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Using Technology To "Prolong Intellectual Gestures"

Q&A with Portuguese artist João Vasco Paiva on his journey to Lyon and his latest work, Forced Empathy.

João Vasco Paiva surprised us with his Chirps installation at last year’s Creators Project launch event in Beijing. The piece consisted of hundreds of motorized plastic birds that, in a chain reaction set off by one bird “maestro”, emulated the sound of a flock of real birds, filling up the vast area of 798 space with a frenetic chirping. This playful work could be interpreted a variety of ways and appealed to all kinds of visitors—ranging from those who were interested in engaging with its poignant reflection on nature vs. artificiality, to those who simply enjoyed being immersed in the strange atmosphere that the work created.

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Portuguese-born artist João Vasco Paiva has been based in Hong Kong since 2006, and it was there that he started exploring an interest in the mechanics of arbitrary composition. Coming from a fine arts background, João developed his artistic concerns within the form of new media, using a constant, underlying dialogue between the creator and his tools as a trope for conveying his ideas.

His works are presented in the form of audiovisual installations, video, digital prints and sound recordings. But while João has a special focus on medium specificity, his work also seeks to experiment with new methods of composition. He uses digital and analog systems to explore notions of abstraction and realism, creating extensive archives of random and raw information.

As an upcoming Creator whose work will be featured out our event in Lyon next week, we decided to take a moment to sit down with João and talk about his life in China, his journey to Lyon and his latest work, Forced Empathy.

The Creators Project: As a Portuguese artist, what made you move to China? Is China a good place for making art?
João Vasco Paiva: After I graduated, I felt the need to distance myself from my familiar environment in an attempt to alienate my creative practice from a very heavy European tradition, culturally and socially. I believed that to expatriate myself would allow me to maintain the required distance that would empower a structural and aesthetic observation of my surroundings.

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In 2005, on a trip to Indonesia, I felt this strangeness for the first time, not only with the usual touristic flaws, but the simple details of everyday life. Then in 2006, I got a scholarship from the Portuguese Orient Foundation in Lisbon, and I enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program at the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong. I was shifting from a fine arts practice to a more media based approach, and everything came together pretty well. I was invited to teach at the same university after I completed my Masters degree, so I end up staying here. Hong Kong, particularly, allows me to keep my position as a bit of an alien, but not a tourist, at home, but not a local, which is perfect for the kind of work that I do.

Experiments on the Notation of Shapes (teaser)

Do you think Chinese culture has influenced your work?
Not directly, no. I forced myself not to get superficially influenced by a culture that I didn't understand clearly. I have a Western point of view, and I should be aware of that. On other hand, it did [influence me]. I work within a city full of visual and sonic stimulus, and I try to depict them. It is a purely hedonistic practice, but it always reflects social, political and cultural issues.

Maya Deren claimed, while documenting rituals in Haiti, that movement and dance are an integrated part of a culture. I too believe that visual and sonic structure—things that anyone can observe without a deep knowledge of the cultural aspects behind them—can also be a main characteristic of a certain culture. The way people move, their speed, the way they deal with each other’s presence on the street, the way buildings are organized, sounds of a street market, the rhythm of a conversation in Cantonese—all these elements, even if reductive, are essential characteristics of a certain culture and a certain place.

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Action Through Non Action

Sea of Mountains

Can you talk more about your new work, Forced Empathy?
Forced Empathy is a new series of works where the determining role of the medium in [the work’s] documentation and presentation are highlighted. I think I am currently on a struggle with what we call "data visualization." To translate information from one source, and format to another, started to seem inefficient. I look at many works where data is grabbed from the internet, from user's interaction, etc., and its transformed into graphics, or motion… it all seems conceptually poor, superficial, and incoherent. I am talking about art here, not design.

So that's when Forced Empathy started to take shape. The idea is to maintain the same [physical] nature of the input in the output. By doing so, I look for an emphasis on the process of mediation, of documentation, and so on. It is impossible to document without a comment, almost all the audio and visual documents have a certain degree of partiality or are semi-fictional, and this lack of impartiality is not only on the [part of the] person who documents, but on the chosen medium, on the chosen frame.

