by Álvaro de los Ángeles, 2006

Arcades first appeared in Paris in the first third of the nineteenth century and became increasingly commonplace, as Walter Benjamin points out, with the growth of the textile trade, which marked the beginning of a hitherto unknown relationship between the inhabitant as a customer/buyer (user) and the city. Glass, iron, overhead light and artificial lighting -”The arcades were the setting for the first gas lighting,”‘ wrote Benjamin- covered entire blocks of buildings. This new architectural concept was in keeping with the period of change and the industrial revolution it formed part of. However, it also represented the ubiquity of a city inside a larger city, a clear attempt to create a “new” world inside a known one, while evoking the ideals of progress and well-being, albeit founded on a virtual idea, unreal or unattainable, that the physical and tangible world no longer seemed capable of generating or achieving.
In much the same way as painting, panoramic views faithfully reflect nature, but, in extending further than painting, they convert it into a lifelike experience thanks to the lighting, generating transitions of light that imitate day and night using effects normally associated with illusionism. In employing features that belong to the scenic arts, panoramic views represent at the same time the prelude to “”photography, silent film and sound film”2. These modes of recording a world in constant flux (modes engaged in an almost constant transition and interrelated with each other), became gradually more feasible when technological advances made it possible to convert into scientific practice the theory that enabled the albeit problematic use of the magic lantern. As a result of one of these transitions, Daguerre, after losing his most developed panoramic views in a fire in 1839, unveiled his daguerreotype, an improved appropriation of the methods of Nicéphore Niépce (above all in relation to the medium and the fixing of the image), something that gave him a disproportionate amount of fame as a pioneer and a consummate illusionist. In other words, if the panoramic views can be viewed as the extension of painting within the ambit of the scenic arts, the appearance of photography momentarily and fragmentarily fixes part of that mystery played out in the settings. If lighting bestows credibility and verisimilitude upon large panoramic settings, then light is the essential material that enables the photographic act to take place, allowing both the photograph to be taken and the resulting image to emerge on a sensitised glass plate.
By following the relevant thread, we can interpret the shop windows of the arcades as screens onto which products are projected, visible behind the transparency of the glass and inaccessible due to the pure thickness of its surface. They drive a desire that is only satisfied by the action of buying and selling. In the objects displayed in them we not only see the goods that we wish to purchase, we also project ourselves into a mental space where we ‘are wearing the clothes, eating the food, using the utensils or living with the furniture put in front of us. This projection operates, at the very least, in two directions. In seeing ourselves within this imaginary world, we plan the future from the present, we create a line of action, we want to see that this journey we are embarking on is feasible. On the other hand, we project an illusory reflection of ourselves, an idyllic image in which the future we imagine does not exist, and in which we would be incapable of handling it with complete freedom should we find ourselves in it. The truth is, we cannot control something that is shown to be intangible and which is also, to all intents and purposes, impossible to predict.

