Folding Pattern is an art project developed by the team of artists, Cristina Ghetti and Emanuele Mazza. The work starts from the idea of proposing a revision of the foundations of perceptual abstraction, that had in it's derivations, one of the art movements more connected with the use of new technologies and one of the art tendencies with more powerful and interesting arguments. We are interested in exploring the developments of abstraction in the digital era, incorporating new media tools, and analyzing how contemporary art is developing the ideas of modernist abstraction introducing the utilization of new technologies, in a context where the influence of science, and of new ways of producing and exhibiting the art works, changes completely the art world.
TopIntroduction
In the rich and complex scene of the new century, new findings in the neurologic perception studies of the last two decades, applied to the visual art studies, and the capabilities of new media tools, opens us new and interesting fields of research and experimentation. Our projects investigate and intend to show, how long of remaining truncated, some proposals and goals from the abstract avant-gardes are re-arising nowadays, and even getting powerful expressing theirselves with new technologies and scientific concepts acquired in the last decades. Following the conductive thread raised some decades ago by the avant-garde’s art pioneers, contemporary artists are researching in the field of art and technology. The case we present is an example of a collaborative generated audio-visual environment (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Folding _Pattern One. Capture
TopNew Abstractions
Lev Manovich defines new abstract practices as complex, dynamic and instable, in opposition to the geometric essentialism of the avant-gardes.
It’s paradigm is complexity If modernist art followed modern science in reducing the mediums of art as well as our sensorial, ontological, and epistemological experiences and models reality to basic elements and simple structures, contemporary software abstraction instead recognizes the essential complexity of the world (Manovich, 2004).
According to this idea, we develop a work joining abstraction and its relationship with software and information society, working with an abstract image that feeds herself of chosen data on line, and reflecting it in the social system. The image, then, results a dynamic form of unstable fluctuations.We consider geometric abstraction as the most adapted language to express the complexity of our time. We are interested in geometry as a « pleasure of seeing», transmitter and receptor of emotions, generator of multiples perceptions: from calm and lyricism up to confusion and agitation. This orients our research departing from a vocabulary reduced to color and simple repetitive forms generating fluctuations of noise, color, and frequencies. We try to establish relations of synesthetic character between form and sound(Ghetti, 2011).
Contemporary art is actually involved with scientific concepts and hybrid fields, the utilization of new media in their artworks allows visual artists to afford topics as creating virtual collaborative spaces or online digital places where individuals and groups can socialize and interact in a virtual or real shared space.
First we have to categorize the different degrees of interaction that an art piece using technologies can propose:
Some art pieces generate interactivity between the user and the environment through the mechanisms of subjective perception. The process of interactivity takes part in the inner time of the user (allows us to see ourselves and be aware of the environment representation). We can call this “perceptual interactivity” and is applicable to the Works that we had developed until now, and that we analyze in this article, as Folding Pattern Zero, and One (see Figure 2))
Figure 2. Folding _Pattern One. Fem Code show, Faculty of fine ArtsPolythecnic University Valencia, 2014.
The second grade of interaction we can apply to this art pieces, are those where the space act as an interface, mediating in a constructed environment like a superposed layer. Some kind of stimuli, chosen by the author, is translated into data, (talking in computer language) changing the aspect of the art piece.
Folding project is now in this second step, conceiving a multi-user art piece which provide different visual patterns depending on the users actions or the web inputs to the interface.