Brief Description of the Webart work of Claudia Sandoval Romero

Brief Description of the Webart work of Claudia Sandoval Romero
Holograms of Deportation, online and 6 digital prints of 50x54cm, 2010
Two pieces produced during as a guest student in KHM, Cologne, 2010,
“Holograms of Deportation” and “Lost Memories”
In “Holograms of Deportation”1 three portraits of deported people are taken
from the internet to create three dot matrix holograms. These holograms were
placed on the walls of Berlin, being exposed to the interaction of the
pedestrians. The portraits belong to three deported people from Germany and
only during a certain time of the day, when the daylight hits in the proper
angle, the simple mirrors reproduce the images of the deported, showing them
as a sort of ghosts brought back to Germany.
1
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/hologramsofdeportation.html
Lost Memories, online, 2010
“Lost Memories” 2 is a movie made of the images of Thaissa’s life in Germany.
Thaissa is a Brazilian who was deported and the movie of her life, this is, her
memories, disappears when the interactors click on the images in the web. The
piece was part of a performance done in KHM where the students participated
helping in the disappearance of the memories of Thaissa, this is, collaborating
with the pass of time through their participation. This way, the mere act of the
passive appreciation of the piece points to the silent responsibility of those who
don’t participate actively in combating the social issue.
2
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/lostmemories.html
Passport, online, 2008-2009
In “Passport”3 falsified passports are offered as a product of an online contest.
Voting on the pictures of passports from France, Cuba, Colombia, Russia and
USA, begins a discussion about transits and nationalities.
3
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/passport.html
Missing, online and 20 digital prints of 13x18cms, 2009
The project “Missing” 4 , 2009, is an answer to the violence without a
recognizable face, and to a conflict without shape, that have taken numerous
victims in Latin America and around the world.
A changing collage is composed by faces of missing people that have been left
in the internet by the relatives and organizations looking for them. Each image
is a mixture of faces of missing people, being the priority the great number of
missing seen as one.
4
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/desaparecidos.html
Coyote, online, 2009
“Coyote” 5, 2009, is a manual to cross the North American border from Mexico.
The manual has being built trough the 25 interviews that were done to illegal
aliens in the United States.
5
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/coyote.html
Sammlung, online, 2010
¨Sammlung¨ 6 is a fake mirror image of the museum’s website Kah-Bonn.
Adding the link “Sammlung”, this is, adding, in a virtual reality, a collection to
the museum. In this occasion the link leads to paintings done by orangutans
and questions the institutional image of the museums in the web.
At the same time, my inquiries about photography and its context brought me
to developed a research about the place that photography occupies when used
as part of multimedia art pieces for the internet.
Therefore I have developed collective art works such as “Scarring”, developed
from Sao Paulo with participants from around the world, since 2006- until the
present time.
6
http://kah-bonn.co.de/
Scarring, online piece, 2006-2011
“Scarring”7 consists in passing via e-mail an image of a woman with a scar in
her stomach, which, hand by hand, is intervened by the participants’ personal
discourses. The project is an allegory of intervening the web with a collective,
already healed wound, and proposes to taking into consideration how the web
has radicalized the fight for creative rights, forgetting authorship in contrast to
the numerous actions developed when copyrights are violated. The work’s
intention is to point to a free use of resources in the internet while evidencing
artist’s conscious loss of control.
An intervention half done in the virtual world of the internet and half a urban
intervention, is the piece “Healing Cotton Balls”, São Paulo, 2008. The work
was done during the seminar Public Interventions of Antoni Muntadas and is a
collaborative project with Marrikka Trotter from Harvard.
7
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/scarring.html
Healing Cotton Balls8, blog, 2008.
This small-scale intervention was intended to respond to a common strategy of
threshold defense in Sao Paulo. The intervention consisted in temporarily
appropriate an aggressive infrastructure with a small act of gentleness and
delight. The relation performance-registry is taken to a next step when
photographic material is posted in a blog continuing with the action in a virtual
sphere were it can still grow.
8
http://healingcottonballs.blogspot.com/
Living Cemetery, online, 2008-2013
The project “Living Cemetery”9, 2008-2013, is a web invitation to belong to a
community where participants reflect about their own death, leaving a
document for their last wishes in the web. And at the same time their images
are used to illustrate their personal and virtual grave, also compound by their
epitaph.
9
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/livingcemetery/livingcemetery.ht
ml
OVO, online, 2009.
The piece “OVO”10, 2009, consisted in the online transmission in real time of
the 21 days that an egg takes until its hatching. Here, a new reading on Viola’s
action is offered, taking the discussion to the matter of time, comparing the
always-accelerated concept of time lived inside the internet, contrasting it to
biological time, impossible to be forced or accelerated. At the same time
“OVO” questions web art, where things must always happen satisfying
interactors’ desire of action, in contrast to other kind of processes hidden to the
human vision.
10
http://www.claudiasandovalromero.com/web/ovo.html
Caloto, blog, 2009.
Other works developed for the web are ¨Caloto¨11, 2009, that consisted in a
workshop about digital photography, writing and blogs, done with the 25
students of the Nucleo Rural Caloto, located in the violent rural area of Cauca,
Colombia. The workshop reflected about the region and the lives of the
teenagers and offered new technologies as tools to create a collective identity.
11
http://calotocauca27.wordpress.com