8=8 The Virtual Museum Project

 

GONZALO MEZZA: FROM INSCRIPTION TO INTERACTION.

Justo Pastor Mellado.

As an independent critic and historian, I have followed closely and for more than a decade the work of Gonzalo Mezza. Coming from the field of Social Sciences and Philosophy, my critical work had no connections with art until the eighties. Precisely when I was back from my studies in France, the first rupture artwork that I saw -at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile, and under a military dictatorship- was La cruz del sur (The Southern Cross) 1981 . I did not know its author. I saw him, he was worried, absorbed in his editing work, changing video-tapes: he was Gonzalo Mezza, who had won a prize at the VI Colocadora Nacional de Valores. /T.N.: VI National Values Investment Bank Prize/

In our collaborative work, this exhibition at the Caixa comes as a strange situation, because it sums up a story of meetings and discussions between an artist and a critic. It is worth saying that this is not a retrospective exhibition, but a retroverted and -why not- recursive essay. Thus, to accomplish this purpose the project has two part: a video projection and sixteen digital prints finely mounted on acrylic and lit by led lights.

The projection consists in the viewing of eighty digital reproductions that depict anonymous interventions on significant matrixes in the work of Gonzalo Mezza. These are the documents that register modifications produced by interactive tolerance. In contrast, graphic reproductions portray images that come from these modifications mentioned before, which were worked on as digital expansions of the prints. This involves activating a hypothesis that assumes a certain kind of technological retraction from the digital production device, while introducing an element of excess that transforms the conditions of material reproducibility of the image.

From this point on I tackle an analysis that may seem contradictory and even contrary to what Gonzalo Mezza himself thinks about the history of his work. This is why I propose an exhibition in two parts, one of them documentary, the other incidental. However, each of these terms affects the other, documentation affects his work, but at the same time, interactive interventions on his matrixes document the perception and circulation of his works. This is one of the most productive points of our debate, from which it is possible to formulate the following question: What are the implications of authorship assertion in the digital media?

Gonzalo Mezza slips away and takes refuge in the physicality of the graphic works that hold him within the museum space. That is when I question his decisions on formal policies, to demand from him a total consistence with virtuality. But no! Again he insists on a compromised solution, which is to control intermediate moments of negotiation with the viewer, who looks at an exhibition in a way that differs radically from that of the reader-consumer in front of a computer terminal. In fact, terminals and computer booths increasingly resemble domestic spaces, to the point that a terminal disputes its presence as an object among other appliances, in a home within which it seems to embody the existence of the non-domestic atmosphere.

At the time we were preparing this exhibition, and to argue against my need for radical network action, Gonzalo Mezza gave me a book published in 2009 by Margarita Schultz, entitled A New Ontology? (The philosophical rights of cyber culture). That was a great stroke of cleverness. Margarita Schultz takes part in this catalog in charge of the analysis of the most emblematic works of Gonzalo Mezza. I devoured the book immediately, surpassing Mezza’s dropped hints. These are the most rewarding experiences during collaborative work in a show like this. Even the contradictions of our visions become points of progress and exchange. Gonzalo Mezza's cunning way of avoiding my demands, ultimately determines a criterion of periodization for his work, for which the use of a category introduced by Margarita Schultz seems very useful to me.

This category was devised by Margarita Schultz after reading the texts of Anne Cauquelin, when the latter resorts to the philosophy of the Stoics to think about the organization of cyberspace in its peculiarity. This implies, of course, bringing together two extremely distant cultural moments in the history of thought, which, however, are illuminating if we bind them abstractly. Thus, Margarita Schultz can say that `when thinking about the nature of cyberspace and its objects, we see that the qualities of that space (even when incompletely characterized) adaptively select the qualities of the objects that inhabit it, and vice versa.´ And later she adds: `Digital objects and cyberspace qualitatively belong to each other in their own domain.´

