The Power of Culture

Interactive art does not simply hang silently on the wall with a name card. It is about technological inventiveness with an artistic dimension, or the other way around, depending on how you look at it. The soap bubble machine by Mariano Rondón from Venezuela, for example, projects enormous soap bubbles on happily gurgling babies and newborn animals. Will fragile life be raised in the future in mechanical wombs like this one? Or the digital letters in the books by the Argentinean artist Mariana Sardón. They change places when you make loud noises, creating new words and meanings: an ironic reference to the universal pretences of science.

Emergentes emphatically claims not to be an over-all exposition. "The exposition shows how Latin American electronic art has developed to date and what inspires contemporary artists", the Peruvian curator José-Carlos Mariátegui explains. "We have not included, for example, the historical-political dimension that is usually characteristic for art from Latin America. The works of art can lend insight into how science and technology can fit in with art and society. They make us stop and think about complicated themes like biogenetics and the influence technology has on our daily lives."

The soundscape Recomputing Space that Rodrigo Derteano from Peru has constructed in a closed space was recorded at seven different locations in Lima. This 'psycho-geographic’ study reproduces the world of taxis, street vendors, cars and passers-by by playing analogue recordings through speakers on the floor. And it works: after only a few seconds you are no longer in a museum but out in the street amidst the chaotic traffic of the metropolis Lima.