- Rosario Guiraldes
Artists: Oliver Laric, Amalia Pica, Alan Segal, and Juan Tessi
We live in a world increasingly mediated through images and screens that make the abstract concrete and visible. In the mid 1980s, Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser signaled a shift that has now become ever present, threatening a displacement of labor into immateriality and an increasing structuring of social interactions through mechanisms of quantification. One of the symptoms within which this shift has occurred is the ubiquitous flood of composite, automated, and digitally animated technical images. Praising the Surface suggests that technical images are not necessarily detached. Rather, they are cognizant of their circumstances of production: they reveal that there isn’t a clear separation between the technical and the social and that their processes are inflected by a user who programs these tasks. In an attempt to understand how to better be aware of the world and of ourselves, Praising the Surface is set to measure the blurred boundaries between automated and human labor.
Praising the Surface presents works by Oliver Laric, Amalia Pica, Alan Segal, and Juan Tessi. Their works capture, decode, and reveal the inextricability between labor and the systems and mechanisms that structure their making processes. These works detail and unfold the willful interventions that guide their construction, demystifying a conception of the technical image as merely immaterial data. As these works make available the users’ editing, play, manipulation or composition, they give clarity to the micro-units of transformation within which subjectivity exists – subjectivity that is often rendered opaque by the mystifications conjured by our technologies.