I am doing research on a book written 500 years ago, by a Portuguese wanderer in Asia, a book whose historical veracity is hard to separate from a certain degree of fiction. This encounter with what we call “exotic” comes to a point where the medium chosen really determines what will be perceived. That's what Forced Empathy is about.

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I am showing this week at Experimenta and at the Orient Museum in Lisbon, Anchored Monument I, the first stage of the project. It consists of a video of a buoy where the buoy is computationally forced to remain still in the center of the screen, while the background adopts the buoys movement. Next to the video, there is a small kinetic model of the same buoy that moves frenetically trying to imitate the buoy’s original movement. Behind the model, there is a two-tone print of gray, depicting the sky and sea in the buoy’s video.

While the video emphasizes the frame, and the medium itself, the model and the print separate the same scenario into background and figure, painting and sculpture, movement and static, addressing the most basic issues of visual studies and visual representation.

In your early work, you worked mainly with video. Now you’re doing work with different mediums such as sculpture, prints, and so forth. Does this indicate a new direction for your work?
I guess that my focus on video came naturally from my background in painting. Nowadays, each work demands a specific medium, and this occurs in two ways: given a certain situation, I find the best way/medium to deal with it, or while researching a specific medium, an idea or a problem pops up. The medium constricts the work, and each medium requires a certain specificity, although my universe expands through different mediums.

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You are bringing Chirps to Lyon next week. What can you tell us about this version of the installation?
In Lyon, I will present Chirps in a setup that will be divided into two parts. In the first part, one of the plastic birds will be shot by a webcam, while in the second part, 100 birds will be staring at a monitor where the video from the webcam is being displayed. I’ve chosen this setup as a response to the legacy of two of the most important citizens of Lyon—the Lumière brothers.

Cinema has changed a lot since then, but the most experimental ideas in terms of moving image can still be found in their work, and in the work of those pioneers, whom the cinema industry call primitive cineasts. From the introduction of narrative to the “reality TV” we have nowadays, or from the appearance of video handicams to the introduction of video conferencing on internet, the main pillars of the moving image remain the same: someone looking at something or someone else doing something. In this version of Chirps, the birds will react/copy what the bird that is being projected on the monitor is doing.

So what do you think of interactivity in new media art? What makes it different from video game/interface design?
I believe the best interaction exists between a person and a painting. I don't think interactivity in the so-called “new media” is a plus. I actually think it’s a big distraction from the real content of the work itself. Only in cases where the interaction is the core concept of the work (perceptually or conceptually) is it valid. A show where everybody is pushing buttons, touching screens, moving their arms around, without a single moment of reflection, I don't think that's interesting. It becomes like an amusement park—entertainment, not art. I do prefer the term “participation”, and for this, you don't need any IR sensor or joystick to get an active and participative audience.

50 years ago, Allan Kaprow, wrote about eliminating the audience. The first “happenings” and performances by groups like Fluxus, demanded this border be dissolved, and I do agree with that. About 10 years ago, Relational Aesthetics tried to reinvent this. It was more or less the same, nothing new, but a bunch of good artists doing good work. But nowadays, interaction, mainly in new media art became an easy way out. The spectacle, and the fake sensation of empowering the viewer when he doesn't even know what's going on inside the computer. Can flushing a toilet be interactive art?

What are you working on at this moment? Any exciting future project we should look forward to?
I am preparing a major show about the book I also mentioned above, Fernão_Mendes_Pinto. I am looking for the same places he described 500 years ago in China, and I am reinventing historical facts by adding stories told by a friend who is an expert in myths, outer space stories, etc. I am gathering all these stories, merged with the history of Chinese civilization, and building up a show that looks more like an archeological exhibition than an art show—a huge lie, with some truths in between. I am also working with super8 projectors, let’s see what will come out of that.

What’s the role of technology in your work?
It has the most important role—it is a prolongation of an intellectual gesture. It’s what helps connect what's inside my head with the physical world. A brush, pencil, camera, screwdriver, computer, all these are extra hands. They help to understand, observe and express, and one should allow them to creatively guide us through the creative process.

Images Courtesy of João Vasco Paiva