I think, then, that with this I will corner Gonzalo Mezza and ask him: why, if your work claims for the dominance of digital virtuality, you manage to base your exhibitions on the presence of graphic works? This is a question that can only be made from a criticism that does not jeopardize friendship, since trust is determined by the nature of our exchanges, in the course of which, Gonzalo Mezza answers me with a `reformist´ argument, intended to install an objective corporeality commitment. Gonzalo Mezza applies his communication skills, taking advantage of them in the negotiation with institutions. But this is acceptable to me only from the use that Margarita Schultz makes of the term `incorporeal´, which will obviously be of use to Gonzalo Mezza. But nothing is so simple! This term allows Margarita Schultz to address the concept of emptiness effectively. If bodies and emptiness need each other as counterforms, then the presence of graphic objects in Gonzalo Mezza’s work requires the unstable and fleeting counterform of digital objects. Thus, one has to think that an exhibition by Gonzalo Mezza is always an area of compromise between two tempos, two spaces, and two corporealities. In this sense, Gonzalo Mezza handles the notion of `incorporeal´ at will, because he uses it intermediately, to meet educational requirements, heavily dominated by museographic needs that otherwise borrow their forms from giantographic devices (as in the Biennial of Sao Paulo) or photographic (as in the Mercosur Biennial and in this current exhibition).

So far, one can distinguish two moments in the production of Gonzalo Mezza: the first one, from 1971 to 1976, when he took part in collective actions with public space and landscape interventions; and the second one, from 1976 to 1981, which was characterized by a relationship between video installation and video performance. After that date, especially around the nineties, his work focused on explorations of interactivity and `digital art´. To some extent, his work gradually went from the intrusion on the landscape to the responsive singularity of networks; he went through an autobiographic representation of corporeality and followed closely the rapid development of technologies for recording and transmission.
                                                                      
Thus, the persistent and programmed `placement´ of corporeal objects on emblematic junctions of the Chilean territory, moved towards the flexible installation of mobilizing networks, characterized by a delegated and shared authorial subjectivity. As I have stated before, his graphic work is justified as a commitment platform, while he develops interactive works, such as those presented at the Biennial of Sao Paulo and the Biennial of Mercosur. Therefore, the validity of my assumptions about the moments of corporeal transition of his work is completely valid. What defines his attitude is the desire to articulate, in the corresponding time and space, graphic and museographic statements with moments of openness and interactive hybridization.

I have spoken of a battery of icons that are recurrent in the work of Gonzalo Mezza. A text by Arlindo Machado, which was written for his exhibition at the MARGS in Porto Alegre, made me get back to an idea that he had postulated there. In the text, Arlindo Machado mentions the expressive capacity of certain icons, which, incidentally, Gonzalo Mezza retrieves from their use in the environment, getting them back as reproductions of reproductions. This is no accident, since his repeated retrieval of meaningful icons, serializes the common uses of the same icons in mass culture. Thanks to them, he was able to mount a fictitious location which led him to create The Southern Cross in 1980. For this and other projects he did not hesitate to travel to Ecuador, in order to capture with precision the visual intensions he expressed about the Equator line. This would become, since then, a simple way to map his own degrees of intensity and combine different quotation schemes, where he resorted to Japanese and Mapuche images, and fixed scriptures that have not yet been deciphered. Meanwhile, he created a thought ecosystem that is strongly anchored in the media and in the use of his most habitual iconic references.

This is why his `obsession´ with the matrix image of Venus makes sense; an image that already appears in his works from the seventies, and to which he resorted again in the eighties and then in the nineties, as a carried matrix. It is necessary to recognize in this resource the parodical use of a Greco-Roman reference, in a political moment in which people seek to annul the republican determinations of social knowledge. Only those whose tracks experience the threat of deletion maintain the policy of producing persistent matrix images. Therefore, the work of Gonzalo Mezza initially states an identity fixation through a printing technique, as this is a technology used for inscription. Thus, beyond the periodization of his work, I can affirm that his two main lines have been Inscription and Interactivity.

