EcoCybernetic Life :The Story of Digital Art in San Miguel De Allende

Reynaldo thompson

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Abstract

San Miguel de Allende rises to be a small hometown in the middle of ineffably beautiful Central Mexico for a cluster of young digital artists from Mexico, whose works on ecocybernetic organisms have created ripples across the world. Recent winner of the Golden Nica 2015 in the category of Hybrid Art and poised for the Venice Biennial artist Gilberto Esparza, who is the most representative of them, created the Autophotosynthetic plants capable of existing like a self-sustaining organism and recyclying waste water for developing industrial societies. The San Miguel group of artists represent the best of digital imagination and experimentation in Latin America. This is the story of an emergence of a humble hill town in Mexico as a center of excellence and radical technological thinking in the context of the whole world.

Keywords: San Miguel de Allende, ecocybernetics, collaborative art, recyclying.

In one of those less frequented neighbourhoods of the otherwise ineffably beautiful town of San Miguel de Allende stands a middling large workshop of artists called the 16, if we were to translate the Spanish name for it – the humble el diez seis, representing just the number of the building. It is typical, a rented artists’ talleres, or ‘workshop; designed perhaps as some kind of workshop or store hall in the style of conventional Mexican casas but in its inside it is pieced out into invisible quarters for the creations of at least three major exponents of electronics arts in Latin America. To visit 16 at the end of the cobbled road which turns from the arterial road in the central museum district of the town is something of an experience; because it is impossible to believe that a revolution was taking place among the artists who drifted to this sleepy haunt from the commotions and distractions of Mexico city. When asked how they are intellectually related they are probably reluctant to admit that there has been any other overriding concern for coming together – the only reason that they could conceive and that could have been actually instrumental was perhaps their incipient dream which dated back to at least fifteen years earlier. Gilberto Esparza, Marcela Aramas, Ivan Puig, Cecilia Garibi, and Katya Mora all got acquainted when they joined the University as undergraduates but what they gradually identified was their desire to do something innovative and different, if not extraordinary, especially with the digital new technology that was only beginning to emerge as a leading media on the art scene in Mexico. Mexico City was already home to some of the pioneering digital and hybrid arts that brewed under the fostership of the Centro Nacional de Bellas Artes (the Codigo project) and the Centro Multimedia of the Centro Nacional de Artes. Perhaps the other great center of experimental digital art already well-known by the last decade, namely the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda, like the other important centers of innovative technologies in Argentina or Brazil, were on the verge of emerging as centers of excellence in the genre. Arcangel Constantini, was the pionerering artist besides figures like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, David Hinojosa Admann, Fran Ilich and Ralpf Lozano-Hemmer in Mexico City, developing complex, hybrid forms.i Ralph Lozano-Hemmer the Mexican born artists had migrated to Canada. Priamo Losada , Jose Luis Barrios were the perceptive critics on the scene –and the great city was like an architecture of a structured art-world full of promise and developing in all directions.

Figure 1. Workshop 16, of the the TRIODO group. But if we take into account the context of digital art productions in contemporary Mexico, and then in relation to contemporary Latin America as a whole we shall have to describe how this group of young artists who graduated from the University of Guanajuato drifted into San Miguel. El diez y seis – 16 -becomes a symbol not only of artists committed to technological innovations and the idea of liberation from a pre-existing ontology, but of a community centered around a garden and caring to spread education around the neighbourhood of Allende. Earlier they had started – Gilberto Esparza, Marcela Armas and Ivan Puig by working at small places in Mexico City. After 2005, after having returned from their University of Valencia in Spain, it took them several years to work within the premises of very small work locations at Mexico City until almost 8 years later till they got wind of the larger workshop at San Miguel de Allende. Esparza and Puig – rented the place they have nothing to call but the 16. Marcela did not have an immediate need. But they were all waiting to buy a new place in which they would have to pay much less than they were doing in Mexico City; although now as were talking to Puig in a late June afternoon Esparza and Marcela, also married to each other were feling the need to remain longer at the City even though the workshop at San Miguel was the real creative hub for each one of them. Something of this owes to the

