reality, technology populates and often tumultuates our imaginary, directly affecting our bodies, which appear muffled in the face of so many variations and fast transformations, restlessness and creative fabacies. Devices increasingly offer possibilities for reinventing and re-creating relationships with others and with the world around us.

The course proposed by the curators Josy Panão and Paloma Oliveira is an invitation to an affective immersion in the world of technology, a reflection on how these inventions have modified our way of acting, communicating and feeling the other and ourselves.

The artists gathered in this exhibition establish a very close (and why not say intimate?) connection between their creative processes and technology, emerging their poetics and works appear after this intimate process.

The works assembled at this festival have emerged from questions about technological tools and their limits, which involve not only the artists’ poetic processes, but also how public can sum into this ephemeral, fluid and hybrid atmosphere of creation.
Juliana França shows us that when technology is added to our bodies, the mathematics 1 + 1 = 2 is not necessarily valid and we can have a result more like 1 + 1 = 3, name of the work presented at this festival. It is not only a sum, but the emergence of another; a new organism is formed. It is from this confused mathematics that the artist’s work is born. From the invention of body extensions with simple materials, Juliana makes us rethink critically about the way we are affected by the devices we attach to our bodies, causing a re-sensitization of the body-technology relationship. In this process, questions arise such as: what lies behind the body-object-creation relationship? How to allow be affected by technology? How to resume its use after having the body activated? Faced with these issues, Juliana will occupy the Incubadora de Artistas for three days (July 4, 5 and 6) inviting visitors to become co-creators of 1 + 1 = 3.

Between analog and digital contrasts, Thiago Hersan, with the work XOXOXOLOLOLOL, problematizes the automation of affections in the environments of digital social networks, proposes to think about the relations that perpass, intensify or fade in these environments. He proposes a new social network of affections spreading his kisses stamped to the four winds of the “real” and “virtual” world, resignifying the forms of communication and affectation that come from this gesture (kissing).
How to sensitize the absent existence of someone dear and fundamental in your life through the traces and fragments left in videographic records? How do we mean and re-signify someone’s existence through technological devices? These are questions implicit in Mateus Knelsen’s Gude and Fleeing Dilemma works. From his family memories, almost always mediated by videos from personal archives, the artist shares and inserts the audience into the fabulation that allows him to create another kind of intimate relationship with his father (a possible way of experiencing in the present his absent existence). The public, in the face of the works of Mateus, invades, interferes, manipulates, and devours intimate landscapes from his memories and affections.

OHMS (Our Home MakerSpace), formed by Dado Sutter, Mariana Salles and Antonio Lutfi, is a collective of makers-inventors who acts much more in the field of inventions than properly within the aesthetic rules of art. The trio rescues the science of garage, using any material that comes to their hands, to develop tools that enable the creation of ludic simulator spaces. For this festival, they created Invisible Wall, an interactive installation that dematerializes the bodies, transforming them into magical windows that allow to see through a wall. It is a game between the body of the public, technological devices and binary abstractions of programming that reveals what goes on the other side of the room, unveiling a certain desire or voyeur fascination.

A marriage between people who are not in the same place: this is the performance Love in the times of code: a telematic marriage of Paloma Oliveira and Mateus Knelsen. The presentation accompanies, transmits and connects, in real time, the grooms and their guests at the time of the ¨yes¨ of a marriage that takes place between cities separated by 12,307.56km of distance: Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City.
Paloma and Mateus propose a reading of the mediated affectivity and bureaucracies around the realization of this ceremony. The promise of “total connectivity” of devices and networks, in practice, contrasts with the noises and limitations of their functioning. In parallel, in a world of many displacements and telepresence, on which bureaucratic structures remain below, they require certificates and presences that are no longer appropriate. Starting from a real distance situation, the couple Mateus and Paloma proposes a caricature of this scenario, where their civil marriage is realized between their images and other people give their bodies as “support” for these images, to comply with the requirements of a notary from Rio. Paloma and Mateus rewrite their intimacy mediated by electronic devices. From the (im) permissibilities of the bureaucracy and the networks, questions emerge such as: what changes in the affections in times where everything is mediated by the programming code? What relationships are made possible and transmuted in the transit of matter? What habits are changed with these tools present in the daily life and in the intimacy of the people? Are the affections still the same in the face of a reality mediated by the telematic-technological devices?

In this second edition of the Atibaia Art and Technology Festival, promoted by Incubadora de Artistas, we find artists-inventors-programmers who, in addition to questioning the operation and comprehensiveness of technological devices in actions and contemporary imagery, allow us to inhabit a potentially sensitized space by the artistic intervention, subverting, displacing and poetizing the use of these tools in our daily life.