However, through this entire formal path, Gonzalo Mezza maintains his reservoir of common images so that they can be provided in a sort of menu of endless symbolic modifications. Thus, a matrix image as that of Venus is photocopied and frozen inside a block of ice, just to experience its de-icing and to be left as a residue from a melted image, which has reached the end of a terminal flow. Ice is only a ghost that threatens its opposite -the burning dryness of the image fixing device- displacing traditional print technologies, some of which worked with acids. But we undoubtedly remain in the realm of a metaphor, which is where Gonzalo Mezza himself wants to take us with another trick.

In relation to this, my own suspicion is that we might live in a cyberworld which we access by using a terminology that comes from a kind of `imprinting unconscious.´ In this sense, I agree with Paulo Sergio Duarte when he speaks about progressive dependency relationships in the history of the means of mechanical reproduction, to indicate that digital culture requires a consistent Copernican revolution, enabled by paradigms that redefine the relationships of man and the machines that create virtuality. Precisely, that is the sense of the fiction that Gonzalo Mezza has created, when he explains the formula of his program: `Art is released information, the internet cyberspace is a new state of numerical matter, but digital culture happens in that third margin or infinite dimension, that I call the eighth art.´ The eighth art is present in the graphic work of his statement, retrieving reveries connected with certain numerologies determined by the equality of 1 byte to 8 bits, and then rotating and fixing the sign in an evocation of infinite, that is to say, of the endless exchangeabilities associated with a complete liberation of networks, which inevitably come to change the field of art.

However, more than the rising of a terminological suspicion, what the work of Gonzalo Mezza claims is a new relationship with the understructure of knowledge production; even further, with the possibility of digital works that, from the world of communications, object the legitimacy lines of artistic productions. What is stated is, then, a matter of jurisdictional powers among incorporeal productions, whose sole existence is verified from inside a network, and that are moderated by a fiction that gives new dimensions to the coordinates of corporeal presence.

           

 

 

     

GONZALO MEZZA BRAZIL-2010

by Margarita Schultz

  1. Some words of access

 

The work of the Chilean artist Gonzalo Mezza (1949 - Santiago), who is a resident of Brazil and Chile, is a diverse and continuous manifestation of a strong conceptual base sustained by the artist himself. In a previous study , I have characterized Mezza’s work as an expression that maintains its validity: I am referring to the concept of ‘technological humanism’.
Now I add another idea to this concept. I want to call his passionate utopia as a ‘planetary technological humanism’. This way, a triad of components is formed. It is Gonzalo Mezza’s permanent ecumenical wish which leads me to characterize his creative undertaking as a ‘utopia’.
            What does the idea of ‘technological humanism’ represent?
When one talks about ‘technology’, one –usually– refers to machines, codes, and automatisms. In turn, ‘humanism’ refers to the person and to personal values, an ethic that positions the human aspect as a priority, represented by feelings, ideas, and concepts. At first glance, it seems to be the impossible unification of two opposing worlds. However, they are comfortably integrated in Mezza’s work, as far as he uses technology to construct a basis for an ad hoc humanism with planetary projection.
            Nowadays the concept of planetary does not demand a major clarification, as we are seeing people intercommunicating widely on the planet through the use of Internet (a recent tool in our historical development). From the most remote areas, the Internet today allows people to establish connection with one another, and this is part of their everyday lives. For example, rural school kids in Northern and Southern Chile (“Enlaces” Project), people from the city of Kathmandu communicating with people from any other part of the planet, regardless of the distance, and even for Nepal, this opens the country up to the outside world.
            Precisely because of this, the philosophy of Gonzalo Mezza’s work is presented to its users with an important meaning: the liberation of messages.

  1. The concept of freeing information: participative images

 

Mezza’s proposal for ‘freeing the information’ and his search for the users’ participation have a precise aspect: generating controversies regarding  information power and control. These theories underlay his productions in the beginning of the 1970’s. This was an important period for Gonzalo Mezza’s artistic development, which took place in Barcelona, Spain. There he graduated in the “Escuela de Diseño EINA”, School of Design & Art Eina pro-Bauhaus.

