To liven up a welcome party, the hosts usually resort to a similar jazz quartet that accompanies the greeting ritual of the guests and anticipates the shared joy of what is to come. But this is the opening ceremony of ISEA, the most recognized international electronic art symposium in the world, and here the music is provided by a dj, half machine, half human, who spins algorithms and generates visual compositions that then fill the air of sounds. We are in the Vergel courtyard of the Museu Frederic Marès, a corner of medieval Barcelona, where everyone tries to imagine the future while the artist Santi Vilanova, from the Playmodes studio, makes us touch it with the tip of a finger, taming the machine live, forcing it to vary its rhythm, melody or style according to its perception of what the evening needs at all times, and making it possible for us to literally hear what we are seeing on a big screen.
FORMS , the stage version of Vilanova's piece that forms part of the Electronic Art Beep collection and is currently exhibited at the Sant Pau Modernist Enclosure, provided the soundtrack and visual for the opening ceremony of the congress promoted by the UOC, which until next Thursday will turn Barcelona into the capital of electronic art. Perhaps so that the international community (there are 650 congressmen registered) could get a quick idea of where they were, there was a previous visit to the Maria Aurèlia Capmany viewpoint on the terrace of the Novíssim City Hall building, with 360º views over the entire city.
And already in the Marès, Slow Violence , a video by the Hamill Industries collective that uses sophisticated technologies to see phenomena that are not evident to the human eye, widened the angle even more and, as if it were an infinite zoom, put the 200 attendees face the destruction of ecosystems and the unstoppable disaster that is taking place in nature. ISEA's motto is Possible and its goal is to imagine that future to be built. The alliance between art and science has much to say about the relationship of humans with machines and animals, climate change or the habitability of the outside world. The present no longer serves, but it is necessary to examine it.
The Councilor for Culture, Jordi Martí, the director of the symposium, Pau Alsina, the rector of the UOC, Josep A. Planell, the Minister for Culture, Natàlia Garrig, and the Minister for Universities, Joan Subirats, spoke. Five speeches and a common wish: that the event serve as an incubator for new projects. The second big event opens this Saturday at the CCCB and is open to the public: DïaloG, an interactive installation by Refik Anadol -an artist who turned Casa Batlló into an NFT- and Maurice Benayoun about otherness.
