-./

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria translates the index of the book “Point and Line to Plane” (1926) by Wassiliy Kandinsky into an audio-visual image via Morse code. This code emerges as a flickering pattern of images, misleading the viewer to believe there is an error in signal transmission. Image and sound are designed in a way that any decoding of the sequence of signs is unlikely. The linear rationalization, the original purpose of its creation, is obscured. The work can be interpreted as an investigation into the intertices between code and language. In the modified arrangement of this visual and acoustic code, a Morse-image emerges. It is an image that appears distorted (normally an unwanted effect but one often appropriated or fashioned as an aesthetic strategy in media art) but, which is, in fact, merely an interruption of one kind of linearity for another. The video image is simulated interference, created through a chain of carefully constructed audio-visual clips that function simultaneously as both aesthetic form and communication. In the work of Gaviria, basic principles of rationality are taken to padoxical ends. The work often follows a tautological thought process that emphasizes the compositions of complexities. In -./ the video image underlines the idea that communication has to be perceived, conceptualized and designed, if it is to explain and animate the dynamics of digital processes. The work shows a transition from Morse code, the communicational instrument, to mediality, which in turn, poses the challenge to understand and engage our environment as complex, scaled and non-scaled networks.

– Manfred Fassler