Between 1970 and 1974, Mezza lived and worked with Antoni Muntadas in the development of conceptual art and making video-art up already exploring the electronic media. The time video-art was created, as a manifestation; was the very beginning of an artistic revolution for its focus on a ‘reality’, a tool that helped expose concepts and testimonies, before being representational.

In 1974 Gonzalo Mezza was working to IMAV (Institute of Audiovisual Midia) and his installation Homenaje a Picasso (Tribute to Picasso) took place in the Picasso Museum, Barcelona, sponsored by the Museum. The surpassing of this exhibition, composed of various forms of multimedia including photographs and projections, proposed a discussion about the use of multimedia in museum spaces. In order to understand the repercussions of that exhibition, it is necessary to recall the historical context. It meant the first steps of a new tradition that has widened the horizons to new forms of artistic creation.
Mezza’s career is focused upon a broad horizon, starting from the platform of innovations that he has produced. A large amount of his creations can be considered as inactual art. Inactual not because it is an art that looks back to the past, but rather the opposite, it is continuously being set in the future in the avant-garde.
At the same time as the work being produced in Europe,  Gonzalo Mezza created in Chile (from 1972 to 1979), the project Des-hielo Venus 123, a video installation, in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. This work was exhibited afterwards in the gallery of Instituto Cultural de Las Condes. On that occasion, he emphasized the use of multimedia when he combined different materials from different sources, such as ice, video, testimonial documents, photocopies, pigments related to the colors of the Chilean flag (white, red, and blue), water taken from the Mapocho River (a symbolic river that crosses the capital Santiago and flows through the Andes mountains).
            1976 was the year of the installation entitled Desierto de Atacama, an art event that took place in the Atacama Desert (Northern Chile) where the idea of ‘no more crosses’, which are elements that carry a strong historical connotation, was proclaimed. It consisted of the relation of the crosses upon the route from and his own body. It was exhibited at Galería Sur (Southern Galery) and acquired by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. It was made again afterwards, in 1989, as No más cruces Chile-Berlín (No More Crosses Chile-Berlin), in Staatlichen Kunsthalle , Berlin , Germany. It was made of acrylic sheets, neon, ice, acrylic, Polaroid photographs, colored photocopies, and black glazed tiles. (The work was arranged in a 17 x 3.50 square meter area).

In 1980, the installation of Cruz del Sur (Southern Cross) was a landmark event in Isla Negra. This work marked a cultural problem regarding the caracterization of a multimedia work of art at that time. It was presented to the competition arranged by the Colocadora Nacional de Valores (National Values Investment Bank). Another example of inactual art set out in the present as if was seen from a future perspective. But why is this a categorization problem? The multimedia quality of the work, which involved the registration and the exhibition of an art event in Isla Negra (on the Chilean coast), changed its classification in the competition. It initiated a pioneering event since it was an installation (5.80 x 4.50m), with photographs (B/W), pigments, sea sand, acrylic boxes, steel pins, recorded sounds, a TV monitor, and a VHS tape machine. It won the first prize for Graphics and Installation in the 6th contest of the Colocadora Nacional de Valores (National Values Investment Bank).
MNBA National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago.

