The Blog of José Alcalá for Digital Art and Culture

Presentación de mi último libro La Piel de la Imagen, viernes 21 de octubre a las 18,80 h. en la Feria de Estampa de Madrid

2011-10-21T03:14:00.000-07:00

Estimados amigos:

Tras 6 años de intenso trabajo y casi 3 tratando de encontrar la editorial adecuada y lo suficientemente valiente como para quererlo publicar, por fin sale a la luz mi último libro.
Lo he titulado La piel de la imagen: Ensayos sobre gráfica en la cultura digital, e inaugura una nueva colección de la editorial Sendemá titulada Arte y Reflexión, dentro de su serie ya abierta Estudios Contemporáneos.

Toda la información a cerca del mismo la encontraréis en: http://www.sendemaeditorial.com/ (entrando en ella, aparece mi libro al primer clic). En este link el editor ha descargado mucha información sobre el libro, como algunos de sus textos (por si queréis obtener + info al respecto leyendo partes del mismo), la posibilidad de comprarlo online (sin coste alguno en el envío postal), y mucho +.

La presentación del libro se realizará el próximo viernes día 21 (octubre), a las 18,30 h. en la sala contigua a la Sala Vip del pabellón 8 de la feria de IFEMA de Madrid, http://www.grupodx5.es/presentacion-del-libro-on-minded,151.html , y dentro del I Foro de Arte Múltiple que ha organizado la Feria de Estampa 2011 http://www.estampa.org/foros.html . La presentación correrá a cargo de Juan Martín Prada (especialista reconocido en este campo de investigación), en ella estarán también Ana Soler (como coordinadora del I Foro de Arte Múltiple) y el editor del libro, Paco Berenguer.

Dentro del mismo acto se presentará también el libro del grupo de investigación DX5, coordinado por Ana Soler y Kako Castro: On minded prints, on prints minded; Gráfica contemporánea de campo expandido, y cuyo ponente (Javier de Blas) se unirán a los de mi libro al final de ambas presentaciones para hacer una Mesa Redonda y debatir conjuntamente sobre las problemáticas planteadas en estas publicaciones (de contenidos y campos de reflexión afines).

La asistencia a dichas presentaciones es gratuita (no hay que pagar nada si sólo se piensa asistir a la de los libros). Pero como para pasar por la puerta principal es necesario disponer de entrada, la organización de la Feria de Estampa os dará una entrada si os identificáis como asistentes a dicha presentación en el Mostrador que hay a la derecha en el vestíbulo principal de entrada a la feria y cuyo rotulo pone PRENSA ESTAMPA.

Aprovecho la ocasión para anunciaros que casi al mismo tiempo que La piel de la imagen, la Universidad de Chile me ha publicado otro libro también de reciente creación, titulado Ser Digital; Manual para náufragos de la cultura electrónica. Aunque espero tener + info al respecto de su distribución, por ahora sólo me han llegado a España 2 ejemplares del mismo, y no puedo daros todavía más información acerca de cómo conseguirlo. Está previsto que en fechas próximas se celebre una presentación al público del mismo en la Embajada de España en Santiago de Chile.

En cualquier caso, os adjunto los datos exactos de ambas publicaciones por si fuera de vuestro interés:

-ALCALÁ, José Ramón: La piel de la imagen: Ensayos sobre gráfica en la cultura digital. Valencia, Sendemá, 2011. 175 pp. ISBN: 978-84-938045-7-2.

-ALCALÁ, José Ramón: Ser Digital; Manual para náufragos de la cultura electrónica, Santiago de Chile, Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile. 2011. 207 pp. ISBN: 978-956-19-0721-8.

LÚMEN_EX 2011, Digital Art Awards in You tube

2011-03-28T03:35:00.000-07:00

Now, you can watch all the awarded and selected animation pieces of the LÚMEN_EX DIGITAL ART AWARDS 2011's 2nd. www.youtube.com/premioslumenex

2ª Edición d elos Premios de Arte Digital / Digital Art Awards LÚEMN_EX 2011

2011-01-10T04:47:00.000-08:00

2º PREMIOS ARTE DIGITAL / 2nd. DIGITAL ART AWARDS LÚMEN_EX 2011

La semana pasada presenté en la sede de la Universidad de Extremadura, en la ciudad Cáceres, la 2ª edición de los Premios de Arte Digital / DIGITAL ART AWARDS, LÚMEN_EX 2011, cuyo plazo de envío de obras está ya abierto hasta el día 18 de febrero.

