EL ULTIMO GRITO MALFICTIONS CATALOGUE GALERÍA ELBA BENÍTEZ

Almost 20 years ago Marc Augé spoke about the “all-fictional” affirming “The disaster would be for us to realise too late that the real has become fiction, that there is therefore no more fiction (only what is distinguishable from the real is fictive) and even less so any author.”

(Augé, 1999, p.105). At that time, at the end of the 20th century, the author could not suspect to what extent the “all-fictional” would become part of our everyday lives. In this context, any act of resistance that makes us reflect on our relationship with imagery could be regarded as a small act of freedom. The most recent work by El Ultimo Grito is entitled Malfictions. In it, an act of visual disobedience is encouraged; addressing the consumption of normalised imagery that’s accepted as “Reality”, EUG interrogates the limits of representation. The work revolves around the idea of the world as fiction, as representation, or as a simulacrum which is arranged across three main axes; firstly as a suite of digital triptychs, secondly as enigmatic camera obscuras, and lastly three-dimensional pieces made of glass. Said axes operate as metaphors of contemporary approaches to the image.

FIRST AXIS –––––––––––––––––––– X AXIS. TRIGGERED GLITCHES In the “Triggered Glitches” triptychs, EUG presents work based on an exploration and study of representational malfunctions of Map apps.

These navigational apps are used by millions of people daily to find their way around cities, but often the system produces representational errors. It is precisely these mapping glitches that interest the artists.

I do not think anyone can overlook the way in which we consume Digital Realities today as though they were truths. In our digital culture we use information without perceiving the medium in which we receive it; Barthes said, in regard to photography, “...a photo is always invisible: it is not that we see.” (Barthes, 1992, p. 34). This remark proves more modern than ever when applied to our digital environment, we are permeated with devices that substitute and replace our direct experience.

Technological changes are accepted at such speed and with such trust that, in a short space of time, we regard the image shown to us by technology as “natural” and even “realistic”. This technological naturalisation is particularly true of the visual terrain. And as image

creators, EUG are essentially interested in the transfer between reality and representation. These days, acceptance and naturalisation go hand in hand with digital technology; they offer us solutions and constructions which we quickly embrace. Digital technology provides visual elements that we adopt as our own. In this regard, Abraham Moles, (as a good Structuralist) distinguished between the act of perceiving as a way to discern forms and the act of understanding as an act of discerning structures. For this author, the idea of the Informational Architecture (Moles, 1992, p.17) of visual messages is a central part of its content; likewise EUG’s oeuvre shows an overriding concern for ways of building the visual.

There is, in these images, a special concern for the medium, for the way all of those elements that construct and construe the building of realities function, the very matter of the “all fictional” story referred to earlier. Accordingly, there are a variety of considerations that may be derived from these Triggered Glitches by EUG. The images come from more or less random digital errors generated by the browser they employ. It is precisely this type of error, or glitch, that manifests and evidences the constructed nature of the image.

Joan Costa (Costa, 1991) spoke of the “signs of technology” as distinguishing features inherent to visual media. The aforesaid technological signs are initially regarded as noise and later, little by little, they become syntactic features of the image. This occurred, for example, with motion blur in photographs, originally discarded it later became an expressive device. There is no analogy between a motion blur photograph and our way of seeing, yet we have syntactically adopted this artifice; which ends up becoming a “codeless sign”. Potentially one could generate new visual realities without depending on any analogy and from this point of view that is exactly what happens in the work being presented now by EUG. Joan Costa also remarks that “visual submission” (Costa, 1991, p.8) occurs when an image seeks to reproduce or represent a reality outside itself, when it seeks to “make present the appearance of an absent object”. The digital domain is overrun by this redundant visual submission, more concerned with appearances than with the development of an autonomous language.

TRIGGERED GLITCHES Madrid – El Retiro 2017

EUG’s urban Triggered Glitches bring us a variety of considerations about the ontology and consumption of the Digital Image.

We live in a climate of technological-digital dependence and confidence, for this reason we feel especially troubled when this type of glitches or system failures occur. These glitches make us aware of the illusion of reality on which the image system is built and therefore aware of our own fragility too. These system errors, whether they be spatial (representational errors) or temporal, (diachronic delays) are perceived as an act of micro-death, a Memento Mori, which inevitably invites us to ask ourselves what hides beneath their external appearance. The images obtained by EUG are purely digital, since they are derived from glitches and this is only possible due to the inherent nature and architecture of data. Each glitch has the category of “technological sign” in the construction of a digital visual code.

Discovery of the browser’s backstage rigging system leads us to question the stability of the system. The spatial representational glitches we observe in these works by EUG are also reminiscent of ruins. Images echo inside us of bombed cities, of disappeared architectural spaces, of negatives spaces... These spatial glitches on the system’s epidermis refer us inescapably to De Chirico’s metaphysical spaces or to Tanguy’s surrealistic landscapes. The images by EUG add more weight to Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that “Nature imitates art” (Wilde, 2004).

The images, moreover, pose an interesting line of questioning about temporal representation. When we use Apple Maps or Google Maps, we do so in the belief that the images shown by the device are produced in real time, though nothing could be further from the truth.

These Triggered Glitches by EUG reveal a whole series of temporal delays in the representation of the maps.

Consequently, a number of interesting temporal paradoxes occur, producing representations of various temporal states at the same time. We can see buildings which disappeared months ago coexisting alongside newly built ones, evidencing the feverish transformation of cities. The images possess an uncertain and transversal temporality because these photographic maps are built from mosaics of photos taken at different moments, later put together, giving rise to a unified

space made from diachronic temporal modules. Different times in the same image.

SECOND AXIS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Y AXIS. ‘La réalité soit trop complexe pour la transmission orale’ Technological acceptance, and its relation to the consumption and use of images, is not at all derived from of the digital world. Perhaps the most historically important example of adoption and naturalisation of a technical-based image is the birth of Perspective as a model of representation. From the Renaissance until our day perfecting the perspective-optical system of representation has been accepted as natural and truthful. This model of representation has capitalised all approaches to the image with such authority that we frequently substitute reality for representation without even noticing.

The by-products of perspective –photography, film, video, but especially all the screens of our devices– only serve to underline the currency of the trompe l’oeil from which the contemporary way of understanding the world through images is derived. The “psychological fact” which Bazin spoke of in 1946, implied “the complete satisfaction of our desire for likeness by a process of mechanical reproduction from which man is excluded” (Bazin, 1990. p. 27). Therefore, the major factor is not a question of mimetism for the final result, but rather the development and automation of the system. EUG have been developing pre-cinematic devices now for some time. These are hallmarked by a degree of precariousness, a precariousness built into the device. Based on a completely homemade system and employing very simple technology, they are able to generate highly complex imagery that relates to extremely sophisticated technological processes. Our technology dependancy habit is diminishing our ability to understand the world, it would seem that everything comes into being through a screen or by means of technology, that everything is pre-designed and ready for use. On the one hand, the look of these devices seems digital, futuristic even, but on the other, basic and pre-technological. This vintage futuristic style has echoes of the film Alphaville by Godard, a quote from which gives the title to this work.

The unsettling camera obscura images depict, on the one hand, melancholically futuristic cities, a somewhat drab and faded future, which they stubbornly insist on reproducing infinitely, in a kind of loop or temporal circle. Other images, however, depict sexual scenes taking place in interiors, using figures that almost resemble caricatures, and that, moreover, provoke a certain sense of instability with regard to the actual image. All of this together evokes a dreamlike and unstable setting. The sexual theme encompasses an exploration of the ways of building images. In our digital society there exists, without a doubt, a noticeable spread of online sexual images, to such an extent that we are all, to a degree, transformed into voyeurs and peeping Toms. The image, as opposed to reality, is transformed into the object of desire, moving away from the visual submission Costa spoke about to a submission to the Real.

In EUG’s oeuvre, the accidental and the error appear as aesthetic features. In his convulsive beauty, André Bretón (Breton, 1934) proposed an accidental and unconscious type of beauty based on “objective randomness” and on “automatic drawing”. The aesthetics of computer glitches, which we spoke about in reference to Triggered Glitches and of precariousness, now invite us to share the desire for rupture, for dreams and the subconscious.

THIRD AXIS –––––––––––Z AXIS. THE FALLACY OF THE CLOSED SYSTEM The last major axis along which this exhibition is organised is a city of glass. EUG present a three-dimensional piece depicting a utopian city of glass. A kind of interconnected, fragile and root-like model of transparent buildings. A work that might easily be regarded as a metaphor of our liquid society –marked by a glassy inconsistency, by uncertainty and fear– which the late Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman, 2003) focussed on.

Digital technology has brought about a pragmatic dematerialisation of the work of art. Without going into the matter of the aura which Benjamin proposed a hundred years ago, the fact is that the majority of information and relation we have with artistic works, regardless of their original medium, is through a computer screen. Accordingly,

a flattening of the works has occurred, which is quite apropos since they reach us in a two-dimensional shape, bereft of any objectuality.

The building of this city of glass counterposes and complements the triptychs. The latter are achieved by means of a virtual reality that only ever existed on our screens, whereas the former, the virtual and imaginary city, is presented to us as a real, physical materialisation.

The city of glass is equipped with an automatic lighting array and image projector. This conjunction of object and projection turns the visitor into a witness of an overlapping of shadow and reality (with a nod to Plato). The whole is, consequently, the depiction of a system developed around the illusion of logic, a “pareidolia” in which we assign recognisable, organised logic to forms and elements which are produced randomly. Additionally, the use of film projection in the pieces brings an extended breadth to the work by conferring an architectural aspect to this type of real time film.

Yet even though it is physically real, the city of glass is a model, a project... and as with all projects it is utopian. At the end of the sixties architects like Superstudio explored the idea of an “anti-utopia” or “negative utopia”, proposals which we cannot dissociate from a whole series of dystopias novels that were intrinsic to the European postMarxism of the late sixties and early seventies. Superstudio’s intention back then, just as it is EUG’s today, was to reveal our world as a map of consumption and to provoke thought into urban spaces as spaces of consumer repression.

Taken together these three discursive axes turn this exhibition into an exercise in social criticism, a considered response to the multiple transfers between reality and representation that we could relate to the lucubrations against architecture or against designs by groups linked to so-called “anti-design” or to “radical design”.

In the face of the certainty of “all fictional”, EUG provides us with an exercise of comings and goings around the image, an act of “anarchodesign” and of “anti-architecture” the result of which is Malfictions.

THE FALLACY OF THE CLOSED SYSTEM 2017

‘La réalité soit trop complexe pour la transmission orale´ Torres Blancas 2017

ENRIQUE CORRALES CRESPO –––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ––––––––– DOCTOR TEACHER AT UEM, RESEARCHER AND VISUAL ARTIST

bibliography

1.

La Jetée de Chris Marker, Fahrenheit 451, made film in 1966 by Truffaut, or Solaris, by Tarkovski, made in 1977. Are just some examples of these proposals that I’m talking about.

Augé, M. (1999). La guerra de los sueños, ejercicios de etnoficción.

Barcelona. Gedisa. Pág 136.

Barthes, R. (1992). La cámara lúcida, Nota sobra la fotografía, Barcelona: Paidós Comunicación. Pág 34.

Bauman, Z (2003). Modernidad Líquida, México DF, Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Bazin, A. (1990). Qué es el cine, cap. Ontología de la imagen Fotográfica.

