June WEB ARTIST :JOESÉR ALVAREZ/ BRAZIL
ENGLISH:1- BIO AND INFORMATION:
I am Joesér Alvarez, media artist, Rio de Janeiro, 1962. I learned to draw
very early. When I was 9 years old, I drew as Michelangelo, but I learned to
paint very late - the 12 years old boy Picasso was much better than me when
I was a 33 years old man. I learned sculpture working in an iron foundry;
and engraving with some artists in Florence. I have worked with digital art
since 94, and net.art since 2001. Currently interests me the conceptual
questions of media art in cyberculture.I live in the Amazonia's periphery, which is the Brazil's periphery. I
worked during 11 years in the gold mines, I won some money "fighting bulls"
the death, knowing it closely, by the smell and sometimes very very closely.
One of my last works MARMÓL, done in partnership with the poet Carlos
Moreira, translates better this pulsion of mine.To know more about me, only interviewing me... ;-)
To know another works of mine:
http://www.enter-net.com.br/linealvarez/bio.html
2- WORK:
I'm an assumed voyeur. Every image interests me. All text capable of generate images also interests me. I like the randomic tools that allow me to play of God, extracting signs of the chaos, formating possible characters, combining infinite colors, textures and forms. I especially like the Van Gogh explosive colors, the Monet palette . In this sense, I try to act as a renascentist of the digital age, trying medias, formats, fields, which are, just limited by the inexistence of a mecenas .
I have learned how to appreciate the use of human figure with Bacon, Jean Rustin, Goya, Frida Kahlo and Lucien Freud. They have touched me with the basic of life: the pain of being human. Day after day fighting against the
death. Not the body death, inevitable, but the one of the worst type: the spirit's death. I try to contemplate the "death" in some of my works, because that tells me a lot about the adventure of being alive, alive through the art, even after the body, although shortly on the earth.
THE THIRD COLLABORATIVE REVIEW
WORKS:
Marble
http://www.iis.com.br/~regvampi/video/black.htm
AND
Scalpoema
1- Joesér Alvarez Mortuary Poetic
I have known Joesér Alvarez mortuary poetic at two moments: one... audio-visually.... and another one... visually. ... I have felt like guest to the life's mausoleo transformed into death ... ... a so young man to the eternity of his beauty myth watching me from the calm of his esfinge...transitory calm altered while the seconds go by.... .... to that other emaciated esfinge legend successor of the more complete and definitive age for our history...the voice says his verses and celebrates the ceremony with his own symphony of time....released photos of their printed chronology transit the space in their quality of witnesses of a cosy inevitable earth. . . . . . testimonial defense of the hiddenest and oldest memory.... I go to the silence of the oficiante and his symphony......for another beginning in the black immense space.... in silence.... rotating skulls meteorites portions of which our human tribe swearing in the rate of transformation to the young esfinge completing between the columns hands of our always pillars for a moment in silence.... my own beats between my bones in silence for esfinges of my history...... between myths and legend being compressed extending their epitaphs verses..... imperceptible movements of my own life transforming themselves here..... knowledgeable of a place into this mausoleo marble indicated on the Earth transforming itself into the space...
Moved thinker.... by so intense quality of poetic suggestion.... .... I finish the ritual fraternized to the creator humanity.
2-Is the death a problem of the alive?
by Regina Célia Pinto
"Moved thinker.... by so intense quality of poetic suggestion.... .... I
I finish the ritual fraternized to the creator's humanity."(Nilda Saldamando-Diaz / Chile)
The experimental poet Nilda Saldamando-Diaz sent us a fabulous poetic review about the Joesér Alvarez works . Touched, not only for "Marble" and "Scalpoema", but also by the sensibility and acuity of Nilda Saldamando-Diaz while describing the Alvarez works, I try now, lowly, express my opinion.
