Jarbas Jácome is one of the best digital artists in Brazil. He comes from the world of data processing arts and, like many artists of the genre, his many solo and collective projects explore the language of computers and their poetic potential (as opposed to artists who seek technology solutions for particular questions). He also advocates the democratization of these languages, since, in times when our emotional memory resides within a server, this is a matter of self-knowledge, and the lack of intimacy with electronic languages would be the next type of alienation to fight against.Jácome’s pieces tend to favor materials on the verge of being discarded, as opposed to deconstructing recent releases. In Crepúsculo dos Ídolos (Twilight of The Idols), an audiovisual installation whose creation coincides with the rise of YouTube, a rotunda of television sets displays a typical TV channel, each TV playing the same thing. A microphone placed in the middle of the room allows visitors to affect and distort the images according to the intensity and duration of the sounds they produce. Based on intensity, the distortion moves through the colors of the sunset—yellow, orange, red, purple and blue—until it finally replaces the TV channel image entirely with an image of the visitors themselves. When there is silence, the channel images fill the screens once more.His second piece, Vitalino, is a manipulator of voxels that honors the Brazilian sculptor Vitalino. The piece is a play on the art of sculpture, allowing visitors to mold shapes but replacing physical touch with an interface composed of cereal boxes, lamps and webcams—a far cry from the high-tech Kinect “virtual pottery” technique we saw not too long ago.The last and and most recent work, Humano, Demasiado Humano (Human, All Too Human), finishes what the artist calls “The Trilogy of Virtualization” and in it he is literally playing with fire. Upon entering the darkened room and striking a match, a video of a roaring fire (with amplified sound for added effect) is activated by the detection of the match's light.The flowcharts and codes are all open source and can be downloaded here.
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