Prologue
In 2001 Argentina suffered the worst economic crisis ever in history. This experience now prooves to have been the predecessor of the global crisis in which the entire world has fallen since september 2008. For people of my generation ( born 1978 during the military government in Argentina) this crisis turned out to be the first profound challenge to our concept of life as artists. The answer to which this collapse of the system provoked us, was to
search for and establish new unkown informal ways of communicacion and social networks like nodes of “trueque” (swap). Starting from this experience I wanted to investigate and reflect more about the structures of parallel networks, how they emerge, how they work, how they develop, how they collapse, how they disappear and resurrect in transformation.
In order to study these processes I took as a model the interaction in the artistic field between existing structures ( galleries, museums, curators, awards, exhibitions) and spontaneously arousing individual actions or unestablished movements.
I invited nine people of diverse disciplines, like an anthropologist, musicians, painters, performers,electrical ingeneer, cook, grafic designer, all of them coming from two different urbanic background, e.g. from the capital of Argentina,Buenos Aires and the city of Cordoba, where I live. All of them were interested in interaction and colaboration, and I asked them to integrate in a collective creative process for the installation of a gigantic apparatus destined to the public amusement and participation, each of them contributing a strictly defined work.
I called this procedure: “Automatic Moving Company (AMC)
This company owes its name and pays tribute to the work of the French artist Emile Cohl (1857-1938), member of the anti-artistic movement “Les Arts Incoherénts”.
I designed two fundamental guidelines of creacion to be followed by them.
1.their work had to use energy power derived from a central tool
2.their work had to be entirely controlled by the central automat
An enormous automata, composed of numerous mechanical organs, with tha eir own conscience, acting according and uninterruptedly to produce a common object, being all those organs subordinated to the same source of energy. (Zitat von Dr. Andrew Ure aus Karl Marx Das Kapital – Kritik der politischen okonomie Bd 1, 1867) In the center of this new AMC, there is an old time- clock for personnel, set to timer electric fluxes in cycles of 24 hours. From this control system device, eight tentacles arise transporting the sufficient energy to activate and to deactivate any mechanism connected to it. Time, movement, evolution, cyclical changes and the energy gave origin to the different processes of creation of each one of the artefacts developed by the invited.Some of these works could be manipulated whereas others are destined exclusively to contemplation. The visitor can interact with this artistic monster that activates and deactivates, with the passing of the hours, all the exhibited mechanisms.
The idea is to continue exhibiting in different places, not only in Argentina but as well in other countries and continents. Thus changing and adapting the model to different cultural contexts, with the participation of other creators who contribute their own artefacts according to the guidelines of the concept.