I knew this restless being, the artist Joesér Alvarez in 2001, through the "Project Boundaries", a project published in the old magazine "Arteonline". I always feel admiration by his constant restlessness and search of life - the good life of the spirit - the constant search of being much more than being which is Alvarez characteristic . The first information that I received from Alvarez was that he was a member of the Group Madeirista. In fact he sent me the group's manifest. It is necessary to tell that the word "Madeirista" is a derivative from "Madeira", the name of a river which crosses Brazilian Amazonia, where Joesér Alvarez lives. I should confess that I was admired of knowing a so articulated group doing art in Amazonia. Would it be prejudice from a person who lives in one of the main cultural centers of Brazil - the city of Rio de Janeiro ?... Little by little I
got much admiration by the artist and the human being. Joesér Alvarez is a very up-to-date and sensitive artist, and he owns a very special creativity. Moreover, always he knows all the opportunities which circulates by the
Internet and, generally, is he who tells me about the interesting events. I like very much his works and I always consider them very intelligent. Thanks for the WEB, which eliminating borders, let me know Alvarez and turned him into an international artist.It is curious that Alvarez research be related to death. As I have already told, he lives near "Madeira" River. Gaston Bachelard, in his book "The Water and the Dreams", comments that the reverie finishes in the core of a weighed and gloomy water which transmits strange and funereal murmurs. Every poet who dreams near waters like these will revive submerged images, maybe meeting again his / her deads. I never saw "Madeira " River, but I do not imagine this river with limpid waters with immense reflexes and crystalline music. I see it much more with weighed and dark waters. Would it be in the Madeira River the foundation of Alvarez research? Have Nature influenced Culture?
The religion, the metaphysics and, more beyond, the culture as a whole, have
tried to understand the death concept. The Philosophy from Plato until Montaigne has affirmed that it is in the continuous meditation about the death that resides the exact relation with "her". Alvarez audio-visual research is based on this reflection which Carlos Moreira (Alvarez's partner) translates so poetically: "the white sun of the bone in the immense darkness of the meat."
"Not the body death, inevitable, but the one of the worst type: the spirit's
death. I try to contemplate the "death" in some of my works, because that
tells me a lot about the adventure of being alive, alive through the art,
even after the body, although shortly on the earth."(Joesér Alvarez)
With this afirmation Alvarez once more thinks as Gaston Bachelard, who poetically said that the dreams that lived in a human being soul keep on alive in his / her works.
Well, I agree with both if we think about painting, sculpture, literature, poetry - traditional art forms. However, the computer invention is producing a new art or many new movements in art... We are, in my opinion, in the starting point of many changes. Moreover, the fantastic speed with which the technology develops does us imagine that from here to ten years, everything that we do today will be completely obsolete. There are already groups
interested, with much reason, in preservation of our digital culture but, at least within me, perhaps because I do not take part of these groups, hover many doubts if that will be possible. Then I finish with Fernando Pessoas' s Realism:"The light is off. Is important for me that this man continue existing?"
What would be death in the cyberspace? Pixels Death, Softwares Death, Lost
Passwords, Forgotten ids ?... Death of our digital culture?...(opened to discussion)
Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literatureby Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
The Electronic Literature Organization announces the publication of a
"Acid-Free Bits," a set of principles and guidelines for the creation of
enduring born-digital works. ELO hopes that this pamphlet will stimulate
debate about the nature and future of digital artworks among artists,
writers, scholars, instructors, students and librarians."Acid-Free Bits" is available in a ready-for-printing format at the
ELO website:
3-The First View on "SCALPOEM" / Joesér Alvarez
by Regina Célia Pinto
This work (158 KB) is one of the best I have seen on the web, in spite of the simplicity of its form. Starting for the title where we find the word scalp, with the sense of poem which is done cutting words from a sentence. This sentence is a fragment of "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas", 1881 ("The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas") by Machado de Assis (". . . the greatest author ever produced in Latin America . . ." / Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, May 7,
1990, p. 107):"To the first worm which gnawed the cold meats of my corpse, I dedicate this
longing memory as posthumous memory."("Ao primeiro verme que roeu as frias
carnes do meu cadáver, dedico como saudosa lembrança estas memórias
póstumas.")After a while, those words go fading and changing. Then, the first sentence turns
into that one below."Looking at myself I want to see beyond of this memory posted."
