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May 24, 2007

Upgrade! São Paulo

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Lucia Leão

Upgrade! São Paulo: lucia leão: Networked bodies: art, culture, environment and sustainment in cyberculture :: jun 14.2007 :: 7:30 pm @ i-People: Av Vergueiro 727, next to the Vergueiro Subway Station.

The relationships between art and nature have always been present in the human history. Since pre-historic times, draws of animals in caves reveal the aspiration to represent and/or control nature. Enigmatic pre-historic monuments and planetary observatories are also amazing samples of man interventions in order to understand the surrounding environment and its movements. From the Egyptian frescos, passing through moments of the Renaissance and 18th century art, the landscape becomes the environment for building narratives and, often, it takes an ornamental or symbolic character. The landscape paintings, not by chance, are very frequent and popular in the colonialist expansion periods and show very clear relationships between the territorial conquest and the aspiration of representation.

In the 20th century, starting in the 60's, a radical transformation happens: the art stop seeing the nature only like an object for representation and the artists start interacting directly in natural spaces. In that period, artworks emerge pointing to several readings of the environment, among them: nature and space problems (Richard Serra); light transformations, time effect and visitor's interaction (Robert Morris and Nancy Holt); environment and consumption (Christo); actions and incisions in the environment (Michael Heizer and Alberto Burri), among others.

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In the cyberculture age, when we think about environment problems, we face two opposite scenarios. From one point of view, the technological apparatuses figure as degrading elements of the environment, they are responsible for a huge amount of garbage production and are related to the pollution emission in several moments. On the other hand, the Internet communication and content production potential have stimulated either a larger awareness and comprehension about environmental problems as much as the creation and development of collective and multi-author projects. Therefore, we could wonder: how can the technology act in the role of preserving ecosystems? How can the environmental thinking and consciousness get associated with the fashion and art creation (while life style, modus vivendi)?

In this talk, it will be presented creative projects that evoke and stimulate communitarian actions. They are works that make use of cybrid spaces and question the modus vivendi through dressing and other nomadic practices. The networked body statute, in all its complexity, requires sensible perception, acts and new visions of the word. In this sense, we will see works that state the inter-relationships between aesthetics, ethics and politics. With activistic propositions, thought and designed by multidisciplinary teams, the contemporary environmental art proposes disturbances in habits and systems. Without mattering with embarrassing or even enormous difficulties, the environmental poetics make it clear that their objectives are stimulating the body perception in network; sowing a systemic consciousness and generating reformulations in the everyday acts.

Lucia Leão is interdisciplinar artist, PHD in comunication and semiotics from PUC-SP and post-PHD in arts from UNICAMP. Author of several articles about art and new media and of the books "The Labyrinth of Hipermedia: architecture and navigation in cyberspace" (1999) and "The Aesthetics of the Labyrinth" (2002). She organized the Interlab collections, with international papers: Labyrinths of the Contemporary Thinking (2002), with nomination for the Jabuti Award; Cybercultura 2.0 (2003); e Derivas: cartography of the cyberspace (2004). Lucia is professor at PUC-SP and SENAC. As artist, she has exhibited, among other places, at ISEA 200, Paris; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas (MACC); XV Biennial of Sao Paulo; II International Biennial of Buenos Aires; ArtMedia, Paris; FILE -SP (2002); Arte Digital Rosario 2003; Cinético Digital, Itaú Cultural (2005); Mostra SESC de Artes (2005) e FILE Rio 2006.

Posted by jo at May 24, 2007 05:10 PM

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