Artworks

Mark

Small fragments of a suspension machine, with interstices
2020
Experiment made with Paloma Oliveira for the Pink Umbrellas Online Residency, curated and organized by artists Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo.

This video is a dialog between me and Paloma. While she worked with other artists on a few video recordings, I replicated some of the elements and scenes from these videos using 3D rendering software. The resulting dialog unfolds with a certain tension between the sometimes familiar, sometimes peculiar recorded scenes; and the rather strange, vague frame-glimpses of faux scene replicas.


Mark


Medium

2017



me·di·um | ˈmēdēəm | noun

1 an agency or means of doing something;

2 a means by which something is communicated or expressed;

3 the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or a force acts on objects at a distance;

4 the material or form used by an artist, composer, or writer;

5 the middle quality or state between two extremes; a reasonable balance;

6 a person claiming to be in contact with the spirits of the dead and to communicate between the dead and the living.

— Oxford English Dictionary

Sound installation developed during the Espectro del Espectro art residency in Espectro Electromagnético, Mexico City, 2017.

The residency took place in a former Christian foster home for women. Many of them came from other cities and pueblos runnning away from troubled family, social and economic backgrounds, in a search for a better life in the big city. The house had a basement full of abandoned personal objects and furniture from the people who lived there prior to the house shut down in the 1990's.

The piece consists of a hacked cassette tape recorder controlled by a microcomputer and electromagnetic sensors placed in the house basement. The erasing heads of the tape deck were hacked to cause variation of the magnetic field appied to the tapes. The result is that while recording, the deck would not completely erase previous tracks, which created a composition of layered sounds in different qualities and textures. The recordings from the basement sounds were amplified in the installation space. Recordings were triggered by changes in the electromagnetic field (it is said that 'ghost' activity causes such disturbances). Installation included personal objects and furniture found in the house.







Mark

Gude
2016
Interactive installation presented in the solo exhibition Espectros, in Galeria Saracvra, Rio de Janeiro, 2016.

This piece addresses how memory objects — those who mediate our memories — can induce our senses, opening breaches within which we can see different realities through and by the fictional aspects of memory. Gude (a portuguese word for "marble") is a device that creates a small universe about the memories of my childhood house and about my father.




Mark

Chronoscope

2017

Installation presented in the solo exhibition Espectros, in Galeria Saracvra, Rio de Janeiro, 2016.
The piece originates from a deviation of the technique applied in a stereoscope, a binocular apparatus of the nineteenth century that displays two images with slightly different perspectives, one for each eye. Here, this technique is subverted, so that our perception conceives a visual continuum where in reality there is a hiatus. The installation consists of two monitors, one in front of the other, with a pair of mirrors between the displays. The monitors display travel recordings by my father in the 1990s; and videos recorded by me, in a similar gesture, in the village where I spent my childhood. When reflections in the mirrors are seen from close, the images of the two videos merge, forming a single continuous landscape, a fictional scene that gathers then and now, father and son, in a way that can only exist in our perception.








"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall (...); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me..."

— Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph