Drift 360
Roc Parés
Catalonia (Spain) - Mexico
In the age of the digital image, we must ask ourselves what we are looking at when we look at a work of art. Contemporary creativity is a continuous aesthetic drift in which different disciplines converge to generate a collective imaginary that is the disembodied result of the diverse ways of creating in the 21st century. Post-photography, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, immaterial and generative art, have forged a new epistemology of digital tools that push us to ask from where we perceive?
And it is within this framework of reflection that Deriva 360 is situated, an artistic project by Roc Parés Burguès, a participatory audiovisual performance that takes place in real time and materializes in the launching into the sky of a mobile device that broadcasts its journey live, propelled by a bunch of helium-filled balloons that drag it inexorably towards the unknown. The public present can not only participate in the launch phases but also follow in real time, through a GPS system, the unpredictable prowl of the curious artifact that is a brilliant example of low cost and easy access technology.
The action, which had significant precedents at the Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico, at the University of Paris or at MIT in Massachusetts, will be extended in an audiovisual installation. Thus culminates a geopoiesic action whose narrative threads will have an inverted time frame in which the journey of the mobile device is narrated from the end, when the signal is definitively lost, to the beginning, when it is released by the artist.
Deriva 360 is a poetic action that aims to awaken critical and participatory consciousness, inviting us to reflect on where we look from and from what perspective we look at reality and the work of art in the age of the immaterial image. So it is natural to ask ourselves what we see in a work of art, without forgetting that nothing we see is reality but an interpretation of it mediated by our senses, experiences and knowledge and also by the use of the technological tools used and the relative perspective distortion of the observed reality.
Deriva 360 is the story of an unusual journey. A journey whose point of arrival is an undefined reality, a terra infirma that appears after an unpredictable audiovisual development between urban and cartographic nuclei. From a metaphorical perspective, Deriva 360 evokes a manifestation of generative art, an audiovisual becoming in continuous transformation, controlled by physical forces and narrated from an electronic eye capable of immortalizing an exchangeable environment that comes to life from a flow of data, whose memory after the performative act will be stored in the network.
In addition to being rooted in the tradition of performance, Deriva 360 shapes an immaterial work of art, which winks at what net.art was at the time and the relationship it established with the public. Everything is triggered by a performative gesture, a creative and theatrical gesture in relation to itself and to the audience, with whom it establishes a direct relationship, involving them in the audiovisual performance, inexorably transforming their sterile contemplative role.
With its small mobile device that moves with a bird's eye view, isolating itself from the possibilities of the body, Deriva 360 points to virtual and remote subjectivities that go beyond human perception and our interaction with the world.
Virtual and remote subjectivities have always been a constant in Roc Parés' work. Over more than thirty years his works are characterized by a documentary dimension that intermingles with what happens in real time, altering the temporal dimensions and generating an existentialist narrative that speaks of immateriality and technology and the use we make of them as a society.
“The image of the world does not pass from being medieval to being modern, but it is the very fact that the world can become an image that characterizes the essence of the Modern Age.”
Martin Heidegger “The Age of the World Picture” (1938)
Roberta Bosco