voxINformatio: Video Performance

Referencing Jorge Eduardo Eielson is a way to approach the afterlife of Quipus for me, and the way media allows us to live beyond the short span of our human existences. Before, we use to have access to this past lives through the objets they left: today, thanks to electronic media, people are able to be “returned to life” whenever we hit “play” on a video or sound recording. With A.I. though, this is taking another shape: now others can be able to listen to things we never said when alive, with our same voice and with our same expressions. Eielson could never fully realize his “Esculturas Subterráneas”, conceptual works from the sixties, that consisted of poetic instructions to create what apparently are impossible land artworks meant to be buried in different cities of the world.

voxINformatio Performance

I allude his impossible work with this action, in a way, materializing it. He insisted in hiding these sculptures from sight by burying them, one can recognize the very Peruvian custom of knowing about our history through unearthing and restoration, disregarding words-as-text as there were none left (if there were ever). The way I see it, Eielson intended to leave a huge Huaco (pre-Columbian pottery) for future generations to find. At least for the Lima sculpture, this never came to be. In any case, the whole conceptual piece does bring back the idea of the artist-as-medium; the act of burying, a sepulcral ritual of sorts. In this video I am burying one of the AIELSON´s "El tiempo del hombre" records, I bury the time of man now of synthetic nature. The air one hears in the video is the actual AIELSON system learning how to speak (sound clips from the actual Neural Network training process). It brings to mind the winds characteristic of the Peruvian desert, the Paracas, which is also the name of an important pre-Columbian civilization from the area, notable for its textiles. I leave a plastic “huaco” for the future, inscripted with a voice and a narrative that never belonged to a human being.