Todos usamos la tecnología: escribimos en ordenador, navegamos por la web y “zapeamos” por los canales de televisión. Damos una orden y cambia el formato de texto o salta un nuevo canal. Daniel García Andújar pone entre interrogantes ese “todos” del principio y nuestra capacidad de dar órdenes, de usar y de interactuar con la tecnología. Y lo hace desde dentro, utilizando sus mismas trampas y engaños.
Daniel García Andújar ha dispuesto en la sala central de Metrònom una enorme instalación de aparente sofisticada tecnología. Al entrar, una supuesta máquina –The Body Research Machine– realiza una especie de escáner del espectador, tomando sus coordenadas físicas y composición química. Con esos datos el ordenador procesa un interfaz para que el espectador interactúe con la instalación. Una vez dentro, cámaras, proyecciones, monitores y diferentes sensores parecen dispuestos para que provoquemos no se sabe muy bien qué efectos. El problema es que no provocamos nada. Todo el tiempo se mantiene la sensación de que nosotros, espectadores, hemos ocasionado alguna de las proyecciones, pero no sabemos ni como ni cuando. Sólo está claro que al acercarnos a ver unas imágenes fotográficas a través de unas pequeñas aberturas en la pared, la luz se apaga y se nos niega la imagen. Tampoco el videoproyector lo pone fácil, en ocasiones unos potentes focos traseros tapan totalmente la imagen. Por algún lugar se reproducen las conversaciones grabadas de otros visitantes. ¿Qué es lo que hemos visto? y ¿qué es lo que hemos hecho? Ni idea. La instalación de Daniel García Andújar está llena de trampas y el espectador lejos de ser el sujeto actuante es el objeto o, tal vez, la víctima.

Pero quizá lo más interesante de su trabajo es que, en el fondo, no tiene trampas. Simplemente ha realizado una máquina ultramoderna e hipertecnológica, con todos los elementos de fascinación que contienen, con la misma falacia sobre nuestra capacidad de control sobre ella, provocando la misma perplejidad que el navegar por la web (un lugar en el que siempre navegas, pero sólo navegas, nunca llegas a ningún sitio y si llegas no es el que esperabas) y, convendría decir, con igual inutilidad. Frente al simulacro tecnológico no ha redoblado su condición de simulacro.

Lo que plantea Daniel García Andújar es una crítica ácida a su supuesta cualidad interactiva y liberadora. Y lo hace sin denuncias explícitas, sino jugando en su mismo orden para subvertirlo, es decir, a través de la ironía. Precisamente esa capacidad irónica del trabajo es la que permite abrir el discurso. Porque no se trata de simple discurso tecnológico sino que acarrea consigo todo lo que en la actualidad está implícito en él. Su propaganda es una propaganda política que nos habla de un mundo mejor y más democrático, con absoluta libertad de información y de acceso a la información. Daniel García Andújar subraya, sin embargo, que tal acceso no es posible, que tan sólo existe la ilusión de que es posible, su fascinación a través del simulacro. Así, en la “sala B” de Metrònom ha instalado un monitor acompañado de una selección de cintas de video para consultar. El problema es que no podemos coger tales cintas, mientras que el televisor sólo ofrece publicidad. En el otro extremo del discurso, en la “Sala A” muestra una serie de imágenes sacadas directamente de internet, que van desde fotografías de Cindy Sherman hasta otras pornográficas, acompañadas de textos sobre los derechos intelectuales y de la imagen.

Daniel García Andújar reflexiona sobre los mecanismos de exclusión de la tecnología mostrando sus supuestos mecanismos de liberación. Mecanismos que no sólo afectan a los que la usamos sino, evidentemente también, a los que no tienen acceso a ella. Interface@metrònom.es (nombre que da título a la exposición) forma parte de un proyecto más amplio, la empresa virtual Technologies To The People. El propósito Technologies To The People es acercar la tecnología a los que no tienen acceso a ella, homeless, parados, drogadictos, países subdesarrollados y en general los “indeseables” de este mundo. Con ello desenmascara los verdaderos mecanismos de poder que operan bajo su falsa capacidad democratizadora.

