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Fabian Wagmister's digital work, two, three, many Guevaras (1997), is a comprehensive multimedia exploration of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, "the man, the icon, and the myth." For this complex piece, Wagmister and his assistants culled hundreds of poetic, literary and visual tributes to Guevara in order to explore the various cultural forces that have shaped our understanding of this unique historical figure. Viewers who navigate the installation employ several digital systems. They begin by simply selecting images; these images lead one through thematically related collections which can be further explored by country of origin, type of work, year produced or individual artist/author. This interactive experience allows each viewer to create a unique path through this "exploratory collective poem." As the work's creators have explained: the "advanced underlying multimedia relational database structure and an interpretative interactive engine the project reaches beyond the conventional 'clicking' navigational mode and allows individuals to make deeper structural choices." To further enrich the interpretative potential of this work, numerous original video interviews with the featured artists and other "relevant cultural workers" have been included. This vivid exploration of the life and mythology of Che contains over 4,000 images, 600 poems, and hundreds of songs from Cuba, Bolivia, Argentina, Korea, Turkey --- in all, more than 60 countries. The visual component of the digital work also includes posters, paintings, drawings, and photographs which were collected by Wagmister from throughout Latin America. The work is accompanied by music inspired by the causes for which Che fought. Wagmister's huge piece --- over 8 gigabytes --- lays out the historical conditions and personal characteristics that make the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara such a significant figure to several cultures while simultaneously reflecting upon the function and potency of political art. --Barbara Lee Williams, Leonardo/ISAST Awards Committee chairperson __________________________________________________ (artist questionnaire) Date of birth: February 25, 1962 (Argentina) Date and location of your first major exhibition: "...two, three, many Guevaras" in the exhibition "La Imagen Constante", La Habana, Cuba, July -- August 1997 Location where you currently work (city and country): Los Angeles, California How do you see technology changing art for the good or ill in the next decade?: Digital technology will continue to penetrate all aspects of human activity including artistic expression. Embedded in the material specificity of this technological paradigm are both fascinating creative possibilities and problematic cultural biases. Generated by the hegemonic nations, the computer is an integral part of continuing ideologies of domination and control at the individual, cultural, and global levels. At the same time the powerful relational structures made possible by this technology permit powerful new modes of interpretation and signification and even liberating departures from dominant modes of representation. This dichotomy between the computer's intended objectives and its divergent expressive potentials needs to be central to serious research and creative activities in the arts. In the future it will also be increasingly important for artists to dig deeply into the technology's material specificity and corresponding aesthetic condition. Software, largely produced by market forces, will continue to filter and even hide the technology's dissonant potentials to those forces. Centrality for software tools (their functionalities, metaphors and interfaces) represents artistic dependency and ideological compliance. For artists to serve as independent observers of the social conditions in a technologically globalized world they will need to reach increasingly deeper into the technology itself. A key component of the future evolution of digital art will be its unique relational capabilities. Sensors, telematics, databases, machine control, networks, distributive media, are all components of relational interactive real-time environments which value process over object and exchange over distribution. This new sense of dynamic connectedness between the factors of art expression (creation - work - participant) and the conditions of the external physical world will implicate new modes of collective construction and interpretation of meaning. __________________________________________________ to learn more about Fabian Wagmister's work, visit these websites http://digitalcultures.isop.ucla.edu/ http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/wagmister.html |