En esta edición, se pueden presentar obras a dos modalidades (secciones):

Animaciones de corta duración <>
Piezas virtuales interactivas (INTERACTIVOS)

Os paso los links para que podías acceder a toda la información y descargaos las bases y los formularios de participación.

WEB: http://www.lumenex.net
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/PremiosLUMENEX
EMAIL: premiosartedigital@unex.es

Como podréis comprobar, a pesar de las dificultades económicas y de los necesarios recortes presupuestarios, hemos conseguido, no sólo poder volver a convocar el certamen, sino hacer que esta 2ª edición mantenga el nivel de interés y de calidad que alcanzamos con la 1ª edición. Por eso es tan importante poder contar de nuevo con vuestra participación, que tanto prestigio le dio a estos premios.

Este certamen tiene el aliciente de que los premiados pasan a formar parte de una importante colección de Arte Digital que se comenzó a crear el año pasado para la Universidad de Extremadura. Además, como podréis ver en las bases, el jurado es un auténtico lujo dentro del mundo del arte y de los museos.

Por otra parte, tanto las piezas premiadas como las seleccionadas por el jurado tendrán el aliciente añadido de que serán expuestas en el prestigioso museo MEIAC de Badajoz (en su magnífico recién estrenado espacio expositivo para piezas virtuales y proyectivas), donde se hará además la entrega de premios.

Married by Facebook

2010-11-20T01:44:00.001-08:00

It happened to me. It was three weeks ago. It was long ago that opened the Facebook. In doing so I stumbled out suddenly with my profile. Status: "In a relationship." What the hell! I am not in any relationship. I am living with Virginia. What is more, a few days ago we went to the Domestic Partner Registry of the Regional Government of Valencia Community to get an appointment for the performance of official registration form. I found it something much more serious than I had imagined: "You each must bring a witness of legal age. You can specify the contractual conditions of your union, etc. So it seemed to me logical and sincere to change my "state" (if one wants to be sincere in Facebook, this is one of the small details that reveals that you are not a digital native). Unfortunately, there were only 2 more options: "Single" or "Married." So then: "Married. It was then the closest option. Is it not true that I am sharing with Vir costs of renting the house in which we live? Did not we just open a joint bank account? These are the things that really linked you with the loved one, more than children or a religious ceremony. These are the truly momentous decisions in your common daily life. So, after pondering for a few seconds, I decided to click the "Married" option.

Ten minutes later, an avalanche of congratulations flooded my wall. Most of my closest friends and my family pissed for not being invited to the wedding. Less close friends were pleasantly surprised to be confirmed from the distance that I have just turned to be a guy who takes things of life seriously. The simply known and whose relationship is primarily through Facebook, felt forced to congratulate me for having been revealed this transcendent act.

Oh my goodness, what a big mess! And the worst of all was that the same thing happened to Virginia in her Facebook wall. I swear I did not write in my profile in who I was "married." No matter: Facebook already knew. No doubt for Facebook who was my actual wife. And it was right! But, gee, what a way to announce a new detail of my profile!

When I went back into my profile I understood why all the fuss. Moments after activating the "Married" option, a phrase made up with giant bold characters was automatically written by the software of this infernal machine and it topped my Facebook wall: "José Ramón Alcalá has married Virpaniagua."

Overwhelmed, we could not deny it. It was not uncertain. After flushing and reprimands, came away a bit of physically and mentally distance allowing an ironic reasoning: In fact, as pointed Vir: “We had just married by Facebook”. Perhaps it is the first wedding which takes place through the official social certification of a social network. Then, we celebrate it. Long live the newlyweds!

