Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

Description:

This is a work that explores the notion of memes, in the sense of the term coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, expanding further from the realm of humans into any cognoscible manifestation. It explores a novel way of bringing artworks into the physical medium by repurposing techniques devised for the restoration of cultural heritage into a process to give birth to new artworks.

Richard Dawkings proposed the meme as a cultural gene, as a form existence for ideas and cultural tokens. Much in the same way that the selfish gene, also proposed by Dawkins, is an agent with its own will and uses us to perpetuate itself, memes are ideas that will use any vessel available to perpetuate themselves. Is the art we produce just a collection of memes taking hostages? Is the artist a puppet in the hands of ideas that exist in a different plane? In this sense, it is absolutely certain that AIs will exhibit what we call "creativity", if such creativity is an expression of ideas that are not unique to humans, but rather have a completely different and independent nature. In this way, this work explores the birth of paper artworks that serve as yet another vessel for ideas to express themselves. If humans have dreams, if machine will have dreams, why not paper? Why can paper not have dreams, it is the dream of a meme?

To this end, it expands on an algorithm that I created for an exhibition about ecologies, "ecologías C". In that work, I explored the notion of self-identity, of the image that we cast as an expression of how we want to be recognized, which is an act of self-discovery. Humans have a tendency to give much importance to their appearance because it shapes the environment where their interactions with others will take place. Any system is shaped by its set of rules, assets, mechanics, and the decisions we make give access progressively to a set of possibilities which is bound by our context _and_ said decisions. I wanted to reflect on how will AIs present themselves: will they also develop an affection for displaying themselves in any given manner? And taking this reflection into this work: are our assumptions on how we should look like influenced by those Dawkian memes? If our cultural beliefs are a collection of memes finding their way through time, it certainly seems possible. If that is the case, those machine identities could potentially be shaped by the _same_ memes. Machines and any other system complex enough to express the intent of the meme at hand. A human that creates an algorithm to obtain an output that is then summoned in the shape of a paper that represents the artwork is just another scenario for an idea to find space for its expression.

I was also intrigued by the idea of a digital artwork that becomes physical not by means of printing or painting or plotting, all of them acts of overlaying some kind of ink / paint onto a blank canvas, but rather by being the medium itself. In the summer of 2022 I made an experiment at Minium Restaura, the art restoration lab of Cruz Ramos Martínez, a professional restorer of cultural heritage. We went with my daughters to take part in an impromptu workshop on paper making. As we went on, an idea came to me: can we create paper in such a way that the artwork is part of the paper itself, not printed? We did a quick experiment then, and left the idea to collect time until September 2023. Then, using the aforementioned algorithm, expanding its space of possibilities by allowing more noise into its composition rules, I generated several works to choose two pieces to create on paper.

The pieces are created using paper restoration techniques employed in the restoration of old manuscripts, old artworks on paper, etc. It does not imply any technique of transferring the artwork on to the paper, but rather it mainly consists of creating a paper from scratch that will become the artwork itself, using colored natural fibers (mostly linen in this case, as it provides with better fibre-fibre bonding and stability). The leaf casting method is employed, where a tub with water is used, a template is placed on a permeable surface (a reemay), and then fibers are poured, coloured with the tint that the shapes in that template are going to acquire. The rest of the surface is covered in non-permeable material (some type of plastic, mylar or others), and a suctioning pump is activated. The water will drain through the places that the template dictates, and the fibers will accumulate on the permeable surface (the reemay). Then, another template is applied and the process is repeated with other coloured fibers, until desired. The paper is then extracted with the reemay and placed sandwidched with drying paper and some weight. The paper fibers bond together, so the final result is one continuous paper, not a layer with inks, oils, acrylic or any other material layered on top. The artwork does then become the paper itself, not something imprinted or transferred onto the medium, but rather the medium itself. In this sense, it is more akin to sculpting than to printing (hence the name "leaf casting").

The technique of leaf casting was invented in the late 1950s, when Esther Alkalay and Yulia Petrovna Nyuksha began experimenting with the concept of filling missing areas in paper with fibers suspended in a liquid medium. By 1961, equipment for this purpose had been developed and was in use in laboratories located in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. In the later years, various kinds of machines were in use in restoration laboratories worldwide, and their use is declining due to the high cost per restored work, with institutions leaning towards digitalization of old documents.

The creation process involved using a spatula to avoid disaster when peeling off the template from the casting bed: paper fibers accumulate and some remain over the template, not just in the given window, and when pulling the template off they will pull in turn from the just born piece of paper. The spatula used was one built from a little spring from a truck, created at a forgery located in the restoration works of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. A spatula that was used to restore parts of that national monument, a world heritage site, was used to help give birth to these two artworks.

The fact that this technique is falling in disuse makes it even more interesting. Mixing digital generative techniques with artisanal paper making with techniques of cultural restoration that are slowly fading away is a way to question the established assumptions that reign sovereign in our society. As we cease to spend resources on preserving the cultural heritage and choose to store a digital representation of the artifact, are we letting certain memes disappear? If the medium is the message, are we not altering the message? Is bringing digital generative into artisanal paper making a way of understanding that the idea can take many shapes? Is the world we live in just one of the many possibilities that could have been, had we chosen something different? Which leads to the more useful question, what are the choices we have now and what is the space of possibilities that they open up next? How do those spaces compare to each other? Which is the reality we want to live in? Which memories do we want to create for their future preservation? Is our identity what we really are or, if it's just the byproduct of our choices, is it really so important that we can go to war for it? - Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez