55 Cancri e – Monica Lopez

The world of global information capitalism daily confronts us with extraordinary events, whose evidences vertiginously move across electronic superhighways. Myriads of images extracted from diverse sources, with heterogeneous qualities and varied formats, invade our space, inevitably set with screens and immersed in its luminous surfaces. We are already with them, and our ways of seeing the world, our affections and representations inhabit their languages. …

Is it true what his flashes offer? Are your narratives reliable? How much of what we perceive today is arbitrated by how electronic devices, their information flows, and what we seek (and download) from the web, shape our beliefs and transform the complex sphere of our corporality? The 55 Cancri e project seems to support this desire to interrogate forms of creation attached to “compressed and flexible data packets” ready to be transferred and integrated into countless procedures and combinations. An ethic of remix and appropriation, as Hito Steyerl calls it, opens the fingerboard to creativity without jurisdiction.

The interfaces open possibilities where a gigantic repository of information of all kinds, seems to affirm the idea of a world in which everything is available and “at a glance”, not only to modify our ways of seeing and appreciating but also to reveal us a horizon of uses where, thanks to the access of a connected majority, authorship is radically transformed. The creative subject relaxes their gifts, making the differences between an artist, a web designer, a graphic designer, or an expert network analyst more blurred.

It is in the distribution of the web where creation, interactivity participation confuse their operations ranges. Translation, editing, critical and parodic editing and other appropriation and transfer maneuvers appear as distinctive modes in artistic practices that are aimed at illuminating “the affective condition of the contemporary crowd”.

These processes have modified perceptual patterns, making us more sensitive to images surfaces and effects than to the content they embody. We are faced with a type of architecture where dissimilar forms of contiguity are incubated, of fragmented apprehension of the world: a spatiality linked to the configurations and formats of the devices, which fosters a different commitment with viewers and users constantly exposed to mutable connections. Engaging, displacement and hierarchies activated in their own experience with the environment.

Mónica López has always been interested in the images that abound in browsers and generally, those produced technologically. Her flatness and meager materiality – aspects that she sometimes emulates in drawing – have occupied her creative endeavors: as if the hand wanted to fight the technical neatness born of the device. But her intentions have been heeled toward questioning the dominant display archetypes distributed by internet platforms. Her proposal is aware of the deceptive nature of the images behind its glittering presence, which, as Juan Martín Prada affirms, refers us back to that “mythical historical association between sources of light and sources of authority.”

She has been feeding her interest in the exploration of those porous edges that exist between languages of sciences whose discursive structure has, per se, real effects and the exploitation of their authorized rhetorics by a juicy market that swings between the apparent seriousness of her statements, the novelty of a society eager for spectacles and an economic sector that proliferates from the pseudo-scientific speculation that abounds on the web.

The possible existence of a planet made entirely of diamond and all the maneuvering that orbits its scientific treatment and its media image stand as the leitmotif of the sample. Its nodes are the images, the devices, the discourse and the corporalities that lie in a field of promiscuous relationships between science, advertising, transnational economic and strategic institutions and interests. And here resonates that suggestive idea of Fredric Jameson when he recognized that in an “era of textualized surfaces and decentralized consciousness ”, the reconstruction of a political unconscious (that latent narration), would only be viable in the figure of allegory, glimpsed through associations and fragmentary texts as approximate and partial articulation.

Lupe Álvarez

The starry heavens and the moral law

Declaration of intent. Notarized document.

The Outer Space Treaty of the United Nations created in 1967 has a legal loophole, it forbids nations from appropriating extraterrestrial lands but does not mention corporations or individuals. Using a declaration of intent, a fundamental document in juridical acts, this piece consists in the appropriation of a 2701 m2 and 2km depth piece of land in the planet 55 Cancri e, whose rough diamonds equals the GDP on Earth.

The kaleidoscope of Zacharias Janssen

Sources: Cambridge university, Top history, Science@nasa, Exploring nature, Exoplanetas noticias, Architectureexposed, National geographic, Nasa jet propulsion laboratory, The universe unfold, SETI Institute, Sci News, The infographics show, Debeers Space and the universe, Victoria’s secret, Nasa explanet archive

As if it were a metapicture, this video installation is an image that reflects on images, words, and their modes of circulation. I am interested in generating, within the installation, the coexistence of different visual textures. As the planet is beyond the limits of the observer’s perceptual environment, the corporeal visual experience is replaced by its relationship with technical devices. It is impossible to see the planet in its entirety; all that can be seen are fragments. The videos, blending science, fiction, and popular culture, will display different visualities that are part of the repertoires proposing the idea of space. They visually support the construction of the value of the planet and the diamond.

The twilight of the dean

Video lecture performance. 24 min

Sources: National geographic, space.com, nasa.com, research gate, exocast.com, abc.es, nasa.gov, astronoo.com, astronomy.com, forbes.com, scitechdailt, europlanetsociety.org, exoplanet.com, skyondtelescope, universe today, astronomyhudson.org, phys.com, Victoria´s secret, Architectureexposed.com

The twilight of the dean is a simulated conference revolving around a major discovery, navigating the boundaries between science as rigor and science as fiction. The script is composed of fragments of texts extracted from scientific journals and websites containing information about the diamond planet 55 Cancri e. The narration connects disparate images as the performer presents a series of scientific, historical, and economic facts, while also raising philosophical questions rooted in existentialist and linguistic traditions.

Crown of suns

Graphite on paper

The Crown of suns series of drawings take its reference images from coronagraph record files, a device that, when adapted to a telescope, is capable of blocking the light of a star, used to study the solar corona and to search for exoplanets. These technical visualization methods paradoxically show a less objective image endowed with imprecise meanings. In its manufacture, the drawing becomes an exercise in the emulation of artificiality.

Breath

Object capable of transforming a diamond into carbon dioxide

The disappearance of one of the most coveted objects on the market that symbolizes infinity is the opposite aim expected in processes of matter transformation for industrial manufacturing. The material changes to become imperceptible; it is free of its economic value emphasizing its symbolic condition. This piece triggers reflections on the appreciation we hold on materials. From a molecular point of view, the air is considered nothing, but CO2 is a vital noble gas.

Field diary

The field diary is an instrument used to record those facts that can be susceptible to be interpreted, it is a tool to think about the possibilities that such an expedition could allow and require. The notes on planning of a journey to a remote and dangerous place include gathered information, such as the location of the planet, project designs, formulas, drawings, and research annotations that evidence the processes that have led the ideas of the 55 Cancri e project.