The José Alcalá's taxonomy of New Media Arts

2010-01-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

New Media Arts

Taxonomy. A classification

José R. Alcalá. MIDECIANT. UCLM. Cuenca (Spain).

1. Digital Arts

a. Digital Imaging

b. Digital Graphics

c. Digital Design (Industrial & Virtual Architecture)

2. Time-based Arts

a. Audiovisuals

i. Digital Cinema

ii. Digital Video

iii. TV (Broadcast)

b. Computer animation

i. 2D Animation

ii. 3D Animation

c. Multimedia

3. Communication Arts

a. Telematics

b. Net Art

c. Communities

4. Interactive Arts

a. Interactive Multimedia

b. Browser Art

c. Interactive Installations

d. Virtual Environments

i. Full-Digital Environments

ii. Mixed Reality

iii. Augmented Reality

5. AScT

a. Software Art (Code)

b. Robotics

c. Genetic Art

d. Bio Art

e. Artificial Life

5 people; 1 experience: 5 different perceptions; Walid Raad and the experience of Beirut.

2010-01-17T03:43:00.000-08:00

There is a videoart piece by Walid Raad (Lebanon, 1967) in the Collection of Video Art in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The Atlas Group, entitled “Hostage: The Bachar Tapes”.

Crafted on a series of tapes as an audiovisual narrative of Lebanese citizen Souheil Bachar (low-level employee of the American embassy in Beirut), it describes Bachar’s experience as a hostage of Lebanese militants over a ten-year period (1983-1993).

As described on tapes 17 and 31, after Bachar was taken hostage, he was driven to a basement in the suburbs of Beirut, near the capital city airport. He was forced to live there alongside five American citizens who had also been kidnapped. They were kept in a 3 x 3.5 meter cell for 27 weeks.

Once they had all been freed, each of the five American hostages who had shared the cell with Bachar wrote a book describing the same experience. Each of these five books was totally different. But what really surprised Souheil was that “all five began their books talking about time. Time? Would that be because they wanted to show that what had befallen them had been something unpredictable and unnatural? Possibly…”.

This real experience shows us unequivocally that, despite sharing the same visual space, the same landscape, the bare architecture which was free of references to the outside world, in an inhuman cell of barely nine square meters, each of the six hostages had had a completely different experience. The perceptions described by each of the six men turn this common experience into something personal and non-transferable, despite an unbearable minimalism and stripping-away of individualism.

This reflection prepares us for the fact that struggling with perception and a sense of space-time in cyberspace is an extremely difficult and complex task, considering that it involves a personal and non-transferable experience. I am inspired by the conviction that what we have understood as space and time up to now—as reality—is nothing more than a panel made up of a collage of thoughts derived from individual and subjective experiences just like those I am using now.

The air from Barcelona: Can a train carry air from the city of its departure to its final destination?

2010-01-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

There where we find darkness and light at once,

we also find the inexplicable.

Samuel Beckett .1

Returning from a trip to Barcelona on a high-speed train, the five-year-old child in the seat in front of me asked her mother (about 90 minutes after setting off and about halfway through the journey) if we had arrived in Valencia yet. The mother said no. It was night time, and as the car was lit from within, nothing could be seen outside. Not satisfied with this answer, the girl asked her mother again: “So then, we’re still in Barcelona?”

At that very moment (thanks to the girl’s questions, or rather to my later reflection on it) I understood totally that the girl had really believed that Barcelona was a slice of time-space that travelled with her inside the train. She thought it would only leave her side (as a sort of mobile connective space between two distant realities) when she got off the train at her destination. The air of Barcelona (or perhaps we should say Barcelona-ether) would be converted into a substantial concept—in physical terms—that would pervade the interior of the train car until the moment that one abandoned it.

Such is not the case in physics, which offers its own explanations based on concrete mathematical formulas. But for converts to the digital culture, these questions are settled with these sorts of explanation-reflections. Something, then, has been displaced.

Thus, the question of phenomenon (that which is contributed by a digital life), might be resolved—insofar as those fundamental philosophical concepts which concern us—by observing the relationship between exterior space-time and the interior of an object which travels at great speed from one point to another, like some kind of space tele-transporter that travels through space at such velocity that, in reality, it is facing only time and is thus connecting two topographical spaces as if by a vacuum tunnel.