It is for this reason that the now ubiquitous compendium of artistic/social connotations that is cinema, whose high-quality prologue is written by the intense history of photography and other advances sensitive to the recording of the world, can be seen as the starting point of models revolving around the concept of desire: its impossible definitive conception (in that it is nothing other than a virtual projection on a screen); and its insatiable appeal (even in the knowledge of its non-conceivable character, we still want to see more and more derivatives of it). This figurative desire has traced a fascinating path that runs from modes of collective contemplation to others where the need for individual viewings and non-transferable personal experiences has been marked out with increasing clarity. Nevertheless, an initial phase in this differentiation was already present in the origins of the cinematic experience. Whereas the Lumière brothers, with their cinematograph (1895), enabled people to come together to watch cinema, linking it forever to the world of spectacle, Thomas Edison’s (1891-1894) kinetoscope laid the basis for the individualised enjoyment of the moving image, in the unreserved belief that there was no future in the social and collective act of viewing -either in cafes, in the early days, or in specially created rooms later on-. Was Edison, as the entire century that followed sought to demonstrate, really so wrong?
It would perhaps be inaccurate to analyse both these options, synthesised herein, in line with such clearly delineated concepts as right or wrong, success or failure, as much as history enjoys such polarised divisions. With the supersonic intervention of digital technology, we now find ourselves at the onset of another technological revolution comparable to the one instigated by the appearance of photography and cinema, which were mainly differentiated (or nuanced rather) by the immediacy of the results, the speed of the perpetual changes, the technical (yet ideological) impossibility of an about-turn or even a simulated slowing-down of events. As a consequence, this constant, regular, unstoppable speed can only be analysed from the perspective of the individual, through an interchangeable interface that is employed solely by a single person: unipersonality, individualism, solitude in the face of the retro-lit screen.
Collective networks created by the Internet generate a not-insignificant paradox: designed to provide wide-ranging solutions, they can only be responded to by individuals who know their logins, passwords, and access routes. Virtuality, perhaps as a reaffirmation of itself or because of the fear of being swallowed up by its own inconsistency, is obliged to surround itself with specific elements, passwords, serial numbers and compatible updates desperately anxious to replace what was there previously. All in all a vast range of options concealed behind the apparently cold and static normality of a screen (a window, but also a mirror) that is representative of each individual. However, underlying the concepts of absolute freedom are obstacles, restrictions, surveillance and control of practically every movement designed to expand the field of activity. Any action of this type generates, as a co-active counterbalance, a reaction that attempts to cancel or subdue it. Behind the translucent plastic casing and crystalline plasma screens of its machines, this transparent society retains part of the darkness so characteristic of the most time-honoured and claustrophobic subjugation of freedoms.
Daniel G. Andújar and Technologies To The People (TTTP) have taken particular interest in the development and use of virtual communication and information networks, such as translation, at the level of the society in which they originate and which they represent. Their e-projects3 set out to respond to specific real needs of a certain sector of the population, through instruments based on virtuality, free access and an almost literal transcription of the Foucaultian “tool box”, where philosophy is replaced by a type of technology that is more social than scientific, more participative than contemplative. As they are virtual spaces of freedom, they become places that generate real dialectic conflicts between users- a micro-society that settles its differences as a mimesis of society in general. Elements such as accessibility, individuality, security, etc. lead to the possibility of constructing the surrounding world around it, with the added advantage of a wide range of options and the free selection of them. Obviously, this construction is based on existing cultural models tailored to the real demands of each user, including the organisation of their milieu in accordance with their needs, tastes or preferences. In this respect, Hack Landscape signifies one more stage in the development of personalised tools and perhaps constitutes one of the installations that best demonstrates, from a symbolic point of view, this social model supported around the construction of the milieu itself.
It is a house/study that features several retro-projections of varying sizes positioned in such a way that they can be seen, totally or partially, from all four sides, and on whose walls are disposed windows or openings. The viewing public can see the mechanism used from the very beginning of the process. The production design is perfectly visible, as are the retro-projected screens and the interior space of the house, which is fitted out not in order to make it credible but to show it is functional and usable. It is for that reason that it has been conceived as a place of work as well as leisure, where technology is an omnipresent element, an unavoidable code (and an acquired civil right) for understanding the current mechanisms of the globalised world. From the inside of the room the screens are marginalised and delimited by the windows, each one of which -as elements that exist more than ever as connecters between two extreme spaces- offers a complex and different visual situation. It is from that vision that the screens supplant urban or natural spaces originating from fiction or taken directly, in real time, from a surveillance cameras. The unifying theme is the landscape or, to be exact, the representation of the landscape and our subjective, cultural and constructed vision of the original natural medium.
The conflict between antagonists is clear from the very beginning. In addition to the aforementioned opposing effect between the visible structure of the projection mechanism and the illusion maintained from the room interior, the alternation between fiction and the reality of the projected audiovisual material can be added, as well as the continuous play between inside/outside, interior/exterior, light/shadow, etc., and, on the other hand, the eternal dichotomy between truth and untruth. Or between what is offered to us as true and that which we discover to be false. These two formal concepts, possessing a cultural and subjective construction, are usually associated with virtues or defects: goodness tends to be linked to truth, whereas falsity and untruths are linked to evil or disobedience (another erroneous and interestingly named concept). In this context, technology is used, and is propagated ad infinitum in the process, as an ideal tool for breaking up discourses designed to cause predetermined confusion, to offer an external image that conceals the real actions of its internal ideology. As a result. Hack Landscape reveals, in a single horizontal and dehierarchised plane, both the construction of the reality of the interior and the physical machinery that makes its technical and conceptual development possible.
The argumentational origin of these oppositions has the potential to return us to the myth of the Platonic cave, where the shadows of real objects cast on the cavern employ here the polyvalent technology of audiovisual projections. For its part, the projected material, which acts as a synthesis of the recording that has been made individually or anonymously throughout the network, recreates from a multitude of angles an entire catalogue of mythological updates, from the reflection of Narcissus on the screen; to a sedentary and virtual Odyssey-”the motionless voyage”, in the words of Eugeni Bonet’- that is not far removed from cinematographic video-artistic and documentary references; and onto Sisyphus’ inability to keep his mind on all the things that are happening (or the stone on top of the mountain).
From a semantic point of view, Hack Landscape refers in this context to the colloquial voice that relates “hackers” to “computer pirates” (the title can thus be translated as “to pirate” or “to appropriate landscapes”). However, as a verb, “hack” also means “cut something up roughly, chop it into pieces”. This definition lends it a hardened, premeditatedly cruel character. a meaning that emanates from the dominant power that, as in other installations created with the support of TTTP, sets out in this work to perform a 180º turn and thereby put the result of the coercion face to face with the element generating it. “watching the watchful” as it were”.
By way of rounding off this very brief analysis, I would like to turn my attention to the concept of creating the environment itself, to the way in which society has changed its behavioural and relationship-related habits in moving from collective uses to individualised modes. The possibility of multiple means of accessing information, leisure, Culture, and virtual experimentation, has lead to the Illumination of one world inside another. The image of landscapes in relation to the city is enough to understand the virtual world inside the physical one, where even sensations seem to become increasingly similar to the original ones they mimic or supplant. Hack Landscape is in no way a catastrophic vision of society today. Rather, it attempts to demonstrate, somewhat remotely, almost objectively, new tools for personalising the professional and domestic environment, all the time fusing the historical separation between our working lives and personal lives, or between the space where we work and where we rest. Everything appears to move into a type of dynamic simulation in which the outlines become blurred and the references become confused, in much the same way as received, stolen or legally used images “rethink” the values of reality or fiction, of authorship or anonymity. The creation of the space that surrounds this house/study takes another step forward in the process of representing the exterior space (regardless of the quality of this landscape) and questions it. Is our field of vision reduced to a panoramic view, to an oblong format? Or is this way of seeing a cultural construction, a synthesis, the literal translation of the picture, frame, window or the screen in the end?
Without question, more so in this than in any other case, the end is the beginning, the question is the answer, the definition forms part of the heading.

All that remains is to look carefully, put the pieces together again and form a stance of one’s own from which to question, yet again, our entire surroundings.

Benjamin, Walter, Ellibro de los pasajes, Madrid. Akal, 2005. p. 38.
Ibid. p. 40.
e-valencia.org (online since November 2001, despite two attempts to censor it); e-barcelona.org (since 2004); a-sevilla.erg (since April2006); e-areo.org (created for Area 2003 but not online at the moment); e-seul and e-wac.org (created as part of the exhibition and debate project On Difference #1 organised by the Kunstverein in Stuttgart, online since May 2005).
4 . Bonet, Eugeni: La invitación a1 viaje / imagen-movimienro-tiempo. In, Movimiento aparente. La invitación al viaje inmóvil en las tecnofogías ubicuas del tiempo, la imagen y fa pantalla (catalogue). Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló-EACC, Generalitat Valenciana, 2000.

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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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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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• 1996
• Website, printed flyers, posters « [www.irational.org/tttp/*siteTTTP/]

Presented with original posters » Products offered by Technologies To The People (TTTP), the company founded by Daniel G. Andújar, range from the Street Access Machine® over the Recovery Card® and Internet Street Access Machine® to the Personal Folkcomputer®. All of these (fictitious) products and technologies aim to allow the socially underprivileged to participate in the emergent information society. While the Internet Street Access Machine® promises »access for all«, the Street Access Machine® and Recovery Card® enables beggars to accept payment by credit card. The project unmasks the belief, propagated by those who manufacture the associated products (and by »Californian ideology«*), that a democratizing potential is inherent to technology. The world shown by TTTP on its posters and leaflets is neither more just thanks to the deployment of these new technologies, nor is it accessible to all — despite the claims made by providers of telecommunications applications. Even if they use the latest info-society tools, beggars remain beggars, the socially marginalized remain socially marginalized. Technologies tend to reinforce, rather than alter, social structures. When the project was presented in Hamburg in 1996, a (bona fide) mail was received from Apple, announcing the company’s interest in the (fictitious) product range of TTTP.** (Inke Arns)

• See Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron: Die kalifornische Ideologie, in: Telepolis, 5 February 1997, www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel1/1007/1.html
  • un-frieden. sabotage von wirklichkeiten — discord.sabotage of realities, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus Hamburg, 1996, curated by Inke Arns and Ute Vorkoeper, see www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Archiv/Discord/. In regard to the participation of Technologies To The People, see also Inke Arns: Technologies to the People® — Our Sponsor, or: How we got the attention of both AppleTM and the left German art critique. In: Technologies to the People®. Annual Report 2000 [i. e. Daniel G. Andujar], Alicante 2001, www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/tp.html

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