Madrid: RIALP. Pág 30.

Breton, A. (1934) ‘La beauté convulsive’ Paris, Minotaure, nº 5, 12 may.

Costa, J. (1991). La fotografía entre sumisión y subversión. México. Ed. Trillas.

Pág 8.

Moles Abraham y Luc Janiszewski. (1992). Grafismo Funcional. Barcelona.

Ceac. Pág 17.

Wilde, O. (2004). Conversación entre Cyril y Vivian en el ensayo La decadencia de la mentira. Madrid. Ediciones Siruela.

TRIGGERED GLITCHES Madrid – Circunvalación 2017

TRIGGERED GLITCHES Madrid – El Retiro 2017

TRIGGERED GLITCHES Madrid – Casco Urbano 2017

‘THE FALLACY OF THE CLOSED SYSTEM’ 2017

‘la réalité soit trop complexe pour la transmission orale’ Torres Blancas 2017

‘LA RÉALITÉ SOIT TROP COMPLEXE POR LA TRANSMISSION ORALE’ Erótica 2016

The impossible has gained more importance than all that’s possible.

At an unidentified turning point.

That which seemed improbable, temporarily obstructs what we regarded as foreseeable.

Our presumptions of impossibility have been refuted: Trump, Brexit, a commercial flight brought down over Ukraine, Aylan and Omran, The Russian Woodpecker, [insert your most recent moment of incredulity in this space].

The natural promise of all possible futures —the precept of any technified civilisation— has been postponed. Going back to our dependence on certain demarcations has become difficult. We struggle to visualise anything beyond this barrier of fulfilled impossibilities.

The certainty of blind pilots, the confident sleep of those who slumber while they travel. Cancelled. Like the new moral dilemmas of technobiology, the search for new particles or for habitable moons.

The seed of the impossible goes unnoticed. The embryonic possesses a natural smallness, a bias towards the imperceptible. At the beginning, there were only a few scant aberrations, isolated infractions, defects that were filed away.

Our consciences rested on the supposition that the system could contain and correct any error. In particular, possible relapses of an anachronic kind. Nothing could make us revert to cycles of conflict that we had already cleared away.

We thought that progress was a univocal and irreversible vector, intrinsically autogenous. We thought it would continue to engender itself inexorably, as though the urge for proliferation were its very genome.

We did not foresee that the system would be ductile enough to manage to assimilate the glitches which, like error-filled lines of code, would start to distort it.

Small disruptive commands, blending in with the physiology of the code, passing undetected, without being labeled with warning signs or being rejected. Capable of integrating the glitch into the normal systemic operation, without preventing it to fulfil all its basic functions.

Clarity, simplification and ease of use are overrated, they are variants of the same disaffected reductionism that brought us here.

Look now.

In the most prosperous state of the nation.

The monuments in the valley appear, temporarily, distorted. Structures exposed to the gaze of consumers of antioxidants and of human growth hormone. You can see its configuration is transient too. But this is not due to natural processes of erosion, or of rust.

Everyone thinks that the Golden Gate is red, but the official colour of the bridge is called ‘International Orange’, hexadecimal code #F04A00.

It is the colour used by the aerospace industry to differentiate an object from its natural background. When they finish painting it at one end, the opposite side already shows signs of wear and they have to begin painting it again, immediately and successively.

The infiltrated error has two guises. The first exposes the weakness of the system opening it to likely actions. The second creates a mistaken impression that the system may be overridden. An illusion of power, the trick that the consumer is able to retake control, without any substantial change to his or her state.

Both guises enclose another intrinsic duality: the first, sheds any ambiguity by applying objective and sequential reasoning. This ability is now attainable only by a few individuals.

The second, submerges us deeper into the fluid of the hallucination, brewing a mournful broth of misinformation. This is an efficient means, it sucks the essence of our lowest passions producing an intense, pleasurable effect.