This, of course, only makes sense in the context of a culture carved out of mental mechanisms such as those which overlap the representation, the multi-constructional narrative that follows channel-surfing and hypermedia navigation and, in general, the connective mechanisms of the mind distributed from current digital individuals.

[1] JULIET, Charles: Conversations with Samuel Beckett . Ed. Siruela. Madrid. 2006.

Art and Transdisciplinarity. The artistic creation in the field of the A/C/T.

2010-01-15T00:30:00.000-08:00

It constitutes for me a thought appellant, that does not stop oppressing to me since I tripped for the first time over the field of creative action ACT (ART/SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY). I must confess that alive professionally obsessed to the specific paper of the artist in the multidisciplinary set than we called present Knowledge.

When I use to teach at the Faculty of Fine Arts or give Workshops, courses or conferences, always treatment to establish defined passages or (in its limits and their objectives and contents) towards the specific knowledge that assumes what should be the endorsement of the specific roll of these future artists at the time of participating in collective or interdisciplinary works. Because I have observed that when multidisciplinary projects set out in which artists participate, these almost never know with exactitude which would be its specific paper in the common table of work, and then, they begin to consider what is what they know how to do and what not, and if they have worried previously, in its formative process, to work a technical and conceptual set of tools whom they define accurately and it gives arguments to its social and cultural rolls.

Most lamentable it is than very few of the present schools and faculties of Fine Arts have considered in their formative programs and their curricula these questions, having turned the objectives, contents and matters that supply in a potpourri without a very defined goals.

I know that - to difference of many of my companions artists, more purists than I- I am part of the group of creators who thought that it is very exciting and flattering to know to us integral of the set of intellectuals who have accepted from the society the responsibility to formalize (give a precise shape) the world of the new ideas that constitutes the budding culture that, first we dreamed, soon we thought about serious and later we designed on paper (or screen), but that cannot live on because not yet we have learned to being users of the same.

Our contemporaries hope, as eager as excited, to recognize and recognize themselves through our creations the world that already think but that they not yet live in fullness. These creations are not constituted by the new images that will solely comprise of our imaginary contemporary, but also by those alternative symbolic systems, whose allegorical and metaphorical constructions will allow the wished usability of the new operative mechanisms of the expanded knowledge that will formalize this Culture.

As the Renaissance artists and creators did during century XIV, when they constructed the perspective system able symbolically to contain functional and the harmonic and unified representation of the new ideas -whose conceptual medullar center was not but an unpublished human conception (and, therefore, vision) of the world, at present, Internet is trying to becomes the system (not only functional, but also conceptual and symbolic), able to unify all the strategies that mark the conception (vision and action) on the world that we have occurred in living (and therefore in dreaming), and that must contemplate and assume parameters such as virtual, interactive, ubiquous, multimedia and multifunctional, linguistic heterodox, and global (or glocal).

For this enormous and exciting task, updated artists (and the creators generally) must irremediably work in communion with the rest of intellectuals and thinkers, of scientists and technologists, sharing the common passion by the development of this task, being understood mutually, feeding back themselves in an never-ending loop and assuming perfectly defined specific rolls inside the complementary work.

Each of them have to know accurately what profile and what background guarantees to him, which are their strengths and their weaknesses, what languages and specific tecno-functional strategies to be used, in what moment they must act in solitude and which of joint form, shared.

They must design between all the interrelation system of its contributions and to construct for it a Culture of the interdisciplinary that allows to reach this longed for transdisciplinar knowledge (in its etymological sense of cross-over), that will only be able to be reached from an education oriented in this direction.

These are part of the important reasons that take to me to deal with continuously to understand the evolution of the roll of the artist in the set of the work for the construction of the knowledge and of the contemporary ideas and to reach therefore a certain understanding about which it is to us own and specific and of they are not more than banal and mistaken incursions in fields of the knowledge that are fields that belong to other people's disciplines.