Juan Cortés | 2020

JUAN CORTÉS

Portfolio 2020

BotĂĄnica TransgĂŠnica (2020)

Video game / interactive multichannel installation.

The botanical expeditions that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in various countries of the then Viceroyalty of New Granada (now south and Central America) were projects that proposed to catalog the botanical species of the territories with a view to establishing a scientific classification and, above all, an inventory of the natives to disposition of the Spanish Empire of the time.

Transgenic Botany project addresses the issue of biological diversity from a fictional and futuristic perspective through the problem of plant monocultures. What would explorers find on a future botanical expedition? What kind of entities or institutions to come would be interested in carrying out an inventory of plant biodiversity?

Today about 60% of cultivable areas in Latin America are occupied by a small number of genetically modified plant-clone species that have commercial registration because they are owned by a few transnational food companies. Right now, the hegemony of the Cavendish banana monocultures –a species of fruit plant of transgenic-commercial origin– in Latin America, and other parts of the world, threatens to considerably decrease plant, animal and micro-organic biodiversity in all territories in those that have been established. Apart from the well-known and reported link between banana monocultures, violence, and land dispossession in Latin America, monocultures (such as the Cavendish-type banana) are intrinsically related to the emergence of pests and diseases like Fusarium Oxysporum that not only affect their health and productivity, but also they also deteriorate the quality of the soil once occupied by polycultures.

Project in collaboration with Atractor Studio and the philosophers Diego Moreno and Santiago Arcila.

Fusarium Oxysporum (2019-2020) Fusarium oxysporum SP4 and Fusarium oxysporum erythroxylum are part of the genus of filamentous fungi. The first is the cause of Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a disease that affects crops of genetically modified banana known as Cavendish; the second is also known as “agent green”, a mutant strain promoted during the 2000s by the Government of the USA as a biological weapon in the ‘War against drugs’ in Latin America. Both species are deeply embedded in Colombia´s recent ecological and political history: despite the wide presence of native species of Fusarium in local soil and vegetation, the introduction of these two “alien fungus” in the country has triggered the devastation of banana-cloned crops, soil degradation and biodiversity loss. Spreading through the private and public budget, thriving among monoculture breeding grounds, the xeno-fungus has infected Colombia’s economic, political and agricultural systems.

This installation aims to unfold a series of audiovisual objects –such as interactive maps, sonification and data visualizations– to constitute a space where a multidisciplinary approach employs AI to present and represent the morphology of the complex network where Fusarium oxysporum SP4 and Fusarium oxysporum erythroxylum interact with other agents of the Colombian´s inner conflict, like politicians, companies, human bodies, money, markets, cartels, guerrillas, farmers, desires, etc. In detail, we employ a web scraping algorithm to extract data from academic, governmental, economic and scientific papers and articles; then we analyze and process the information in order to establish four different sets of relationships: fusarium-banana Cavendish, Fusarium-native soil, fusarium-war against drugs and fusarium-public policies. Finally, we render the data in order to produce an organic visualization of the whole behavior of the fungus in its encounter with the geopolitical conditions of Colombia.

The Migrant (2018)

Video game / interactive multichannel

The Migrants is a video game based on a real bird-migration history from 2014. The Golden Warbler birds faced adverse conditions due to global warming that generated storms on the coasts of Florida, which were their main destination. This caused the birds to alter their migratory routes, being forced to explore an alternative way through Mexico and Central America until arriving in Colombia.

The video game recovers the Amerindian technological gesture of adopting the point of view of the animal. The prosthesis is the control of the main character of the game, who must overcome obstacles by detecting magnetic fields and seeds with infrared vision. The game problematizes Umwelt relations with the technological and political activities that pollute the environment: walls, electric fences, communication antennas and pollution.

Understanding the implications of migration has to do with understanding that the bird, in its journey, is a seed disperser, a forest weaver. The bird recovers and feeds ecological niches. This Umwelt serves as a contrast to think about the complexity of migrations and massive displacements in the human sphere, which make the news and whose motives involve climatic, industrial, political and technical causes of the contemporary form, but also are displacements in which cultural and communal fabrics are produced.

Rethinking the relationships between technology, animal worlds and culture through art generates the possibility of imagining new scenarios and alternative atmospheres where biodiversity as a production of difference from nature recovers its power in a gesture of resistance to our current global scenario.

Revelations (2020)

In collaboration with atractor studio.

This particular piece involves an AI program based on the GPT-2 algorithm that shows how AI has evolved to a point where researchers cannot distinguish between elements produced by humans and those created by machines. However, what is even more astonishing are the learning and creative capacities that machines and algorithms such as GPT-2 have acquired over time, threatening enough and with such inconceivable implications that they have been censored in many parts of the world.

Here, a robotic arm powered by this AI and trained to process cosmological and scientific texts from diverse cultures and historical moments around the world attempts to make sense of the information, and in turn, create its own cosmogonical texts. Therefore showcasing some of the possible implications that new technologies may have within the creative processes as for example the characteristic of being “creative� which, thus far, has been widely believed to be one of the main elements that characterizes us as human beings.

SUPRALUNAR

(project commisioned by CERN, currently touring Europe as part of the exhibition QUANTICA/ Broken Symmetries - produced by Atractor, Hyphenhub and Santiago Arcila)

What is the role of dark matter, an invisible form which accounts for approximately 70% of all matter in the universe?

In the 1970’s, astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that the objects at the edges of galaxies moved faster than expected, and predicted the existence of unseen dark matter to explain the discrepancy.

Supralunar invites us to experience discoveries made by Rubin on the relationship between dark matter and the rotational movement of galaxies. It proposes a poetic approach to dark matter, visualising this strange and unknown entity that scientists believe supports entire galaxies, stopping them from being torn apart by the extreme speed at which they rotate - but which we cannot see or detect yet.

Placing an eye against the lens causes the skull’s orbital and temporal bones to act as an amplifier for the sound produced by the electromechanical gears inside, while the frequency of the lights inside creates a simulation of the morphogenesis of a galaxy through light and sound. Paradoxically, Supralunar’s construction –reminiscent of an ancient clock– allows us to comprehend through everyday, classical mechanics a phenomenon that is based on the abstract theories and unseen constituents of modern physical cosmology.

Short Bio An audiovisual artist and lecturer in Art and Audiovisual Media, Cortés works in the areas of research and interdisciplinary processes. He is especially interested in the connections between art, science, and educational processes. His projects, inspired by sound and the forces of nature, have been exhibited in galleries and at film festivals and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), the Bilbao Exhibition Centre, CCCB Barcelona and Creative Tech Week in New York. He was also awarded the Eighth Bogotá Prize for Alternative Art Spaces. He is the current curator of Sensoria in Artbo.

Cortés, and regularly works with the Hyphen-Hub space for artistic and community creation. In 2018 he received an Honorary Mention in the CERN Collide International Prize, which is awarded as part of CERN’s art and science programme, Art at CERN, as well as being awarded the prestigious PRAC Prize by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and the Present/Future award by Mana contemporary and the Shanghai institute of Art in China.

Cortés is also part of Atractor, an interdisciplinary study that arises as a union between artists who work around the relationship between art, science and technology.

Its members have approaches in different areas such as electronics, sound synthesis, performance, programming, animation, vr / ar, and creation of objects and machines.