Mexican artist Luis Ponce’s psychedelic landscapes lure the viewer into worlds of intersecting looped systems, acid colors permeated with growing flora, bodies and bodily fragments (undead or otherwise), creating a serial image for a so-called “cybernetic existentialism.” In Primitive agents of change, a more careful examination reveals an omnipresent feature: a four-eyed face, eye-shaped striped balls that sometimes seem to levitate aimlessly, at other times jumping in a nervous and impatient manner, apparently examining what is around them and creating a nascent sense of anxiety. At the same time, systems loop and seem to work smoothly with, or perhaps despite, the psychedelic prospects.

Failed networks kill ideas but successful ones trigger them

2160 x 3840 px · 24FPS · 144F  


Primitive agents of change

New Renaissance

I Promised You Nothing, Now Better Believe in It

Mediator

Today, virtual communities, generative, chaotic, self-regulating networks, are the new agents of change bringing with them an idiosyncratic type of existentialism. Cyberspace has been explored as a productive ground for speculative post-human thought, bringing to the fore that which the increasing visibility of digital art has made more widely accessible: the rise of new gods, species, and relations, repositioning the place of the human in favor of positing new agencies of power and effective change. Sentiments related to those agencies have also evolved, from the sense of empowerment in existence as a collective being to diversifying the past with a peculiar digital nostalgia and anxiety. In other words, the production of affect in the digital era has been questioned, who and how affects and is affected is now an urgent matter.

Primitive agents of change

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35 ETH