After these initial dualities there appear multiple uncontrollable ramifications, in the shape of geometric progressions, but we need not worry, we are individuals of great importance.

The notion of ‘protagonist’ is another premise of the hallucination. The latter configures a multitude of cosmo-centric individuals surrounded by select, personalized possessions, in the manner of totemic attributes. Scarcely differentiated beings anointed by an excess of information about their genetic traits, their vital signs, their degree of wellbeing, their reproductive vigour, their physical abilities.

In reality, there are only three names you need to know: Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, [insert the name of any political, technological or media confabulator here].

To give birth to the user, you must copulate without replicating any of the postures promoted by ‘mainstream’ pornography. Suppressing any

trait that might give away your social status or your buying habits.

The nation’s most prosperous city builds glass towers with peaks piercing the troposphere. Exclusively for you. A safe haven from the swarms of Africa, from the eastern church, safe from any archaic variant of collectivism or spirituality.

It has been built to create a pleasant experience based on a process of deglutition. It devours inhabitants.

The workers congratulate each other for taking communion with their mortgage liturgy, for inhabiting an environment in which their capacity for consumption will prevail forever.

Every Monday the vitreous city gives away new needs. A new material goal, far off yet attainable, even fuller of promise, healthier, more expert, more satisfying.

A few hostile meteorological events break across the sky unexpectedly.

As though the glitch unfolding in some areas of the system might start creeping into the lowest layers of the atmosphere too. The inhabitants try to ignore any visible change to the grid. It has been decreed that orange or violet sunsets be regarded as times of danger.

PATRICIA RODRÍGUEZ –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– –––––– AUTHOR OF THE NOVELS ‘LA HUIDA INVERSA’ AND ‘19 PULGADAS’

TRIGGERED GLITCHES San Francisco – Golden Gate Bridge 2017

Founded in 1997, El Ultimo Grito is composed of Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado. Highly acclaimed for its production in the realm of design, today the work of El Ultimo Grito’s spans multiple disciplines, contexts and media — including installations, objects, films, performances and publications, as well as curatorial, editorial and academic projects – producing work that responds to an ongoing investigation into the nature and representation of systems.

El Ultimo Grito has had solo exhibitions at the Halle Verrière (Miesenthal, 2016), fig-2 ICA (London, 2015), the Rice Gallery (Houston, 2014) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2007), as well as having participated in numerous groups shows including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2007), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, 2015), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijon, 2009) and the 10th Gwangju Bienniale (2014). The work of El Ultimo Grito forms part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum Collection (London), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem) and the Shanghai Museum of Glass.

In 2012 El Ultimo Grito was awarded the prestigious London Gold Design Medal acknowledging their contribution to design in the United Kingdom. Independent of their collaborative work, Roberto Feo is Professor of Practice at Goldsmiths University of London and Rosario Hurtado directs the MA Space and Communication at HEAD Géneve.

Graphic Design: Yarza Twins.

ISBN 978-0-9956986-1-1 Published by VfXP in association with Galería Elba Benítez, London 2017.

Printed by Printdomain, UK. All the works and texts are © of their authors.

Photographs: El Ultimo Grito.

Photographs pages 22-23: Luis Asín.

Contacts: Galería Elba Benítez

San Lorenzo 11 28004 Madrid, Spain. www.elbabenitez.com info@elbabenitez.com VfXP_Goldsmiths

12 Laurie Grove

New Cross SE14 6NW UK vehicleforexperimentalpractice@gmail.com El Ultimo Grito info@eugstudio.com www.eugstudio.com Thanks to Ori Gersht for the generosity with his time and knowledge and to Brian Voce, for materialising this support, to Nick Williamson for his ingenuity and technical support, to Andrew Hunt for his capacity of improvisation and production, to Eva and Marta Yarza, for their patience and good practice, to Elba Feo, for her interpretations and to HEAD-Genève and to Goldsmiths University London for their constant support.