award of the Golden Nica, the prestigious Ars Electronica award of 2015 to Esparzaii – perhaps a recognition which was all too long due to one of the masters of digital art in its global context. But the group was ‘born’ so to speak, in Guanajuato, Central Mexico – though none of the artists were from the state of Guanajuato itself and it was true that all of them were looking for something else – this search that was unique. At one time it seemed normal for young people passing out of college but in retrospect it seems to have been a very special kind of reunion, a meeting of temperamentally inclined young minds. This interest in what is unusual still keeps working and holding them together, now that they are also moving around with their work; Puig says now they believe that there is no longer any barrier between what is possible and what is not. Puig and Esparza were living in Spain in 2002 and 2003. Again Puig, Cecilia Garibi (whom Puig married) and Katyawent back to live in Spain in 2004, that is at different times. But Gilberto Esparza returned from Spain after the exchange visit under the banner of the university of Guanajuato to live in Guadalajara, and then went back with Marcela Aramas, another brilliant formulator-artist in the group - and to whom he is now married - to Spain, before finally moving to settle down in Mexico city in 2005. After the University years all of them met at Mexico City, and at once experienced a strong synergy. Esparza, Armas, Puig all received invitations to participate in the digital arts Plataforma at Puebla –the curator Lozada who spotted the budding talents started pushing for them, and was instrumental for the development of electronics arts in Mexico. In fact Esparza and Aramas were invited for several projects. The Zero Gravity Projects, the Parabolic Flights 2014, were subsequently invited to Russia – this was the first breakthrough on an international scale of a triad whose friendship and collaborative work has now continued for almost twenty years.iii Moscow Star City, which was the venue for their performance installation, is the name of a city famous for its military installations. The Russian Roscosmos includes the Gagarin training center, and everything that had to do with the space race in Russia now formed the venue where the TRIODO (Esparza, Puig and Armas) -as they later called themselves iv - met for the first time on an international scale.

Figure 2. Marcela Armas, Gilberto Esparza, Ivan Puig The project though not very concrete in terms of its objectivity as a project La Gravedad de los Asuntos explored and communicated the conceptual possibilities for all kinds of creative practice in space. A Zero gravity trajectory was used to demonstrate how artists would physically operate in space. For this Esparza, Puig, Aramas along with others from the art scenario in Mexico city huddled together and floated freely within an aircraft dipping with zero gravity impact on the body. Indeed the gravity free zone was a study of how humans would behave under altered conditions – and interpret the new kind of liberation where the anxieties of a pre-humanist world might cease to matter. But the ideas of eco-cybernetic art, with the combination of digital intelligence and microbiological processuality something which symbolizes the heights of the group’s subsequent achievements, were to develop in the years after. Puig unlike Esparza became directly involved with the SEFT 1 project v – which is now being imported back from Europe to be placed in the San Miguel’s workshop 16.

The Zero Gravity project titled Gravedad de los Asuntos though, gave them their firt sense of identity and uniqueness. Some of the projects for the future TRIODO could be conceived only in terms of the three working together. The collectivity of the three artists is however a much bigger and comprehensive thing, just as Helen Harrison once said in relation to the technologically informed art of the new millennium, the fact that it had to be practiced as a collaborative genre: that as the art is “enacted in the real environment, we become anonymous, we are bigger than our plan, and more

