Mariana Figueroa · El Norte · 6 February 2002
The creators of MARCO’s first virtual exhibition prepare the ground for Friday’s opening.
What might a utopian city’s architecture be? How can globalisation be discussed while taking regionalisation into account? How can the concept of the city be surpassed by combining art and technology? From Friday, answers will unfold in Room 11 at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Metápolis, a vision of “cyber-Monterrey” recreated by French artists Miguel Chevalier and Jean-Pierre Balpe and Italian Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi.
To prepare the virtual city’s technical platform—three screens, three interface cylinders and sound equipment over 300 square metres—the artists are currently installing MARCO’s first virtual work. Creation took two years and was finalised some months ago when each completed a specific urban collection task: Chevalier gathered images, Balpe texts and Baboni-Schilingi sounds.
The result is a museum environment suggesting an invented entity with every great metropolis’s traits: speed and movement, traffic, horns, factories and markets, images of Planetario Alfa, Faro del Comercio and Parque Fundidora, mixed with texts referring to Monterrey’s streets and people.
“The idea was to approach the city locally,” Chevalier said. “Flows of cars and people create an even larger city we can hold in our minds but which may never exist. Art should also create imaginaries that do not exist or can become projections into the future.”
In every period, artists use available means to express themselves, said Chevalier, who has explored art and technology together since 1982. “There is much energy around us; we try to capture it and make the impossible visible: the utopian city. Technology offers the opportunity for this kind of utopia, previously made through three-dimensional drawings. This broader field can connect image, music and texts transversally. It is a challenge because we have never done it before.”
The audiovisual cocktail viewers will see and help create through three sensor-equipped cylinders modifying text, image and sound is supported by AAASEED, the software Emmanuel Berriet began designing seven years ago.
“It is a construction model comparable to LEGO,” Berriet said. “Depending on the purpose, you can build or invent whatever you want because the platform permits information flow.”
Anyone may look into this unseen, perhaps already imagined Monterrey from Friday at 8.30 p.m. at MARCO. Admission is free.
Captions: Jean-Pierre Balpe, Jacopo Baboni and Miguel Chevalier, creators of Metápolis, opening Friday; Emmanuel Berriet, creator of the software used to recreate Metápolis.