Following this direction and keeping with Gonzalo Mezza’s current productions, which have been engaged with the digital world, it is relevant to ask: which was his first digital work?
It was the N.S.E.O Installation = Shared Information Installation 1981-1982. It stands for a certain leit motiv found in the creative collection of the artist Mezza: North, South, East, West, the four cardinal directions, the four horizons available to a person anywhere in the planet, wherever one is placed and considers something beyond his/her own limitations.
The site of the installation was the IBM offices and factory in Chile. The set was made up by an IBM computer, neon lightning, and sound system. Its dimensions were: 3 x 3.50 X 3.30 square meters.
It was an enterprise to transform contemporary art into something different in comparison with the traditional exhibition of works. N.S.E.O was planned as a Net work. From the IBM offices, the information was distributed from a computer: a true insight into future communications using the WWW (World Wide Web).
It’s important to mention something since it was revolutionary at that time (1981/1982): In August 1991, the general audience could access what was the beginning of the WWW service through news groups. In 1993 the source code was transformed into free software.
1988, hailed the arrival of the installation Las Mil y una Noches de la Maja Desnuda y de Goya_Dadá (The One Thousand and One Nights of the Naked Maja and Goya_Dadá). His visit to the European artistic community is directly connected to his artistic development. Once, he pointed out: “I carry European art in my backpack, I can’t renounce it.” It was a polaroid photography work about Goya’s production, neon, architecture, wood, acrylic, lightning, and texts. 6 x 2.50  x 0.30 square metres. It was displayed as part of an exhibition called: Contemporary Art from Chile. (Americas Society Gallery. New York. USA).
The Palacio de la Moneda Laser Projection, in 1994, represented the next multimedia installation, in front of the Palacio de la Moneda (Santiago, Chile). It should be understood as being ‘virtual’ with regard to the basis of laser projections , since the images which were projected (for example the perimeter of the Chilean territory) had an ephemeral presence at night. Its constitutive elements: laser ray projection, computer, and lightning upon the historical Palacio de La Moneda building facade. 140 x 60 x 12 metres. Documented recordings were made on March 11th  and 12th, 1994.
In the same year of 1994, in the Matta room of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile , Gonzalo Mezza’s Digital Paintings were displayed. Such a new concept of ‘painting’ without any brushes or oil was entitled by the artist as: Instalación al borde del siglo XXl & Tranferencias postmodernas (Installation on the Edge of the 21st century & Post-Modern Transferences). Installation Asia + America = Europe + Africa. The ecumenical guiding principles were evident again, since four continents were symbolised by images such as: the Hiroshima girl, the Mapuche Venus, a Vincent Van Gogh’s self-portrait, and an African girl. Elements: digital painting on multi-media screen, 4 IBM computers, video, and sound. Dimensions: 5 x 40 x 22 square metres.
In 1996 (three years after the release of the WWW code) he took part in the 23rd São Paulo Art Biennial with a huge installation of 162 square metres (4.80 x 10.80 x 7.50 square metres). It was called the Instalación M@r.co.sur (M@r.co.sur Installation).
There was access to the Internet (WWW) of interactive virtual style, allowing online connection between Santiago and São Paulo; it displayed digital cyber painting, and disposed two Macintosh computers. It was also a hypertext because of the way the satellite images were related to the synchronized works and images from different cultures.
Through this work, he once again was establishing, his idea about intercommunication among continents. The synthetic screen (printed on both sides) exhibited both ‘Atlantic’ and ‘Pacific’ sides. And, upon a representative ‘earth’ surface background captured by satellite, each side had symbolic elements regarding many cultures related to both oceans, in a digital collage production.
Through the WWW, the audience could interact with the images, recreate them and return to them in the same way: via Internet. These images could be collected (opened as we say nowadays) by in situ audiences, but also from anywhere on the planet where there was the appropriate technology. It has already been fourteen years since then!
As I mentioned before, his concepts about the ‘artistic nature’ in terms of public places started in the 1970’s,. At that time, a new medium was being considered, which today, in 2010, has such a multi-expressive character in several areas of the artistic world. Since the 1970’s it has been only about the connection from the material aspect to the virtual one (an expression I use in italics as an alert).  Apart from that, it is worth emphasizing that in the main methodology used in Gonzalo Mezza’s work, there is always a material basis to support or make the images presence possible. On the other hand, in his installations, the objects are part of the digital images world and its own foundations.
 His Virtual Installation M@R.CO.SUR 2 at the 1st Mercosul Biennial, took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1997. That was when he had the opportunity to occupy two iconic sites in the city: Usina do Gasômetro and Mercado Público (Public Market). Usina do Gasômetro, that once provided energy to the city of Porto Alegre, is now a cultural center and an open public site. The Public Market is still a public building for the local population, being used for its original purpose.
History and Service link both buildings. Incidentally, during the M@R.CO.SUR 2   project, another link, also ‘invisible’ but significant, connected both buildings: two cameras that provided information about what was going on in the other exhibition areas screened to the exhibition visitors at both buildings.
1998: The Virtual Installation WWW.M@R.CO.SUR , Project was located in the room of CTC de Fundación Telefónica- in Chile, in which the audience had the chance to take part once again in Mezza´s proposals, through downloading from any computer one work of art by the artist. The selection could be made by searching the Virtual Museum Website in order to interact and send their own manipulated image worldwide to a maximum of 720 x 480 pixels in jpg format, to 72 dpi by e-mail to info@mezza.cl. Such methodology coincides with the conceptual system that I recall here: shared authorship, interactivity, art object de-fetishising, and web communication, which means ‘worldwide’.
In 1999, during the 2nd Mercosul Biennial, at Usina do Gasômetro in Porto Alegre, the  images of the participants were projected at the Arts and Technology pavilion. The visitors were invited to “Download the image above to your computer and interact or create your own project. Then, send the file (in JPG 72 dpi format or 640 x 419 pixel through Internet) to the following e-mail info@mezza.cl.” In addition, alongside this event, the visitors could visit a gallery of interactions created by other users from anywhere in the planet: “On the Gallery www.m@r.co.sur you can get to know some works already sent.”


