Awakening into the living cosmos Among young artists it is Federico Díaz and the virtual unit Silver that have managed, in their multimedia projects, to fully face up to the challenge to apply digital technology as a new medium of expression.1 Their work represents specific methods of exploring nature and shares a common starting point in sculpture. Computers make it possible to approach this form of art from the opposite side, as it were, to program shapes as models from within the computer field, “without the touch of the human hand“ (Díaz), like a pure expression of thought.
Silver and Díaz are interested in shape in its archetypal structure as the conduit or medium of energy. This is the case of Silver’s computer‐animated E‐Flowers – simulated psychoactive radiators in the form of symmetrically constructed abstract shapes – and Díaz’s illusory cyber‐objects Blob I,II,III (1992–1997), emphasising physicality and motion.However, if the work of Silver is shaped by a strict rational order, a kind of virtual classicism, grounded in algorithmic structures, then the visionary work of Federico Díaz springs from the subconscious depths of dreams and reveals the primordial chaos of creation. This is symbolically demonstrated in Díaz’s first important multimedia work, the sound sculpture Nostalgia (1992), which takes the form of a giant helical seashell – the case or “dwelling” of the body, that at the same time is a hologram of the cosmos. Nostalgia takes as its subject dreams of the cosmos origin and of man’s deep union with nature and the universe.
The medium used for this was an unidentifiable low‐frequency sound emanating from the core of the object, which the viewer has no visual access to. From that point, the intangible sound vibration became Díaz’s primary medium of artistic strategy. Federico Díaz – like his teacher Karel Malich – perceives the world around him as an energy field of various vibrations. In the multimedia installation Dehibernation, which over the course of two years passed through three transformative stages, he finally achieved his concept of a dynamic holophonic sound environment, in which each visitor through his or her movement in space evoked various, diversely localised sounds. Part of the installation was a computer projection that could be modified by the sound of a person’s voice or the movement of eye pupils.
The term dehibernation, which we could paraphrase as “awakening”, would appear to be crucial to understanding Díaz’s creative thinking. Díaz is trying to attack the viewer’s immediate perception, to offer a sensorially compelling experience, devoid of all the usual connotations of meaning. In doing so, he opens up a path beyond language, structure and communication. He suspects that there exists something beyond the mind, something more substantial, which is revealed in the pure experience of the given moment. Through this intuitive sense, Díaz evokes not just Zen and other Eastern teachings, but also the theory of some contemporary scientists, such as the physicist David Bohm or the theorist of general evolution Ervin Laszlo.
Both have reached a similar conclusion, that matter and mind, as mutually interconnected aspects of reality, evolved together out of that “primordial vacuum“, or as Ervin Laszlo put it: “it evolved out of a common cosmic womb: the energy field of the quantum vacuum”.2 The path to this intangible, invisible substance of the world is sought in Díaz’s interactive sound installation 7 at City Gallery Prague (1998), in which the artist counts on the effect of conscious and subconscious sound impressions. From this perspective, his grand project for a house of cosmic consciousness for the third millennium, E AREA (1998–1999), represents a synthesis of Díaz’s work.3
The heart of this project is formed by holophonic simulators in the shape of balls ten and twenty metres in diameter, intended to simulate multidimensional motion based on the principle of holophonic sound and virtual reality. They were intended to facilitate a view into multidimensional reality, into the processes of external and internal nature, including human consciousness. In their installations, Díaz and Silver model patterns of human perception on the principle of the participative links between the perceiver and the perceived. They thus touch on the understanding of reality as a kind of continuous “field”, something explored in quantum physics by the above‐mentioned theorists Laszlo and Bohm: 1. The perceiver can through his/her senses enter the perceived reality and with his/her voice or vision can change it (Díaz – Dehibernation / Spin; Silver – Resident; both 1995); 2. Matter (nature) represents a specific form of perceiving being, which responds to our perception (Díaz – GUG, 1997, and Blob, 1998).
For example, Silver’s Resident, created using the technology of virtual reality as an artificial luminous being or an artificial creature, changes form according to the sounds of the human voice; in the broad spectrum of connotations of this work we can note the Rudolphine myth of the Golem or the revelation of an internal light in the pastels by Karel Malich.4 In their installations, Díaz and Silver thus model the perception patterns of an interconnected world, in which there is no dichotomy of matter and consciousness or of man and nature.5
The work of both artists chimes with the current wider trend of an awakening into the living cosmos, which many studies and theoretic visions of a new paradigm have opened up for us.While Díaz’s sound installations can be described as dynamic, unstable (“chaos”) structures of sound, pelting the viewer and drawing him/her into their vortices, Silver’s interactive sound fields take shape on a strictly rational principle and adhere to the idea of harmony. This work of Silver’s emerged out of the need for an alternative to classical music, and it can be ranked in the wider context of so‐called generative music, exemplified by its main initiator Brian Eno. It audio‐sculpture or audio‐performance, where, out of a databank of recorded sounds, the spontaneous movements of visitors generate an actual image of the work of music in a specific space, an image that is each time different and original. Silver created a total of four such works – from Sirénes in the New Hall Gallery in Prague (1993) to the installation Victoria in the Small Hall of the Veletržní Palace (1999–2000); one project never realised was an interactive sound field called Gateway from 1996, which was based on the myth of speech, its origin and functions, and which anticipated a similar project by Federico Díaz, 7.
Díaz’s sound installations and Silver’s process sound fields reflect the change in the life feeling that was ushered in by the 1990s. I have in mind a de‐subjectivised human consciousness, its interlinking through interactive ties and the development of a new type of telematic and ecological existence. According to Vilém Flusser, man in the telematic age is “something like an onion, an empty kind of cluster of fibres. […] Relationships are the real, concrete given”.8 The consciousness that we exist “only if we are connected to others” is becoming a paradigm for us today. The question of human identity and of the originality and authenticity of artistic expression thus re‐emerges. Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonances has shown that we do not actually possess our thoughts, and that too can be applied to artistic inspiration. Reflections on similar questions resonate in the project E AREA and even lie at the very origin of the virtual unit Silver.
Jiří Zemánek
art theorist and curator