JUAN CORTES
Migrations
November 12 - December 15, 2021
The Migrants is a project based on a real bird-migration history from 2014. The Golden Warbler birds faced adverse conditions due to global warming that generated storms on the coasts of Florida, which was their main destination. This caused the birds to alter their migratory routes, being forced to explore an alternative way through Mexico and Central America until arriving in Colombia.
Rethinking the relationships between technology, animal worlds and culture through art generates the possibility of imagining new scenarios and alternative atmospheres where biodiversity as a production of difference from nature recovers its power in a gesture of resistance to our current global scenario.
The project started with the Umwelt concept, translated as the surrounding world by the zoologist Jacob Von Uexkull, who had a musical idea of nature- as a symphony of bubbles that surrounded animals and determined their ecological relationships. These bubbles contained everything that is significant to the animal. Umwelt goes against anthropocentrism and allows the animal to be thought of as an agent that possesses a world and not as a passive machine of reactions. Following Viveiros de Castro, we find in Amerindian cultures a way of seeing animals very close to the Umwelt: for Amerindians animals are also agents, indispensable for the cosmogonic organization of their community: skins, fangs and canes are technological prostheses that complement the human body and create bridges of communication with invisible dimensions, by extending the mind to other realms, acting as enablers of an inter-umwelt communication.
This new series of digital artworks are based on The Migrants project and are generative works inspired by four specific situations of bird migration as metaphors that allow us to create a parallel with experiences crossed by anthropic agents, like the crosses between migrant birds and the travelers that cross the ocean, or the challenges that both the birds and the humans face when crossing the desert. The videos presented here are a capture of the generative piece running in a game engine simulation using flock algorithms and the Unity VFX Graph, that allows the creation of complex particle systems so the sequence never repeats itself.
Atractor Studio: We are a group of artists who work with mechanical, electronic and computer engineering techniques from the field of the arts. We focus on the visualization of natural phenomena, mathematical and scientific paradigms related to socio-cultural phenomena not only of the hegemonic western culture, but also of other ways of knowing and understanding the scientific, through the interaction of the viewer with a digital and analog substrate. We understand technology as a field of struggle from our Latin American context. In this scenario, assimilating and experiencing technology always as active users implies that electronic arts and creation have the power to detonate conversations and create spaces for community dialogue. Atractor is an open studio that seeks to nourish itself from the conversation with beings from other disciplines and interests. We believe that horizontal creative relationships are much more enriching than the specialist and segregating vision of academia and traditional creative spaces.
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