Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

textos traducidos
Inglés
Javier Sanz Fernández
It is of great interest that a research group from our university shares the results of
their work with the university community as well as with all citizens. This allows us
a closer knowledge of the different types of research carried out in our setting and
a better understanding of their contributions and relevance. Thus, the Exhibition
hall of the Vicerrectorado de Cultura of the UPV becomes an open forum between
us and the world, where art and science get together.
This exhibition lets us recover and appreciate part of our modern cultural heritage,
which - although still recent - has been lost or incomplete due to different
circumstances. However, the remakes and current approaches of the group
Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia lead us to reconsider in the present those
th
innovating aspects appeared in the avant-garde age of the first half of 20 century.
I am pleased to see that this exhibition has managed to integrate those
fundamental aspects that should always go side by side: research and creation,
art and science.
Ángela García
Art and research have always been an inseparable pair without which creation
would not be the same as it would become repetition, serialization… Search is
inherent in art and the latter cannot be understood without the former.
The search, in this case, is the objective of a team of professors from the
Department of Sculpture who work with a defined methodology and a predictable
trajectory. Theirs is not the search in the customary solitude of the artist's studio,
but multidisciplinary teamwork.
The research that originated this exhibition has also another nature: historical
recovery connected with vocation; but not only the fact of recovery itself but the
recovery aimed at the delight and knowledge of art, the educational work
underlying any activity performed by the artist-professor-researcher.
This educational dimension, from an artist's perspective, entails an additional
interest, - the exploration connected to creation - and makes it suitable for our
students, direct and natural beneficiaries of the university actions, and society in
general to which we serve, as it offers the opportunity to view this contribution as a
tool to gain knowledge of an age and a specially fruitful period of artistic creation
like the European historical avant-garde movements.
Our congratulations to this group of professors/researchers of the Laboratorio de
Creaciones Intermedia for allowing us to know a reality through the remake of
another one, in an attempt to evoke its meaning and significance in the past.
Elías M. Pérez García
Our faculty has continuously and firmly demonstrated its commitment to work and
innovation. All of us together have managed to propose an educational and
- 137 -
research framework capable of establishing itself with authority in the present and
look forward to a complex and changing future. The academic challenge of the
European convergence, besides presenting a methodological renovation at all
educational levels, shall deal with a redefinition of the art education in this
common educational space and, shall approach a map of the different art
disciplines by resolutely proposing a close relationship between them. We have
already outlined and walked a great deal of this journey. In this sense, our Faculty
has been permeable and I should say outstanding for years, as we have been
clearly committed to interdisciplinarity in terms of educational contents and have
carried out several activities with other artistic, cultural, social and productive
spheres.
Similarly, the artistic proposals of the last century have passed along different
fields without respecting the borders between the different disciplines. Today
more than ever, artworks correspond to a creative project and to their capacity to
invoke the appropriate means, without being restricted by usual discipline
divisions. The Faculty of Fine Arts, and the research groups of the different
Departments, are making a considerable effort to understand and make the
present understandable, with a clearly creative vocation to allow us participate in
its design. We have been trying for years to create and provide the academic
structure and the laboratories that allow teaching, experimentation and
investigation in these interdisciplinary practices of different languages and media.
It could not be otherwise in an institution like the University, which must participate
actively in the analysis and in the construction of contemporary knowledge.
The research group “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations” (“Laboratorio de
Creaciones Intermedia”) is the natural inheritor of an uninterrupted experiment
started at the end of the 1980's, when some professors and research assistants
gathered around a common interest in the development of the concept of
sculpture, especially regarding its relation with audio-visual media. With scarce
means, a lot of illusion and the sensitivity of the Department of Sculpture, at that
time enthusiastically and excitingly thrown into an innovative experimental plan,
which allowed, encouraged and channeled the individual and collective energies
in an integration project. From that original "Laboratory of Audio-visual
Techniques" (later on "Sculpture and New Technologies"), we still have the
intensive experience of several projects, in which together with to the interest by
the kinetic and ephemeral art, etc. was the use of video, photography and
computers at different moments and processes of the artistic creation. They dealt
with terms that nowadays are usual such as video installation, sound spaces,
photo-sculpture, and also virtual, robotic sculpture, interaction, etc. Ambitious
projects in which the illusion to investigate and to experiment was not generally
balanced with the availability of technological infrastructures, but as it fortunately
happens, the lack of means did not prevent the development of some highly
interesting proposals.