Page 121 - ARTE!Brasileiros #56

Men and women are just high enough in the scale of physical world. We need to do more to address the datasphere, every human is a user – to be bombarded
civilisation to be intrusted with the power of knowing financial inequalities in this paradox and compensate with virus-images. The ruling artificial intelligence
their own failings and have been granted the gift of digital-first artists more fairly”. simultaneously subverts, inverts and reverses
laughing at them”. In that same text, reminding us of To approach the elephant in the room before ontological and metaphysical notions about what
the importance of proportion, the British writer ends finishing this article: after all, memes are art? “We is true, exemplified by deepfake, in which case it is
up also mentioning the nonexistence of a “complete often think that, no matter how far away, they have confusing to discern whether what we see is real:
hero”, the one who needs to be put on a pedestal. some connection with the conceptualism of the “The more the discriminator learns to recognize false
The “complete hero”, does it look like a pretension 1960s and 1970s, especially with regard to operations images, the more the generator learns to deceive it”.
familiar to some figures in the art world? Such self- performed between word and image”, notes New Beiguelman’s main argument is that, in contemporary
mythologized characters, not rarely, make up the Memeseum. Cem A. believes that memes should be society, images and data are infinite, incessant and
cast of this memetic play. Is it possible, though, to recognized in the context of art because they carry unstoppable, guiding political and social dynamics.
get them off the pinnacle and back to proportion? aesthetic and conceptual qualities. “However, this Within a fog of mirrored noises - like shattered
“We don’t know if the satire of institutions and their doesn’t necessarily mean they should be considered fractals, suspended by an atmosphere infected
characters by arts-related memes make these same artworks or as ‘contemporary art’”, and stresses: “In by fake news in frantic and almost automated
characters/elements more accessible”, confesses fact, we should collectively question the assumption WhatsApp routings -, an illusion of equality between
New Memeseum. “Perhaps, it makes more visible that contemporary art stands on a higher level”. “Me” and the “Other” is created, drowning in a
the narrative plot in which they are involved: the This and the other issues mentioned above might narcissistic dive that entails serious decisions.
problems, weaknesses, contradictions, professional still gain momentum. “We believe that nothing has According to Beiguelman, Bolsonaro’s election
and personal dramas etc”. been exhausted [in relation to memes] because, in was caused by an extreme identification of the then
If not to demystify the linguist, can memes decode art, these debates have barely begun”, the Brazilian candidate with the habits of his voters: “Throughout
their language? For Cem A., memes can be useful both meme creators reiterate. the electoral campaign, in front of the cameras (some
for communicating complex ideas and for criticizing his own), candidate Bolsonaro laughed, became
inaccessible texts - frequent in the art world - when books imaGE [paGEs 98 to 100] serious, challenged ‘the media’, he prepared the
they don’t fight hard enough to win their reader. To the bread with condensed milk for his breakfast, went to
latter, Hilde refers to as “show off texts where people BEIGUELMAN’S the butcher shop and had a barbecue. He appeared
are really proud to show you they have a master’s at the barbershop, posed with his daughter, rested
degree in polysyllabic words”. VIRUS IMAGES on the sofa and shared pamperings received from
“I think that this sort of language is used as anonymous followers. Wearing a sports shirt, shorts,
an intimidation tactic and rarely are the people In her new book, Políticas da imagem – and even in a suit and tie, already in the post of
wielding this language in full control of what they Vigilância e resistência na dadosfera, president, he didn’t speak to his voter, he expressed
say. If they were, they’d say much less in a smoother, Giselle Beiguelman talks about a current it. And, by expressing it, it turned him into a hero,
more palatable way”, she states and, wittily, poses time in which images become infinite, inviting the voter to elect himself.”
the question: “Have you ever heard of a meme?”. fragmented and pulverized How, then, to understand an almost quantum
According to Jerry Gogosian’s creator, “you do need image, with multiple realities, that escapes the
cultural literacy to understand memes as well as a By matEus nunEs polarization between real and false that we are used
general sense of the topic, but you can learn to read to? The image’s forces of resistance, paradoxically,
them rather quickly and there’s not grammar to learn in the sounD anD the Fury, William Faulkner corroborate its dissemination – the double and
(please see how poorly I spell in my memes)”. writes: “I went to the dresser and took up the watch, ambiguous vector of a new understanding of
For New Memeseum, the memetic panorama with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the resistance. Beiguelman establishes a methodological-
is too diverse to state categorically that memes corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of analytical structure worthy of this new nature - or new
make something more accessible, and can be as glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and artificiality -, declaring an essential obsolescence
or more truncated than many curatorial texts or twisted the hands-off and put them in the tray. The of positivist ways of thinking, based on data that,
artists’ speeches. “Sometimes the reception of watch ticked on”. The feeling of being armed with even though they were already digital, had a certain
memes ranges from ‘ok, I get it’ to ‘what does that a marker that no longer serves, inefficient when analogical aspect of data processing interpretation
really mean?’ – there’s a wide spectrum between showing a faulty representation of a reality that . So that these images can be processed, they are
transparency and opacity and that makes this does not stop, is the uneasiness felt when looking converted into data that homogenize and standardize
language so interesting to work with”. at the world after reading Giselle Beiguelman’s new angles, framing, behaviors and actions: “What is
Such nuance combined with humor allows memes book, Políticas da imagem – Vigilância e resistência behind this are the criteria for organizing the data so
to address important issues, sometimes relegated by na dadosfera (Ubu, 2021). When holding something that they are more quickly ‘findable’ in searches and
consolidated media and/or cultural commentators. that ticks and doesn’t show the time, maybe we ways in which algorithms contextualize the contents
The anonymity of the producers of memes (Hilde are carrying a bomb in our hands: cell phones and in the specific bubbles to which we belong (something
had her identity revealed against her will, in fact, in watches whose more distant, secondary, functions that we do not control and that controls us)”, explains
an Artnet article, whose writer did not get the memo, are to make calls or show the time. Beiguelman’s the author.