( Ao VER-ME quero ver além desta memória posta.)
It is necessary to tell that in Portuguese: VERME = WORM and VER - ME = Looking at me (me = myself).
It is really a very interesting game of words!
Read some texts about the book "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" (From http://www.amazon.com)Fans of Latin American literature will be thrilled by Oxford University Press's new translations of works by 19th-century Brazilian author JoaquimMaria Machado de Assis. His novels are both heartbreaking and comic; his limning of a colonial Brazil in flux is both perceptive and remarkably modern. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written as an autobiography, a chronicle of the erotic misadventures of its narrator, Brás Cubas--who happens to be dead. In pursuit of love and progeny, Cubas rejects the women who want him and aspires to the ones who reject him. In the end, he dies unloved and without heirs, yet he somehow manages to turn this bitter pill into a victory of sorts. What makes Memoirs stand up 100 years after the book was written is Machado's biting humor, brilliant prose, and profound understanding of all the vagaries of human behavior. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
A 19th-century classic of Brazilian literature, Machado de Assis's 1880 novel is written as a posthumously composed memoir (according to the fictional author Bras Cubas, a superior way of writing memoirs, since a dead writer can be frank about events). Bras Cubas's life is less interesting than the book's style and structure: 160 brief chapters in which Bras Cubas comments both on his life and the novel's composition. The fictional author
was a politician, writer, and celebrity who has an affair...Book Description
"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the
story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and
unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it.Download the complet text of the book, only in Portuguese.
4-Scalpoem, a Second View and Conclusion
By Regina Célia Pinto
All of you should be reminded that Joesér Alvarez initiates his Scalpoem with this text fragment which initiates "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás
Cubas " by Machado de Assis:"To the first worm which gnawed the cold meats of my corpse, I dedicate this longing memory as posthumous memory." ("Ao primeiro verme que roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver, dedico como saudosa lembrança estas memórias póstumas.")
"Pascal told us that the man is a thinking hurdle. No: it is a thinking misprint, that is it. Each period of life is an edition, which corrects the
previous one, and that will be corrected too, until the definitive edition, which the editor gives free to the worms." ("The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, cap.XXVII)Brás Cubas, selfish, arrogant, irresponsible, rich, voluble, who pushed the idleness and the tedium the whole life, in a certain way will redeem himself of these "predicates", while transforming himself in the exposed narrator who finally dives, in a critical form, in the great emptiness of his
existence. Or, telling in a different way: while reviewing life by a disillusioned but perspicacious view of his author, Brás Cubas until recovers a little of his lost dignity and, by the fact of being already dead, can not just to tell their memories, but tell them entirely...The Scalpoem by Joesér Alvarez , through a small animation, some scalps (words cuts and substitutions) get condense in an unique sentence, magnificently, all that process of narrative:
"LOOKING AT MISELF I WANT TO SEE BEYOND OF THIS MEMORY POSTED." ("Ao ver-me quero ver além dessa memória posta")
It is really extraordinary to observe and to compare both narratives, the one of the XIX century, and other of the century XXI! Scalpoem is an awfully illuminated moment of the work series of Joesér Alvarez.In "The Posthumous Memory of Brás Cubas", not even the death, the most profound shock of the human experience, represents any narrative impediment, but, by the contrary, propitiates here the ideal dismissal, so that this
life can have a retrospect and avaliation. The sense of life only can be revealed if interlaced to the idea of death . We, in the same way, have to think about the sense of our digital culture (life) interlacing it with the obsolence of softwares and machines (death). Should we stop producing what we are producing or use simpler solutions for our work remains for ever?
