MARIANO SARDÓN
Tunnels of Wind
OPENING: Saturday, 07 May 2022 – H 4.00 pm
10 May 2022 – 09 July 2022
Text by ENNIO BIANCO
When we talk about algorithms in digital art, we are not referring to cold sequences of instructions capable of generating an image or a continuous flow of images, but we are indicating the basic tools that the digital artist has at his disposal, something similar to chemical-physics of the colours of the great Renaissance masters or to the perspective tables by Brunelleschi. Algorithmic Art was born in the 1960s with the first artists who dealt with cybernetics, but it has never stopped evolving and producing spectacular works, as in the case of Mariano Sardón’s “Wind Tunnels”.
Who, among us, hasn’t used all the air in the body to blow and watch the fruits disperse in the landscape picking on a blowball (the “common Dandelion” of the Asteraceae family)? If we could, I have no doubt that we would have decided to blow all over the surrounding landscape as well.
Here, Mariano Sardón has recreated that breath, that wind, with an algorithm and has decided to apply it on each pixel of the images obtained from online datasets, to suggest a metaphor concerning our society, our culture. A culture that in the Digital Age is characterized by an enormous availability of large masses of data linked together, but which nevertheless flounders due to the problems of intellectual property, the privatization of knowledge, and above all the non-mediated access to different opinions.
“We are in a process of social transformation in which the previous categories are becoming confused. We live in a world on the verge of extinction, where every conception is questioned and the things we have known have fallen. If we have lived in a liquid modernity, we are living in a gaseous reality», Sardon says while presenting this extraordinary series of works of great charm and beauty.
