Synthetika

Unlike Hegel, who called the set of ideas of a given era the “spirit of the times” (Zeitgeist), we could call our era “Zeitsynthetik” (the time of the synthetic). In the classical period, art was inseparable from religion, whose essence was spirituality; in modernity, spirituality was replaced by the ideologies of grand narratives (capitalism and socialism). The classical arts invented poetics and aesthetics: the beautiful and the sublime. Modern art invented the avant-garde that proposed to be revolutionary, its driving force was the dialectic of the new without the old, and on the other hand, postmodernists mixed everything with everything, including the old with the new. Today we live in the era of synthetic technologies, the era of disruptive technologies. In which the new of modernity is no longer sufficient or surprising. Syntheticity is the new vector: synthetic algorithms; synthetic virtual realities; synthetic intelligences. The driving force behind synthetic art is: 1) the fusion of new art and technological innovation, and 2) the inter-creativity between the artist and artificial creativity. Prompt engineers strategically simulate personas for AIs in order to move away from triviality and thus obtain more creative results. Synthetic intelligences are no longer just instruments, but partners of artists in the construction of a creative and innovative symbiosis.

Art and culture are going through a moment in which creativity ceases to be just human, it becomes artificial; syntheticity thus prospects a post-culture, a new FORM: the form SYNTHETIKA.

Ricardo Barreto

Curator and co-founder of FILE

Electronic Language International Festival

Mosaic Virus
Mosaic Virus (2018) e Mosaic Virus (2019) sono una serie di opere che raccolgono idee sul capitalismo, il valore e il crollo da diversi punti della storia. Il primo è un pezzo di immagine in movimento a schermo singolo che mostra una griglia di tulipani in continua evoluzione in fiore; la seconda un’installazione video su tre schermi, ognuno dei quali mostra un singolo tulipano. In entrambi i pezzi i tulipani sono controllati dal prezzo del bitcoin, cambiando nel tempo per mostrare come fluttua il mercato e rendendo esplicito questo collegamento. Tulipmania è stato un fenomeno del XVII secolo che ha visto il prezzo dei bulbi di tulipano aumentare e crollare: al culmine andando allo stesso prezzo di una casa di città di Amsterdam prima di scendere al prezzo di una cipolla. È spesso considerato un esempio di uno dei primi casi registrati di una bolla speculativa e si possono fare forti parallelismi con la speculazione in corso sulle criptovalute. C’è un’evidente connessione economica tra i due sistemi – entrambi sono spesso descritti come frenesie instabili – ma per me questa associazione va oltre il modo in cui i prezzi dei due si comportano su un grafico.

Brazil Now
BRAZIL NOW is a composition that addresses increasing militarization and surveillance within urban areas. Its geographical and acoustic reference is São Paulo, the largest megacity in Latin America. The piece is based on field recordings that capture the symptoms of a Latin American variant of turbo-capitalism with its distinctive acoustic features. Eruptive public demonstrations on the streets are often accompanied by loud, carnivalesque elements. These are controlled by a militarized infrastructure, openly demonstrating a readiness to deploy violence. The sonic documents are analyzed by machine learning algorithms searching for acoustic memes, textures, and rhythms that could be symptomatic for predominant social forces. The algorithmic results are then used as a base for a score and its interpretation through a musical ensemble. The piece drafts a phantasmatic auditory landscape built on the algorithmic evaluation of urban conflict zones.

Moving atmospheres
Moving Atmospheres, the tenth Garage Atrium Commission curated by Iaroslav Volovod, is a partially mirrored sphere suspended in the air, propelling us towards an Aerocene epoch. We call towards this new era with Aerocene. For more than a decade we have been imagining a world free from the carbon, extractivism, capitalism and patriarchy that fuels some forms of life, a new way of being with the atmosphere and emissions-free travel, free from solar panels, lithium, helium, hydrogen and fossil fuels. This new era stands in stark contrast to the lingering eco-traumas of the Anthropocene, the current geological age in which some human capitalistic activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

The Present Condition

The landscapes of ‘The Present Condition’ derive from a journey of more than 15,000 km by land by the artist between the two geographical extremes of South America. The video is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, where real and imaginary spaces intersect. Concepts such as human intimacy, desire, work, the savage capitalism that builds cathedrals in the desert, the perverse bureaucracy and the construction of the border wall are just some of the elements that are mixed in a striking and suggestive mosaic of images.

file sp 2019 videoart

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Джозефин Мексепер
Josephine Meckseper is adept at critiquing her environment. She questioned the prosperity of the art world by placing an “Out of Business” sign in the window of a gallery in Chelsea (a similarly cheeky “Help Wanted” sign attracted up to 20 applicants a day who had failed to get in on the joke). In 2012 she erected two 25-foot oil rigs in the heart of Times Square to remind unsuspecting tourists about the perils of capitalism and industrialization. Her work critically examines mass media, our consumption-obsessed society, and even our political systems.

АНДРЕАС ГУРСКИ
안드레아스 거스키
安德烈亚斯·古尔斯基
أندرياس غورسكي
アンドレアスことスキー
אנדריאס גורסקי
Bahrain
Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life. Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints.

Андреас Гурски
안드레아스 거스키
安德烈亚斯·古尔斯基
أندرياس غورسكي
アンドレアスことスキー
אנדריאס גורסקי
Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Андреас Гурски
안드레아스 거스키
安德烈亚斯·古尔斯基
أندرياس غورسكي
アンドレアスことスキー
אנדריאס גורסקי
‘Pyongyang I’
Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.

Ruins of capitalism
Autrefois une métropole florissante, au cœur du monde industrialisé, Détroit était un exemple de la manière de réaliser le rêve américain. Aujourd’hui, la magnificence qui caractérisait autrefois cette ville demeure sous la forme de ses bâtiments abandonnés. Au cours des cinq dernières années, un projet a été en vigueur pour préserver et immortaliser les bâtiments comme preuve de la magnificence de son passé.