Well, who visited http://www.eliterature.org , found there some suggestions. I suggest you also visit: http://www.variablemedia.net.One of the conclusions that one arrives is that to preserve arts in ephemeral formats the artist should always describe his / her work in an
independent and not ephemeral way, thus it will be easier to translate the work which will become obsolete into new medios.It would be interesting to think, that we can still watch and to amaze us with films of the origins of the movies. Among them I would like to remind
here two of my favorites: Metrópolis by Fritz Lang and Intolerance by D.W.Griffitht. Even though I believe that still today it is difficult to
find some cinematic or multimedia narrative that overcomes them. So that, it seems to me that what is really good and innovative remains.I would like to conclude the review reminding that there are other kinds ofart which are ephemeral by nature: the Performances and Instalations. Artists interested in these communication forms do not stop to accomplish
them, even knowing that they are ephemeral. If the performances and installations have good quality they will remain alive in the memory from
whom watched them and to whom did not watch, always there will be photos and descriptions.We have again the perpetuation of which is not eternal in a way which is independent and not ephemeral...
5- Speaking about Death in Cyberspace...
Joesér Alvarez sent us these information two times, the first e-mail is completely death thereabout in some corner of the net. I transcribe below the second , with the same text of the first, but that found its way for our mail box, although it have reached us after the review already concluded:
""In the middle of 1996, when the amazon's thematic ( not so true yet ) predominated in my work and some social points appeared in my aesthetics reflection, was that Thanatos started to appear more. It was the case of the Conflict of Corumbiara, at Rondônia's Province, during the summit of the agrarian conflicts in the decade of 90, where 09 persons were died officially, caused by the fight between people without rural properties and the police supported by jagunços. Some months before had occurred the Massacre de Eldorado de Carajás, at Pará, where 19 people died.
I always was sympathizer of the popular actions, and in that period I took part in some manifestations against the slaughter, working with graphic material, some drawings, sculptures and screens were a consequence of that thematic.
settlers
In 2001, three of these screens took part in an itinerant exhibition at USA: http://www.valweb.org/3americas/Americas3.htm
As well as I admire the work of the International Amnesty, I finished giving the copyright of these images to that institution.
The thematic of the death came back again, still with social view, for a mail art exhibition http://anilina.virtualave.net/obras_mapuche2.htm against the genocide of the people Mapuche in Chile, with which I contributed marrying Morte/Vida Severina by João Cabral de Melo Neto (one of my preferred poets in that time) with some words told by Chilean authorities, that affirmed that Mapuches have enough land:
Of other hand, in 2001, during the online discussions of the Project Boundaries, certain day, some "eccentric corpses" started to arise,
it seemed to me that they contributed to the ideas change and the sociability among participants, giving a funny interpretation to the thematic of Thanatos, as that, a celebration to life - the guilty main for this approach was Paulo Villela, whose digital body was freely appropriated for be dissected by La Dr. Tulp...We were in the middle of this fun, when September 11st occurred, and thence there was not already more joy in playing with the death, even because, that happening overcame us too much, the insane obstinacy of the terror in their two facsimiles, in the towers and in Afghanistan. What we did? What could we do? My catharsis for overcome this madness was the clip-poem "Agora", inside the proposal of the Esthetics of the Tragedy Exhibition, made for Regina Pinto, what helped us to reflect and perhaps, overcome although in a very insignificant way, our impotence in front of so much violence. Not yet satisfied, I created my first and only game: Wargame, which also tryes, inside an "artivista" proposal, place some grains of sand in the dish of the peace that hangs more and more contrary in the balance, thence I went to the Projeto Século XXI , which relies on the several artists collaboration and which reflects through images on the directions of our species.
Regina Pinto is right in her text, when she mentions the influence of a dark and weighed water in my work, because that river is much present in my everyday: I drink its water, see it every day, and I know how many times I escaped of turning food of fish. I think in it as a metaphor of life, in flow, which is born in some Point of the Andes and ended at the sea, larger metaphor of the diversity and of the plurality, of the digital nets that we approach so much, like the words of Nilda Saldamando touch us - poetry on poetry, flow on flow, making potent the dreams, the wish, for wish.
This way, in a several manner, I let Thanatos come at the table, sometimes talking with the most profound of my theoretician investigation of being and inquiries, sometimes with an engaged poetic, trying to do some difference in a world whose social groups more and more fight for similar privileges being at the same time vastly differents. The Madeirismo is that. It is not enough a river, it is not enough a city. It is necessary to do hear your voice.
Where is it?