nor the joke) along with their irreverence and the text leaves us breathless, with our hearts racing, This data organization, by trying to convert
release from the pretense heroes of the art world, taking care not to make sudden movements: we the docile matter of images into numbers, fails. It
really allow them cross narrower corridors. have a grenade of images in our hands. follows the reductionist path of trying to tame the
“ It is nearly impossible to run a sustainable Upon exploding, these images become infinite, plural powers of the objects to be analyzed into pure
business in the art world. Media outlets are included fragmented and pulverized in what the author computer data, domesticated in databases that,
in this too. So I can see why their editorial choices precisely calls the datasphere. Structurally, these no matter how much they weave hypercomplex
tend to be conservative. Having said that, I don’t infinite images can be understood as rhizomes or operations, have their input in numbers. As
agree with their approach at all”, says Cem A. when constellations, in their macro and microcosmic Beiguelman reminds us, “computers don’t see”. It
I mention the case of the exhibition Arte em Campo, dimensions. Beiguelman brings us, however, a is still necessary to create a platform – still idyllic,
held in late 2020 and reported on with the neutrality vision beyond the understanding of the structure, but utopian – capable of processing what is seen when
of a detergent. The event brought together about towards the understanding of the dynamics: images “in front of the image”, as Georges Didi-Huberman,
25 galleries and 54 artists to celebrate the “new proliferate pandemically, in a stark exponential. French image theorist, says. It’s like trying to read
Pacaembu”, the result of its concession to the private Images are contaminated. This contamination of images and write in art history still under the formalist
sector for 35 years. It was the opportunity to “say images in the datasphere - given the analogous shackles of stifling styles and chronologies, on which
goodbye” to the beloved stadium that would have, reading to the pandemic - is already seen in the parallelism with Beiguelman’s text remains
months later, the area that housed its most affordable psychopathologies – such as anxiety-depressive extremely pertinent: “visual contents are mapped
tickets demolished. Curator Pollyana Quintella tells disorders – and their somatizations. Nobody goes by the words that describe them and by recognition of
she wondered what role the exhibition played there, through these pandemics unscathed. In the field some patterns, such as lines, densities and shapes”.
in addition to camouflaging, “sophisticating” and of image theory, the duality of the paradigm that We insist on continuing to live and nurture a world
providing “a cool façade that would justify interests Beiguelman presents to us goes beyond the ambiguity that does not represent reality, that disregards the
that were far from the ones favoring the city [and of the image, which, while structural, is also dynamic. inherent complexities and inequalities caused. The
the public interest, rather than the private sector]”. The author questions the pathos of image, both in author, based on her own work in the field of image
Therefore, this kind of news - or distribution of “merely psychic and pandemic pathology, and in imagetic theory, expands the multidimensional horizons of
carefully crafted pieces of pr”,” as Hilde describes pathos, a concept dear to Western philosophy and methodological approaches and hopefully presents
it - also gets on the radar of meme creators. aesthetics for millennia. us with a necessarily delusional epistemology.
Taking advantage of the busted art neoliberalism In frightening times of fake news and invasion of Whenever you opt for a repeated adaptation,
affair, Cem A. does not cease to draw attention to privacy, it is clear that consumption is intricately linked backwards – in this case, the attempt to convert
the “invisible work” of digital projects: “People often to surveillance and scanning practices, which become complex images into quantitative data – chaos
overlook the time and effort it takes to put together protagonists in contemporary systems of power. ensues and the system breaks down: the world in
a digital project. Memes are included in this too. The circulation of data-images is inexhaustible, its current situations, both material and immaterial,
The pandemic showed us that the internet is now and this personal information is the product. In is unsustainable. As complex as data processing
an integral part of the art ecosystem and often can this way, the algorithms are fed to better serve the systems and devices are, they still handle images
reach bigger audiences than what is possible in the companies that use them, forcing the user – in the as if they were objective, which they clearly aren’t.
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