anonymous ourselves”. Helen Harrison Grey Matters. vi The exhibition was held in 2015 January –the expectatios were high but the results were simple and sometimes the individual pieces may not have communicated the feeling of being out there in space so effectively as the others – but the team work was coming together with La Gravedad de Los Asuntos – a project which was meant to be on zero gravity. Thereafter the TRIODO artists started to come together under the banner of the The Centro Multimedia (Mexico City) which is part of the national organization called the Centro de Nacionales Artes or the CNA in short, that supports new media artists and their projects from all over Mexico - the hub as it were, which also supported both Esparza and Puig under the Young Artists (Jovenes Creadores) program of support for young creative artists. Esparza and Puig had enough money from the project, and then every three months there were reputed artists, like Arcangel Constantini, who were mentoring them. Arcangel Constantini was the pioneer of electronics arts in Mexico. He was very active at the time and had a project called the Nanodrizas, which (we shall show) was to become a major influence on the hybrid art of the group that earned them the global reputation in recent years. He has been a reference, a good friend ad a companion. The TRIODO made small experiments with sound art and installations like the Un Quarto ( ¼) and several other initiatory projects funded by the same or other related organizations like the FONCA, or the Fondo Nacionales para la Cultura y las Artes among others. The TRIODO migrated to San Miguel in 2014, discovering in the process a haven for their work, freed and liberated from the frenetic life of Mexico City, as if some of the ecocybernetic creatures that they woulddesign, especially esparza, were meant to have been born in the beautiful wildernesses of central Mesoamerica, and so close to Guanajuato, the capital and their University town, and once the town of their dreams. The focus of the TRIODO is now more varied and even more decisively engaged with their of community building, their deep and unrelenting attachment with the life of common men in Mexico, just as Ralph Lozano Hemmer’s works had been. They called themselves as being part of a comunanza. Puig said recently as part of an interview: “we want to work to bring the art to the people, to generate a critical point of view and as the title comunanza suggests, to do something within the community”. Like the El Nigromante of San Miguel, but there is no comparable artists organization like the one that Puig, Esparza, Armas, Cecilia Garibi, and Katya Mora have been doing on the social side of their work at the workshop 16, which they describe in terms of their comunanza. Now that they have met together at San Miguel after so many days they want to open a process – now they take the art

to the people.The TRIODO signed some though not all of the works in which they have been working together intimately, helping each other to think through and find the links.The TRIODO is unique in San Miguel, which is otherwise a town (like Taos in New Mexico) also famous for different kind of art initiatives. Ale Mendoza (who now lives in San Miguel) is the daughter of the Director of the Public Library in San Miguel. Ale and her Father have a project called Viceversa, a political or social project directed towards teenagers, the neighbourhood and poor people. Puig, Garibi and Armas and others are getting organized, they are finding each other for the work.

If we start analysing the reasons for the importance accredited to the San Miguel artists for their inventions with the new and hybrid technologies then the search begins not only with their interpretations of society and the conditions of life in Latin America, but also with the liberation that technology could bring for a post-human world.The intersection of technology and art was ingrained in their dreams – if the primordial expression of this was evident in Esparza’s robotic cars which would probe unknown, hidden recesses wihin earth or Katya Mora’s project work on electronic impulse formations from organic sources (wastes) then its culmination is seen in Esparza’s Nomadic Plants and the Autophotosythetic Plants that ultimately fetched for him the Golden Nica in the May of this year. If we think of the directions – in this paper we shall concentrate on one particular aspect of the many concerns that preoccupied them, especially Esparza. The most interesting example has been that of Hybrid Art – coming out as it does from dreams as Marcela Armas says of their childhood and their love of science fiction creatures, but also at heart the ability to find delight in the process of watching a transformation in the already perceived natural object (Armas 41),vii like a plant or an insect; or as Puig describes it in the search for uniqueness (vide. Personal Interview June 13, 2015). In terms of the art itself, both for Esparza as well as Puig the convergence of technology and art was a gradual process- a removal of subjective techniques for the new computational epistemology (Armas et al 2014, Jasso 50; Martegui 69).viii The process is exactly similar to the whole discipline of embodied intelligence - although Armas, working with Esparza for more than ten years goes to the extent of calling it emotional intelligence (Armas 44) – but more importantly what seems to matter is the question of

separate systems working simultaneously to generate a living installation. The robotic installation – or the hybrid installation ...is not just a robot but on the smaller timescale of its exhibition it also emerges like a self-sustaining systems.

The origin for systems which Esparza deviced were in the collaborative work on such hybrid architectures that Arcangel Constantini and Esparza, which Constantini called Nanodrizasix – Constantini’s Nanodrizas is a prototype of Esparza’s Autotrophs and the Plantas Nomadas. Constantini designed the Nanodrizas as UFOs but atypically extraterrestrial objects – politically it is also a comment, that it hasthe shape or dubious identity of a possibility – in the fact that no mechanism of purification of the environment exists on earth but it may be a useful proposition. The technologies that make the Nanodrizas project possible are mechatronics manipualative circuits which use both a circuit design for movements and a sensor driven mechanism for detection of pollutants. Therefore none of the digital art developed by the TRIODO are without context. Just as Constantini said that the Nanodrizas had their precedents in the radical eco-art of Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer, who also believed in accordance with what they tried to execute for their Bauhaus project – that for any radical ecological art of the kind they conceived they needed to have a group. More importantly Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer were trying to engage in interactive art, anticipating the loss of artistic subjectivity an idea which finds its ways into Esparza’s works in devious but almost shocking ways – as it sets up the question whether the new robotic plants would make the presence of the author dispensable at some stage of the system. For Ivan Puig and Marcela Armas in particular the art had taken a different direction, though the concern for the environment was always in a way inextricable from their work –with Esparza the object displays several ontological dimensions. Consider how robotics was gradually integrated into Esparza’s works – he simulates machine insects called the Plantas Nomadas.The Plantas Nomadas are robotic plants (with real sustaining chlorophyllated leaves) that use polluted water to produce oxygen The Plant moves on wheels in the ecosystem into which they are released with the help of electricity generated from solar panels.This was the brilliant project conceived and executed with the help of ideas and methods that Esparza gained from his collaborative work with Constantini. But Esparza was able to take the mechatronic plant one step further. For Constatini the environmental message was there – in the ability of a machine to be able to

detect pollutants, perhaps anticipating a robotic process which would be more efficient than humans. But the Nomadic Plants represent an advancement. There are two branches or ideas which seem to come together – on the one hand there is the microbiological component in which microorganisms take an active role by activating the oxygen cycle – and on the other hand there is a mechtronically driven cybernetic component which allows the plant, resembling some kind of post-human arachnid to move through the swamps and landfills around polluted waters, or like the banks of the rivers polluted by the oil from refineries, or as in along the Rio Lerma in Salamanca and Guadalajara, before it sluices into the tropical paradises of the Pacific.

What is unique to the Plantas Nomadas series is the microbial component that Esparza deviced. Interestingly enough when we were interviewing the TRIODO and their accompanying artists-sociologists – in particular Katya Mora we came up with the almost shockingly interesting work done by Mora, another member of the group who was studying and experimenting together with Esparza and Puig in the University of Guanajuato. But Mora so interestingly was developing the art of harnessing art out of the electronic impulses of biological or organic wastes –a concept so brilliant in itself but which Esaparza was to take to a different level altogether with the more augmented cybernetically controlled organisms. While we tried to conclude our research on these eco-cybernetic organisms we were led to reconsider the pioneering objects designed by Katya Mora – it would be difficult to predict what implications such projects might have except for the unfading hope that it generates for developing economies – in the whole idea of getting to believe and thus knowing that we could invest in a hope of the future when such art would have created contexts of recycling waste and of rendering the idea of wastage or contamination obsolete, or like vestigial symbols of industrial civilization. Katya Mora is a genius who never explored the potential of her art – in order to travel. Mora’s Experiment VII lays the foundation for an artistic critique of industrial economics with its rhizomatic possibilities.

Figure 3. Katya Mora. Organic Des_Composicion.

Mora’s Experiment Six was conceived in such tangible terms that no one has yet been able to conceive, except for Esparza in that same dimension. For Mora conceived the electromotive force as a resultant of organic decomposition. The art is laid out in the presence of the waste matter - in the active site sought since the beginning of the investigation. With the construction of batteries made from decaying matter, it looked as if that for that matter, through its own transformation, it could contribute to give mobility to the work. For this she did a series of experiments focused on shaping modes of batteries from organic matter. As a first trial, manufacturing from compost lead to a structure like that of a car battery. Then she intervened with sheets of copper and brass wire networks that gave rise to a potential difference driven by the decomposition of matter (chemical energy) and the heated gases emitted in the process of decomposition. Voltage rose as the putrefaction process was carried out. Over a month, tension remained stable around a Volt (87 v).