In 2000, the Project called WWW.C.U.B.A.C.U.B.O.S.I.N.F.R.O.N.T.E.R.A.S   was presented as a Cyber-Installation Via cellular or Internet in the 7th  Biennial of Havana. Cuba. AMERICA + AFRICA = EUROPE + ASIA + OCEANIA
Its objective was to project images upon a pyramid built with 400 sugar cubes (sugar is the main Cuban product). The images were the product itself, sent by different people located geographically at several different places in the world, using Internet or cellular phones.
The system of equivalences (recognized by the sign ‘=’) which refers to many of his works, according to Gonzalo Mezza’s perspective, indicates his ideal of comparisons, such as unlimited continents, countries with friendly inter-relations, inter-communicating people, available images open to participation, co-creative collectivities, and free software.
His theory of what I call artistic authorship communion is inserted within these concepts. Such authorship, that surpasses the traditional individual author’s boundaries, gets developed in the people’s creative intentions. That’s why it transcends ‘communication’ to the notion of ‘communion’. The motivation of taking part of it generates and stimulates an attitude similar to the pro-activity. Even when the user’s participations are made from the image and the invitation of an artist, the action surpasses the mere ‘receiving’.
After the installation in the 7th Biennial of Havana and improving the pyramid made with sugar cubes, in 2001, Mezza created a multi-media installation at the Animal Gallery, in Santiago. He named this exhibition: 0 + 1 = 8 (In f i n i t e)
The synchronized elements placed there were: Power Mac G4 Computers, 600mhz Titanium, 5 Multimedia Epson projectors, Digital Video, Digital Photography, Digital Bang Olufsen Stereo, X Rays, Water Crystal, Internet, Sugar, Silicon, Concrete, Titanium, Neon, and Glass. The set occupied an 11.80 x 10.70 x 5.80 square meter surface area.
The title is related to the original idea the artist has developed in subsequent works. This equation can be confusing, but suits perfectly in the context: 0 + 1 = 8 (Infinite). Ones and zeros, the binary system of symbols for digital productions, the number 8 is at the same time the symbol of the eighth art and the sign for the ‘infinite’ (that is, with neither finite nor measurable limits).