El trabajo de Daniel García Andújar no pretende deslumbrar al espectador a través de una obra que haga alarde tecnológico, limitando nuestra capacidad de juicio por nuestra facilidad para la fascinación, sino que su despliegue tecnológico es irónico, crítico sobre si mismo, autorreferencial y abierto hacia una crítica irónica generalizada del poder.

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Frieze Issue 37 November-December 1997

DASA, Dortmund, Germany

DASA, or the Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung (The German Health and Safety at Work Exhibition) to give it its full title, is a museum in which you can put on a pair of hygienically padded headphones and take a guided tour of the history of work. Behind this is the serious point that working people – whether typing at computers or tapping blast furnaces – are exposed to danger. Ear muffs, goggles and back exercises were all invented to protect the body during the production process. If the mind responsible for that body is to understand how vulnerable it is and how it works, clear images are needed. ‘Short Cuts – Anschlüsse an den Körper. Ein Cross-Over durch Kunst, Wissenschaft und Körperbilder’ (Short Cuts: connections to the body. A criss-cross tour of art, science and images of the body) is the wordy title of an exhibition that provides just that. The 17 artists involved use photography, video, installation and interactive computers. Curators Iris Dressler (art historian) and Hans D. Christ (artist) state that in organising the show they were interested in ‘surfaces’ and not in ‘physical feelings’.

Dressler and Christ are aware that the image of the body at the end of the millennium has been a staple of art magazines, major exhibitions and symposia for many years. The key features of this show are the unusual venue and the claim to be showing work by young and largely unknown artists. Timm Ulrichs, who was born in 1940, is the oldest. The End (1997), his photograph of a closed eyelid with the words of its title tattooed on to it, hangs at the beginning of the exhibition. Nearby, Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar’s Body Research Machine (1997) uses a pompous set of apparatus that purports to provide, in the form of scanned data, information about the visitors who walk through it. You realise that all this high-tech hoo-ha is a fake when smoke rises after the scan button has been pressed, but the work is based on the fantasy that you can magic people out of some sort of data-essence – which reduces gene and clone technology to a level that even Mary Shelley had gone beyond.

Surprisingly few artists addressed the two aspects that have been illuminated most strongly by art based on the body and its image in the last few years: gene technology and the field of tension between sex and gender. The American artist Janine Antoni uses the latter most obviously – but in a way that is already slightly old-fashioned. Her three-part photographic work Mom and Dad (1994) shows an elderly couple (her parents) losing their sexual identity through make-up and styling.

The photographs exhibited are mostly examples of the flood of artfully produced body pictures that has been pouring out for some years, but which have become bogged down in technicalities through putting technique above content. This applies as much to Bea de Visser’s Getting Back Through You (1996), eight portraits of people superimposed on the artist’s face, as it does to Frank Goeldner’s series ‘O.T.’ (Untitled, 1992), in which a trick is used to make the subjects’ skin seem transparent. But Gabriele Leidloff’s installation Ugly Casting (1997) does convince. She shows eleven photographs of death-masks. The sequence of still images produces a cliched scene of a kiss, which is then set in motion in a video. Zoe Leonard uses similarly macabre material in her presentation of anatomical models and plays with the contradiction between subjectively felt shame and a scientific approach that allows the body to function as an object of research.

Ritual 1-2 & 3 (1997) by Dutch artist Peter Bogers takes a more spectacular approach. In contrast with many works in the show, which approach the theme of the body with calm reticence, a ticking wall-clock establishes the tempo in Bogers’ space. On one wall you see real-time pictures from various other exhibition areas, or of yourself, caught up in Bogers’ video works. On the floor are 12 TV monitors set in a circle. The scenes playing are edited in such a way that each screen shows a violent scene from a feature film and then freezes. This produces an endless sequence of punches and bullet wounds. You stand in the middle and follow them round, or you can sit down in front of a smaller video screen and watch loops of action scenes dissolving into each other. Headphones play a soundtrack like a DJ’s set, with shots and blows as the beat. You are aware that Bogers’ sources help shape our image of the body, but it is the only work in the exhibition to make it clear, through the vehemence of its manipulation, that this is wrong.

