On Wednesday Sept. 13, la Fundación Telefónica inaugurates the multimedia interactive exhibit Marea Negra [Black Tide] by Gabriel Corchero. A collection of interactive poems and sound landscapes, with video projections, CD-ROM and Internet, Black Tide creates an atmosphere of immersion with a great audiovisual impact: a symbolic space of lights and shadows in which the artist evokes a unique architecture of the uncertain, made up of dislocated words and viscous silences.

The piece is conceived as a poetic space inviting reflective thought. It alludes to the black tide, taken to be a metaphor of an altered state, marked by ambiguity, disorientation and altered parameters of time and space. At the same time it establishes relationships between the ecosystem and the info-system. In this sense, it recognizes one field of analogies and resonance between the pollution of our natural environment and the environment of media.

To deal with the experience and the complexity of the black tide phenomenon, Gabriel Corchero relies upon digital communication technologies. These enable him to not only represent, but also create the symbolic space for contemplation and experience. Altogether, the artist presents a world of dynamic, evolving reciprocities that are activated by the intervention of the piece’s viewers/users. An interactive navigation system, conceived of specifically for this exhibit, allows one to make a random journey through thirty-two audiovisual poems. In addition, there is an audio installation that responds to the flow of audience.

In its entirety, the Gabriel Corchero exhibit has conceived a transformable hybrid landscape, an associative world of signifiers and signified whose fuzzy logic corresponds to the polyphony of substances that make up the plot of what is real.

With "Black Tide" Gabriel Corchero consolidates his research in the field of audiovisual arts. This exhibit acknowledges Corchero’s productive artistic career, one that began with his photographic and video work in the 1980’s, culminating in the 90’s with his innovative creations of interactive multimedia spaces.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BLACK TIDE PROJECT*

In "Black Tide" Gabriel Corchero presents a cathartic, chaotic and dislocated atmosphere, a black mirror reflecting a world of shadows turned inside-out. In fact, the first space of the exhibit offers a desolate atmosphere: boxes of light in different sizes, each unique in appearance, haphazardly placed on both the floor and walls. Upon the black background of the boxes white words can be made out; emotions and thoughts emanating from a turbid and shaken internal space. This poetic landscape constitutes a mass of black viscous material: fossil fuel extracted from a dark world of anguish and anxiety. Those who move through this exhibit space activate certain sound devices that echo the written words, creating a irregular and dissonant chorus. Altogether, they form an altered media Infosystem that spits out its own senselessness. It evokes a sensation of saturation that turns onto itself and collapses under its own excess. The chorus of voices grows as the number of visitors does: only their absence can silence it. The more movement, the more noise and interference. A sticky sound imposes itself while also obstructing the flow of meanings.

This cathartic atmosphere of dissonant polyphony is followed by a landscape of silence and reflection. A large audiovisual projection in black and white is the key element in this space. The slow wavy movement of water invades the atmosphere and projects its reflection onto a dark liquid spread across the floor. The images give off a hypnotic and deceiving beauty, both relaxing and troubling. An unmistakable odor of tar emanates from the walls and the floor. The images transmit a feeling of ambivalence and uncertainty. On the large screen with clear water Gabriel Corchero inserts small windows, spaces of interference that cloud the image. The video becomes out of focus and background images of the same reality begin to appear, differing counterpoints that are added to the sound of subterranean water. A deep rippling sound of natural spring water is mixed with the dry sound of an electronic fountain. With this audio background one confuses voices of the ecosystem with those of the info-system.

The superimposing of visual, audio and olfactory impressions produces disconcerting effects. It provokes a state of alert and suggests a critical reflection that puts the senses in question. Once again it shows that in the end it is the brain that perceives and conceives of the realities of our natural and media environments.

The relativity and vulnerability of our relationship with the physical world is amplified by the various media filters and by those electronic devices that impose their objective views above subjective valuations. Thus, memory and knowledge systems are imposed and made homogenous, intercepting exactly those rational qualities generated by perception and subjective experience.

Next, Gabriel Corchero redirects the space of reflection towards one of interaction. He invites the visitor to assume the active user role. By means of thirty-two interactive poems he creates a random journey through the black tides. This is an audiovisual landscape made up of a world of words, images and sounds. Placed upon a fluid and wavy backdrop or inserted into a subtle cybernetic communicational architecture, his poems become mobile, dynamic and evolving. Words inserted into a media environment both form and transform the phrases.

They interrogate, alter and reconsider the signifier and the signified through numerous possible constellations and configurations. Each poem suggests journeys in different directions. When navigating through these thirty-two audiovisual poems one cannot go backwards: one must always go forwards through the different mental and emotional spaces of Black Tide. In the end what remains are the footprints of the steps taken, a type of navigational map through a world of ambiguities and uncertainties.

Nevertheless, the journey through the exhibit does not end with interaction, rather, it evolves with its projection onto the Internet. In Black Tide’s virtual space the words expand, resound and open up to new dialogues. It introduces a forum of debate and in the long run, a data bank that will grow with the news, reflections, experiences and knowledge provided by the virtual visitors.

The author’s desire is for Black Tide to remain as a living space on the Internet, a space that evolves with the contributions of the internauts, but also with the ebb and flow of real tides, through data collected in four seaports around the world. This sum of data will mark the tone of the sound landscape of the on-line Black Tide. Thus, the natural environment and the media environment will function together in a sea of inter-connected data. In the long run the info-sphere of this ocean will be as susceptible and vulnerable to pollution as the world of real fluids.

The four seasons suggested in Black Tide – catharsis, reflection, interaction and evolution – as well as the various intensities and processes presented in this piece by Gabriel Corchero have led to the selection of texts present. Taken together, they offer a broad field of reflections that correlate diverse spheres, scientific, philosophic and artistic, by means of the metaphor, black tide.

Firstly, Diagnóstico: Marea Negra ("Diagnosis: Black Tide"), presents a crisscrossing interdisciplinary view of environmental pollution. It is a journey through diverse concepts and perspectives which includes the participation of the writer Joaquín Araújo and the following scientists: Antonio Fernández de Molina, Manuel García Velarde, Ricardo Guerrero, Lynn Margulis and Federico Morán, through an interview by Luis Rico. In Oleaje blanco – marea negra ("White surf – black tide") the author, Mario Satz, uses the figure of Faust to explore those mythologies lying beneath and feeding ideologies of contemporary progress. In Ecos de lo negro en las mareas ("Echoes of black in the tides"), José Iges contextualizes Gabriel Corchero’s work in the hybrid and frontier areas of audio and visual experiences in twentieth century art. In La estética de la poshistoria ("The aesthetics of post-history"), Norbert Bolz offers a critical analysis of contemporary artistic practices. Lastly, in Home lands in land, Manuel Gausa articulates a set of reconciling, constructive ideas for art, architecture and landscape, seen through the transversal nature of emerging architectural tendencies. Altogether, they propose new views that transform a world of opposing polarized concepts into a territory of compound complementary substances.

Note:
(*) Excerpt from the text Marea Negra: de medio a media, by Karin Ohlenschläger, published in the exhibit’s catalogue.

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Information: Obdulio Martín Bernal ( Phone: 91-584-8996; Fax: 91-584-0697; Email: obdulio.martinbernal@telefonica.es) and Carmen Mañueco (Phone: 91-584-0424; Fax: 91-532-3287; Email: carmen.manuecogrinda@telefonica.es)