3. Interactivity and shared authorship
The Internet’s space neutrality in which messages circulate, no matter the physical distance (this neutrality is frequently criticized by detractors of the digital world), should be characterized, however, as a machine appealing to the people. It is exactly what allows people from different places of the physical world to interact. Furthermore, the ‘artistic’ communication should be linked to the digital world and with the phenomenon of the social networks of all types, that are increasing, multiplying, (and, certainly, generating millionaire gains).

Exploring Gonzalo Mezza’s Virtual Museum (www.mezza.cl), in every creative situation shown in galleries, formal museums, and established spaces dedicated to art, such as the Market of Porto Alegre for example, the possibilities the users have to interact are shown. Alternatively on the Internet, there are ‘galleries of interventions’ in which the audience replies to Mezza’s invitations to take part are shown.
Marco Bonta’s room in MAC (Contemporary Art Museum of Chile) was the location of one of his exhibitions in 2003. On this occasion, his project was named: 0+1=ADN. It was a variation of different equations (=), the equality as the major concept. In such circumstances, the equation was a project which compared the main alphabet of the digital formation (zeros and ones) to the alphabet of the formation of life (DNA): adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. In the respective space, on the Web, we can find this gallery of intervention.
In August 2003, Gonzalo Mezza created 0+1 E-EVOLUTION a Digital Multimedia retrospective at MAVI / Visual Arts Museum / Chile, in which his productions from 1973 to 2003 were collected. The multimedia retrospective embraced and brought together: Cyber-Installation, Interactive Art, Net Art, Web Art, Cyber-paintings, Plasma, Cyber-prints, Internet Project, Installations, DVD Multimedia, Digital Paintings, Laser Photography, and Digital Video.

At that time I wrote: “Why e-evolution? E- represents electronic actions on the Internet, it is an authentic prefix used nowadays in different expressions such as e-medicine, e-learning, and e-art. What does e-evolution mean in this respect? Roughly speaking, it is about a continuous transfer from the matter to the electronic information, a de-materialization. But Gonzalo Mezza does not engage in these restricted ideas, although developed from the de-materialization as an excluding process and gradual progress of the digital technologies. His humanist and creative character motivates him to persist in the revival of values such as body and matter.

            This is the motivation for his installations, on one hand there is the opening of boundaries and on the other hand, consequently, there is the integration or ‘congregation’ of media and matters. It is about a certain value involving, retrospectively, the presence of the material aspect in his projects such as, for example, ice (in his piece Venus en los hielos del Sur (Venus in the Southern Ices), charcoal (in his installation at the Fundação Telefônica)… That is why, along with his image interventions, Mezza has suggested a noticeable ‘digital intervention’ in the geographic space by the users: “interact on this space”, which is the invitation of his work for the 2nd Mercosul Biennial.

In 2005 it was the opening of: 5 + 5 = 8 Infinite. This is the name given for the Digital Cyber e-Space ‘mural’ installed at the hall of the Education Ministry building, in Chile (West wing). The description of its components is about a working methodology that always comprehends ‘multimedia’: CyberInstallation Mural, 5 digital cyberpaintings from five continents over aluminum plaques, Alucobond, Interactive Internet, computers, a server to support the interactions of the users, 5 water crystal monitors, a LCD, a DVD, digital video projections, a webcam to record the situation at all the events in situ, sound installation, digital polyphonic sound, and neon lighting or LEDs. Dimensions: 5 meters high x 25 meters wide.

Gonzalo Mezza describes Cyber-Space like this:
“It is another state of the matter, m@r.co of a new support for the creative e-nergy of the contemporary thinking. (…)This work in binary language is an interactive link with e-ducation; each pixel is one square meter of territory, the 5 continents, the 5 senses, the 5 windows to knowledge. East is 0 (zero), West is 1 (one). But the Earth is only one, like the fixed hemispheres of our brain. We are all passengers on the same spacecraft, the Earth, which navigates around infinite galaxies, since the time of Big Bang. "

  1.  The meaning of 8, the eighth art, the symbol of ‘infinite’, and a new art project.

 