After that you can rest on E.R. Sonntag’s rubber seat, entitled Omo (1996-97), enjoying the vibrations running through your body, until Bogers’ images start to slowly drain out of your brain – unfortunately they will never disappear completely.

Martin Pesch, translated by Michael Robinson

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Frieze Issue 37 November-December 1997

DASA, Dortmund, Germany

DASA, or the Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung (The German Health and Safety at Work Exhibition) to give it its full title, is a museum in which you can put on a pair of hygienically padded headphones and take a guided tour of the history of work. Behind this is the serious point that working people – whether typing at computers or tapping blast furnaces – are exposed to danger. Ear muffs, goggles and back exercises were all invented to protect the body during the production process. If the mind responsible for that body is to understand how vulnerable it is and how it works, clear images are needed. ‘Short Cuts – Anschlüsse an den Körper. Ein Cross-Over durch Kunst, Wissenschaft und Körperbilder’ (Short Cuts: connections to the body. A criss-cross tour of art, science and images of the body) is the wordy title of an exhibition that provides just that. The 17 artists involved use photography, video, installation and interactive computers. Curators Iris Dressler (art historian) and Hans D. Christ (artist) state that in organising the show they were interested in ‘surfaces’ and not in ‘physical feelings’.

Dressler and Christ are aware that the image of the body at the end of the millennium has been a staple of art magazines, major exhibitions and symposia for many years. The key features of this show are the unusual venue and the claim to be showing work by young and largely unknown artists. Timm Ulrichs, who was born in 1940, is the oldest. The End (1997), his photograph of a closed eyelid with the words of its title tattooed on to it, hangs at the beginning of the exhibition. Nearby, Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar’s Body Research Machine (1997) uses a pompous set of apparatus that purports to provide, in the form of scanned data, information about the visitors who walk through it. You realise that all this high-tech hoo-ha is a fake when smoke rises after the scan button has been pressed, but the work is based on the fantasy that you can magic people out of some sort of data-essence – which reduces gene and clone technology to a level that even Mary Shelley had gone beyond.

Surprisingly few artists addressed the two aspects that have been illuminated most strongly by art based on the body and its image in the last few years: gene technology and the field of tension between sex and gender. The American artist Janine Antoni uses the latter most obviously – but in a way that is already slightly old-fashioned. Her three-part photographic work Mom and Dad (1994) shows an elderly couple (her parents) losing their sexual identity through make-up and styling.

The photographs exhibited are mostly examples of the flood of artfully produced body pictures that has been pouring out for some years, but which have become bogged down in technicalities through putting technique above content. This applies as much to Bea de Visser’s Getting Back Through You (1996), eight portraits of people superimposed on the artist’s face, as it does to Frank Goeldner’s series ‘O.T.’ (Untitled, 1992), in which a trick is used to make the subjects’ skin seem transparent. But Gabriele Leidloff’s installation Ugly Casting (1997) does convince. She shows eleven photographs of death-masks. The sequence of still images produces a cliched scene of a kiss, which is then set in motion in a video. Zoe Leonard uses similarly macabre material in her presentation of anatomical models and plays with the contradiction between subjectively felt shame and a scientific approach that allows the body to function as an object of research.

