THE EXPLOIT: DANIEL G. ANDÚJAR
A*Desk 02 FEBRUARY 2015 JUANJO SANTOS The first solo exhibition of the year at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is “ Operating System”, by Daniel García Andújar. A large selection of earlier works is being shown alongside new creations that continue to explore the link between new technologies and society, intervening between the public and the private. We talk with an artist who considers his work to be more collective than individual. Your exhibition could also have been called "Inoperative system". In fact I’m into these analogies, very black or white. I make a lot of references, as happened in “Postcapital”, where I reduced language to colours, something symbolic but that is still there as part of the artistic language. In the artist’s toolbox there are all the languages used during the history of art, it would be absurd not to use them. I make an almost reductive use in this type of analogy, in this case of red, white and black. I make these analogies, as in operating system, in order to establish parallels with the political system. In line with the language of hacking, there is an endeavour to seek out the failures of the system, through the bug, and once on the inside to improve or repair it; this search is for a more democratic system, for a much more horizontal system. Through the hole opened up by the bug enters exploit, the programme that can be damaging or beneficial. I work with this idea, in fact I always explain the paradox of the knife: If we film a scene with a close up, a certain type of lighting, use certain dramatic recourses of film and a knife appears, we think one thing. But if later a hand and Ferran Adrià appear, we’ll be talking about cooking. Depending on how we use them, tools have one result or another. I’m in favour of a greater transparency and emancipation, and that what be criminalized be a bad use of this information. But they are criminalising or supervising us a priori, and don’t let us function as an emancipated society. You mentioned there are errors in the system. Do you think the way to solve them is through the participation of society? Undoubtedly. When I began to develop these operating systems and software, I talked about an emancipated citizen in this sense. If instead of society as a shapeless mass we have individuals who are trained, with a good stock of educational and pedagogical culture, we’d have a better society. Here I draw a parallel with the Spanish empire of Philip II, when thanks to the printing press, the word, in this case of God, the Bible, begins to be disseminated. There is a wider access to certain information and its interpretation. It’s there the developments began that led to the French Revolution, that first great emancipation of the bourgeoisie. I make an analogy with this huge divide that is currently forming, that ultimately is like a new social hierarchy, what in the 90’s was called info-rich and info-poor. The digital divide is growing increasingly wider, adding to a divide that was already there.
Daniel García Andújar. Operating System. January 20. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Daniel García Andújar. Operating System January 21 - May 4, 2015. Sabatini Building, Floor 3, Zones E and F Organized by: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Curatorship: Manuel J. Borja-Villel Artists: Daniel García Andújar Martes 20 Enero 2015: 12.00 Press 13:00 Private visit 20.00 Official opening http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/daniel-garcia-andujar-operating-system Daniel García Andújar (Almoradí, 1966) is a visual artist, theorist and activist that is difficult to classify, and is considered one of the most pre-eminent representatives of so-called Net.art in Spain. With an interest in constructing a cultural discourse through digital media and IT and communication technologies, the artist operates from public space, making use of the city and the Network as territories from which to conduct his work. Along these lines, social relations and power are found under a system of negotiation that is permanently being redefined, manifesting, through IT systems, inequalities and discussions generated in these relations. The vast majority of the works included in this exhibition are new productions, yet there are also significant pieces that date back to the beginning of the 1990s, where the constants can be noted in a career that not only uses a collective work method and a form of questioning aimed more at users than viewers, but also demonstrates the patent conversion and critical re-use of
Videoarte hecho en España
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Desde hoy, 12 de febrero, se puede ver en el Centro de Arte Complutense la exposición Videoarte hecho en España. En esta exposición queda patente el impulso del videoarte en el escenario cultural español como tendencia artística paralela a la consolidación y universalización de los medios de comunicación de masas.
Los videoartistas utilizan los medios electrónicos con un fin artístico, que no debe confundirse con la televisión o el cine experimental, pues establece una dinámica estética conceptual a través de la narración visual o audiovisual. Su vocación interdisciplinar les permite sumar valores de la pintura, la escultura, la performance, el cine y otros métodos artísticos para buscar su propia plasticidad del movimiento, y su propio lenguaje simbólico.
Free Software on the Surface, Behind the Screen and in a Cultural Kaleidoscope: X-Devian.
The New Technologies To The People® System
By Jacob Lillemose
In 1999, when the art and technology festival Ars Electronica awarded The Golden Nica, first prize in the ”.net” category, to the programmer Linus Torvalds for his development of the Linux operating system, it was pointing in general to the relationship between free software and art, and more specifically to the affinity between free software and that part of contemporary art which is concerned with software’s constantly increasing influence on social, economic and political conditions. Like Linux, this part of contemporary art works against the proprietary software industry’s standardization, repression and rationalization of the software culture, and instead explores alternate possibilities for freeing the software culture through more open, expressive and speculative processes.
On a more indirect level, Ars Electronica’s choice of Linux also emphasized another relationship between free software and this contemporary art, i.e. the idea informing both that software is not just a question of programming, but of producing culture - of understanding and using technology as a means of engaging in a social context. According to the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Richard Stallman, free software is about ”practical material advantages” but also about ”what kind of society we want to live in, and what constitutes a good society”. 1 Stallman himself imagines an extremely collective and creative society founded on the freedom to ”use, study, copy, modify and redistribute software”. For him, the free software’s fundamental abolishment of intellectual property rights represents a chance to structurally and conceptually ”reprogram” society for the better, and this is an opinion he shares with much of contemporary art.
Crítica de la simulación de las libertades
Álvaro de los Ángeles
Daniel G. Andújar. Individual Citizen Republic Project: EL SISTEMA. Technologies To The People - Espai ZER01, Olot, diciembre 2003 - febrero 2004

Individual Citizen Republic ProjectTM: El Sistema
El ciclo Dimensiones Variables es un proyecto que pretende explorar la paradójica inclinación que afecta a ciertas prácticas artísticas contemporáneas, las cuales parecen debatirse entre dos territorios de interpelación en apariencia antagónicos: por una parte, el impulso de acotar el espacio social para analizar sus estrategias, posicionarse respecto a sus dinámicas y actuar de manera enfrentada dentro de él; por otra parte, la variabilidad inevitable a la que queda expuesto este mismo objetivo, el sentido, necesariamente restringido y parcial, implícito en cualquier tipo de acotación. En este contexto, las propuestas Individual Citizen Republic ProjectTM: El Sistema y Lo viejo y lo nuevo. ¿Qué hay de nuevo, viejo? concebidas por Daniel García Andújar y Pedro G. Romero, respectivamente, constituyen dos aproximaciones independientes y específicas a la paradoja que subraya el título del ciclo, dos planteamientos distintos pero que, sin embargo, se caracterizan por construir particulares espacios de resistencia crítica, zonas difícilmente domesticables, marcadas por una orientación irónica y por la voluntad de restituir nuevas dimensiones, dimensiones variables, a la configuración del entorno social.