Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC): Academics from the UC School of Art participate in the 15th Biennial of Media Arts

The crucible is an instrument used by various cultures for the fusion and disintegration of metals at high temperatures. The Media Arts Biennial in its 15th edition “Umbral” , has been inspired by this element to host works by artists, academics and academics from the University of Chile and the Catholic University, who make up a common narrative body, giving an account of a past , present and near future, where the collaborative represents a foundational criterion.

The works find a point of convergence in the Museum of Contemporary Art, provoking a space for interaction with the community that proposes questions and reflections on social, poetic, political and economic issues, answers that can only be completed by those who observe them, producing micro crucibles of meaning that activate other readings. The museum is proposed as a melting pot and the melting pot as a threshold, so that each visitor can elucidate different questions on their journey.

The artists participating in “Crisol” from the UC School of Art are: Valentina Serrati, Gastón Laval, Roberto Farriol and Claudia Müller. In addition, the UC audiovisual producer Susana Foxley and the UC journalist David Osorio, the designer and artist UC Ricardo Vega, and the Research Network in Environmental Humanities (RIHA) , in which different academics from our house of studies participate, were invited. Adolfo Martínez, Ricardo Vega, Carla Motto, Luis Montes and Pablo Rivera participate from the University of Chile. Other participants are the Forensic Architecture collective, the Chilean Video Corporation and the Andrés Bello Central Archive of the University of Chile.

“Crisol” , at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), Parque Forestal headquarters, will be available until April 9, 2022.

Blood maps. Atlas and Diagram (2021)
Gaston Laval
This montage is part of the Cartographies of the blood project , started in 2019, which integrates art and science, relating anatomy, physics, medicine and engineering through research, experimentation and creation around the concept of the body. The work, a product of multidisciplinary creation, proposes a series of relationships, scientific as well as metaphorical and symbolic, establishing a crossroads with the physical concept of turbulence, coming from fluid mechanics.

The assembly for the Biennial includes two main pieces. In the first place, the center of the room is arranged, suspended, the image of a skeleton framed in an iron structure, which is the positive printed on paper of about 40 x-rays that make up the body of the artist. Under this structure there are four naked monitors (22″ televisions, DLP technology from the ’90s), without casing, facing the cardinal points. This low-tech audiovisual system shows a series of videos linked to the notion of the body. A total of 36 cones and speakers extend from the ground in which the sound translations of the visual information of the videos are reproduced, creating an ellipse around the image of the body.

A video from the translation of magnetic resonance imaging of a female body is projected on the back wall of the room, transforming its original files of diagnostic image information (VTK) into video and animation formats.


Valentina Serrati
Intra-disciplinary creation in media arts, biology and performing arts that explores theories around ecological evolution and synthetic biology, together with notions of post-humanism and cyberfeminism, as a form of critical thinking in the context of the global crisis we are experiencing. as the human species. One that includes the exploitation of resources, the environmental emergency, the economic crisis and the alienation of the human as a productive subject. ATANA, is in the final stretch of this timeline, and being initially human, it advances without stopping, towards the integration of identities, genders and sexualities defined as non-human.

ATANA consists of a site-specific video performance configured from the confluence of elements from installation, staging, generative art, and sound design. Conceived as a laboratory based on the PaR model –practice as research– its methodology is based on the intersection between practice and theory, and how they problematize and nurture each other in the understanding of doing as a way of knowing. Under this consideration, the space is proposed from the performance in correspondence with the virtual space, thus seeking to generate a multisensory perception. On the other hand, it opens the question about the limits and configuration of identity, showing it confronted with a virtual reality that multiplies it while the performance unfolds through non-sequential simultaneity and multiple narratives.

The last landscape, landscape of memory (2021)
Roberto Farriol
Based on the concept of landscape of memory, this video-essay seeks to represent the memory of the first inhabitants of Valle Exploradores –located in Chilean Patagonia– during the first half of the 20th century.

In an interdisciplinary work between art and geography, a compilation and selection of stories from its inhabitants about human occupation and the different productive activities that have been developed there over time was made. In addition, historical photographs and audiovisual material of the vestiges that still remain of the ancient inhabitants of the place were gathered.


Boundary of Confusion: Spectra (2021-2022)
Claudia Müller
The astronomical concept “limit of confusion” (is characterized by) arises from the difficulty in distinguishing individual objects when there are many sources detected, making it difficult to choose a particular aspect to analyze. Spectra seeks to establish a simile between this notion and the creative processes of the visual arts from the intersection between a daily action and scientific coding.

The work is configured through the act of directing light and projecting through the water, circular figures on the ground. Action that is carried out on eight glass jars with tea of ​​different herbs: chamomile, boldo, rosehip, which have a direct relationship with the sun and have grown thanks to this star. The herbs are illuminated by a light system that recreates movements similar to those of the binary stars that orbit each other in the celestial vault. The oscillatory movement allows the projected circles to intertwine and their images to intersect, blurring their limits and causing an undefined shape that confuses and unites their circular bodies.