One strong direction that such simple experimental designs as Mora’s offered was realized in the production of Esparza’s magnificent Autophotosynthetic Plants – even as it becomes a totally discrete system in which organic matter generates impulses which are captured by systems of receptors that turn the whole organization into a kind of sensitive or intelligent architecture. How could we descrive autophotosynthetic plants?

Figure 4. Gilberto Esparza. Autophotosyntheticas.

The basic idea remains simple: the generation of electronic impulses and their transformation into musical reflexes. The magic lies with the idea that it is like a self-sustaining system and does not need human interaction once it has been installed. According to Esparza himself: “It is made up of a set of modular microbial fuel cells for the development of colonies of bacteria whose metabolism produces electricity and improves water quality”. x But the story of this formation needs to be told in the context of the fate of San Miguel, the art town to which the inspiring artists gravitate – to give it a new identity and possibility of visualization in the digital history of arts in Latin America. Even as the news of the Golden Nica 2015 spreads through relevant circles Gilberto Esparza, returns to keep working within the quiet refuge of talleres 16. The official website of Prix Ars Electronica quotes the jury on its highest award to Esparza’s autophotosynthetic plants that Esparza had been developing with the Telefonica Foundation sponsorship of Peru. The jury

acknowledges Esparza’s Plantas Autofotosintécas as an outstanding example of an artistic embodiment of the progressive convergence of hardware, software and wetware, while addressing issues of wastewater management and the need for symbiotic ecological solutions both materially and philosophically. xi

In another corner of the workshop 16 Marcella Armas pours burnt oil in the tank of circular shape, which amazingly looks like a black mirror. She keeps (or dumps) it in the workshop. The artists message here still shine, in the art of making a a community here around Allende, with farm gardening, education and transforming technologies of another world.

References i See for a list of pioneering digital artists in Mexico City at the end of the ninetees. http://www.elpais.com/comunes/2005/arco/netart/2004Mexico.html ii http://www.aec.at/prix/en/gewinner/#hybridart iii http://www.space-affairs.com/index.php?wohin=zerog. See also http://www.artscatalyst.org/news/matters-gravity for a description of the exhibition of the russian cosmoart project in England. iv http://www.portavoz.tv/2011/09/27/colectivo-triodo-marcela-armas-ivan-puig-gilberto-esparza/ v Puig worked on the project with his brother Andres Padilla Domene www.ivanpuig.net/seft.html vi 2. Helen Harrison Grey Matters. http://www.culturalcurrency.ca/Two%20Lines%20of%20Sight%20and%20An%20Unexp.pdf vii Armas Marcela. ‘Gil’s World’. Gilberto Esparza Cultivos. Edited by

Armas Marcela, Tatiana Cuevas, Matthew Hall, Jens Hauser, Karla Jasso, Jose-Carlos Mariategui ( 61) Creating Symbiotic Species, Jessica Riskin. Lima: Peru Espacio Fundacion Telefonica 2015.

viii Karla Jasso, ‘RBN PRSTS/ NMDC PLNTS / PHTSNTHTC PLNTS’ pp 107 ff. Jose-Carlos Mariategui, ‘Creating Symbiotic Species’ pp. 61- 69. in Marcela Armas et al (Ed). Gilberto Esparza Cultivos. Armas Marcela, Tatiana Cuevas, Matthew Hall, Jens Hauser, Karla Jasso, Jose-Carlos Mariategui ( 61) Creating Symbiotic Species, Jessica Riskin. Lima: Peru Espacio Fundacion Telefonica 2015 ix http://www.nanodrizas.org/page3.html x A full interdisciplinary description of the project is available in the Ars Electronica website http://prix2015.aec.at/prixwinner/16228/ xi http://www.aec.at/prix/en/gewinner/#hybridart