Ritual 1-2 & 3 (1997) by Dutch artist Peter Bogers takes a more spectacular approach. In contrast with many works in the show, which approach the theme of the body with calm reticence, a ticking wall-clock establishes the tempo in Bogers’ space. On one wall you see real-time pictures from various other exhibition areas, or of yourself, caught up in Bogers’ video works. On the floor are 12 TV monitors set in a circle. The scenes playing are edited in such a way that each screen shows a violent scene from a feature film and then freezes. This produces an endless sequence of punches and bullet wounds. You stand in the middle and follow them round, or you can sit down in front of a smaller video screen and watch loops of action scenes dissolving into each other. Headphones play a soundtrack like a DJ’s set, with shots and blows as the beat. You are aware that Bogers’ sources help shape our image of the body, but it is the only work in the exhibition to make it clear, through the vehemence of its manipulation, that this is wrong.

After that you can rest on E.R. Sonntag’s rubber seat, entitled Omo (1996-97), enjoying the vibrations running through your body, until Bogers’ images start to slowly drain out of your brain – unfortunately they will never disappear completely.

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Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (Screenshot)

Installation

Coproduction: Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Courtesy: Technologies To The People
Since 2000, a modified version has been part of the permanent collection of the Deutschen Arbeitsschutzausstellung, Dortmund
Shortcuts. Anschlüsse an den Körper, 1997

“‘THE BODY RESEARCH MACHINE©’ uses innovative technologies based on advanced biometrics in order to record complex data related to the human body. The machine transmits through the body ultrasound waves which are then split up into phase data. While doing so, the machine scans every section of the body for interesting information, transferring all input signals to a special computer database.
Specially developed by TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE©, the database system imitates the structure of various atom models and is able to reconstruct, atom for atom, individual amino-acid structures. These data and other information are stored in our central database. The collected data can ultimately be compared with the DNA strings saved in a GenBank.
TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE© supports the ‘Model Ethical Protocol for Collecting DNA Samples’. We will permit neither the patenting of our DNA strings nor the sale of genetic material. In contrast, we guarantee individual control over personal information. Once the ‘Human Genome Project’ has fulfilled the mission of transcribing the code which controls the creation and development of human life, it will place this code on the market and thus make it generally available. That is what we hope. After the DNS chains of the human being are wholly decrypted and interpreted, we will be in a position to use the findings for our own purposes. We will re-invent our own selves and alter the course of evolution.”

Daniel García Andújar

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (Screenshot)

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Installationsansicht (Photo: Sascha Dressler)

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“THE BODY RESEARCH MACHINE© nutzt neuartige Technologien, die auf hochentwickelten biometrischen Technologien basieren, um komplexe Daten über den menschlichen Körper zu erfassen. Die Maschine sendet Ultraschall-Wellen durch den Körper, die in Phasen-Daten aufgespaltet werden. Sie sucht dabei jede Sektion des Körpers nach interessanten Informationen ab und überträgt sämtliche Eingangssignale in eine spezielle Computerdatenbank.

Das Datenbanksystem, das von TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE© eigens entwickelt wurde, beruht auf dem Aufbau verschiedener Atommodelle und kann individuelle Aminosäurestrukturen Atom für Atom nachbauen. Diese und andere Daten werden in unserer Zentraldatenbank gespeichert. Die gewonnenen Daten können schließlich mit den DNA-Ketten einer GenBank verglichen werden.

TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE© unterstützt das “Model Ethical Protocol for Collecting DNA Samples”. Wir werden keine Patentierung der DNA-Ketten oder den Verkauf des genetischen Materials zulassen. Wir garantieren dagegen die individuelle Kontrolle über persönliche Informationen. Wenn das “Human Genome Project” seine Mission, die Transkription des Codes, der die Erschaffung und Entwicklung menschlichen Lebens kontrolliert, erfüllt hat, wird dieser Code für alle auf dem Markt verfügbar sein. So hoffen wir. Sind die DNS-Ketten des Menschen erst einmal vollständig entschlüsselt und interpretiert, dann werden wir in der Lage sein, das Ergebnis für unsere eigenen Zwecke zu nutzen. Wir werden uns selbst neu erschaffen und den Lauf der Evolution ändern.”

Daniel García Andújar

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (screenshot)

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (screenshot)

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Installationsansicht (Photo: Sascha Dressler)

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