For a decade, Gonzalo Mezza has been defining digital artistic productions as ‘Eighth Art’. The definition should be understood as a direct and continuous link with the art that has been developed throughout history (at least in the West), while there are revolutions emerging.
Let’s consider his position as an artistic creator once again, which  is strongly connected to conceptualizing during the creative activity. In my opinion Mezza’s creative process comprehends the twin paths of concepts and works of art generation.
Is there an 8th (eighth) art? The cinema, designated as the ‘Seventh Art’, socially began on December28th, 1895. At that moment the Lumière brothers screened a film for spectators: workers leaving a factory in Lyon, amongst other productions. Being independent on the cultural run for the ‘mace’ of the eighth art (such an eighth art that exists similarly alongside video-games and comics, for example), the variety and quantity of pieces produced by creative centers in the world guarantee enough distinction to the digital productions regarding this category.
Whether observed through graphics or concepts, the number ‘eight’ has an drawing identity with the ‘infinite’ sign (which comes it closer to the meaning of the Moebius strip), besides indicating the number of ‘bits’ that compounds one ‘byte’, eight.


 ‘Infinite’ Symbol Diagram.

It is quite interesting to think about the antiquity of that sign (the horizontal ‘eight’) in Mathematics. It was used in 1655 by a mathematician called John Wallis to represent the infinite. The expressive value of thesign is based on  the possibility to follow and to follow the line ‘infinitely’ (like the Moebius strip), a movement or action that has no formal limit.

Moebius strip

The digital productions of interactive artistic intention (the Interactive Digital Artistic O.A.D.I. ), of a continuous presence on Gonzalo Mezza’s creative production, I maintain, are open to users interaction.  These objects (the eight art matter) take part in the notion of ‘infinite’. Theoretically, there is no tie neither end for the people’s interactivity with his works. That is because the imagination of an individual can be extended as far as its own potential is possible to reach. But, besides that, the objects are ‘infinite’, because several users can take part of them .
           
Advancements in human knowledge continuously motivate this Chilean creative artist, who lives in Brazil and whose spirit is universal and Latin-American at the same time. His new project explores the mysteries that nowadays the scientists are trying to uncover, more precisely, the ones related to the origins of the Universe, since that ever surprising germ: the Big Bang. It will be interesting to see his artistic production concerning what seems to be the retrospective border of the Universe.

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Text to the conference “Technological Humanism”, The Art of Gonzallo Mezza”, prepared for The Multimedial Digital Retrospective Exhibition, 1973 to 2003. MAVI / Museo de Artes Visuais (Visual Arts Museum) / Chile 2003. Cyber-Installation / Interactive Art / Net Art / Web Art / Cyber-paintings / Plasma / Installations / Multimedia DVD / Digital Paintings / Laser Photography / Digital-video.

Laser: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

The National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago has recently acquired four of Gonzalo Mezza’s symbolic works: Venus de hielo: los deshielos de la Venus 123 (Ice Venus: The de-ice Venus 123), the recording of the art interaction on Desierto de Atacama (Atacama Desert), his work La Cruz del Sur (The Southern Cross), and the Venus del Sur (Southern Venus) in the Antarctic Territory, for the Museum’s collection and patrimony.

The term “virtual” has a conflictive usage. In fact, it should not be applied to the images on a screen, but to its potentiality contained within the programming code. The images on a computer are only the ‘present ones’ and possibly they have already been updated.
 

Extract from my presentation on the work of Gonzalo Mezza for the referent exhibition. 2003.

I have already suggested this acronym to represent the Interactive Artistic Objects. See specially: Schultz, M.: Filosofía y Producciones Digitales. Buenos Aires.Alfagrama. 2006. Schultz, M.: ¿Una nueva Ontología? los derechos filosóficos de la Cibercultura. Santiago de Chile. Colección TEORÍA. Facultad de Artes. Universidad de Chile. 2009.

Which replaces the designation ‘open piece 3D, broadening Umberto Eco’s ideas.

From the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, its French acronym).