I LOOK, THEREFORE I AM Denise Mota If cinema has established itself as a universe in which reality is illusion,(1) the Uruguayan artists chosen for this FF>>Dossier apply this perception—inverted—to portray the current society: illusion is reality. In “Baudrillardian” key, they debate with the seventh art by conditioning the comprehension of the world to the observation of fictional artifices that mark the modern times, “the age of simulation”(2)characterized by an avalanche of artificial signs. To Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), “the signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized formalization in which the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective ‘reality,’ but to its own logic.”(3) Furthering this comprehension and in one of his most aggressive papers, in “The Mask of War” (an article published for the Libération daily on March 10, 2003), he states that the war in Iraq was a “puppet event,” “a kind of disease prevention on a worldwide scale” in which, as shown by Steven Spielberg in the movie Minority Report—the Frenchman compares—, the crime bud is supposedly nipped before it germinates. “The question that irresistibly arises is: would the supposed crime have taken place?” inquires the philosopher. “Here, reality is a virtual horizon.” Successful cinematographic products have been able to make use of these ideas. Matrix, a series of two movies by the Wachowski brothers, greatly multiplied the presence of Baudrillard’s name in the medium, with which he was so involved. However, he considered it a misinterpretation of his ideas, as it is polarized between the real and virtual. As a movie translating his suppositions, the French philosopher prefers The Truman Show. It is within this orbit, but from another perspective, that the guests of this FF>>Dossier gravitate. Dani Umpi, Paula Delgado, Martín Sastre, and Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena have, as the backbone of their artistic investigations, the instances of a world created in a laboratory—or even better, on editing tables—, where the perception of reality is measured by image. Especially in the Uruguayan context, in which video as an artistic tool has only recently gained official recognition (the Video Department of the National Museum of Visual Arts in the country was only established in 1999), a prominent generation of artists has materialized, working with digital media from the start of their careers. All have been awarded, having shown their work locally and internationally (Guemberena and Sastre have participated in several biennials), and have very individual work, although they also produce with other groups. Uniting cinema, TV, video, and visual arts, these authors move in a universe of receptors conditioned to the technological vertigo of the current day. Inventors of a varied and uninterrupted “make-believe,” they point out the artificial, cruel, and/or idiotic characteristics of contemporary discourse in daily relations of power, collective or individual—be they masculine x feminine (Paula Delgado), North x South (Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena), mainstream art x independent creation (Martín Sastre), or high x low culture (Dani Umpi). Different from the comprehension of simulacrum offered by Matrix, here life is reproduced with no distinction between objective and subjective reality, farce, comedy, satire or drama, fiction or documentary. All four artists find in the simulacrum a tool of power and, ironically, adopt the modus operandi of a society that is saturated of images and excessively familiar with representation in all its forms. Dani Umpi—character-author-work that the artist previously known as Daniel Umpiérrez has become—moves around the underground region by the Río de la Plata, the children’s soccer fields, and the beauty parlors in the neighborhood, where he finds appreciators for the varied and often paradoxical fruit of his creation. A playback singer, writer-performer, poet-curator, creator seen full-time as creature, multidisciplinary, fantastic, and fanciful, prepared to show a peculiar world with many traces of daily life and playful winks into the vicissitudes of life, “sophisticated and vulgar,” as he defines it. Questions of gender, pastiche, or fetish, and darts good-humoredly thrown in the direction of sexism leave the hands of Paula Delgado, from various personas that integrate the visual commentaries the artist weaves around herself. An enthusiastic wannabe, an antiquated engaged couple waltzing in a shopping center, unknown sex-symbol candidates faced with the same industrial production process for female beauty showing themselves ridiculous and sublime, generating sympathy and distancing, bringing smiles and commiseration. Like a charmer, Martín Sastre throws glitter in the eyes of the observer. Like Umpi, he is the product and cause of his creations, a character who mimics under extraordinary conditions and who may be the redeemer of Latin America while on his climb to world domination, the element of connection to the secret life of Princess Diana after the car crash in which the world pronounced her dead, or the underdeveloped reincarnation of a megastar like Robbie Williams. The illusionist’s credential is also hidden in Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena’s magician’s hat, out of which soldiers camouflaged under a dreamy or nightmarish sky, books crossed by ambiguous (North-American or Iraqi?) rifles, and youths attuned to the colorful guidelines of fashion, but who intimately fondle dark projects of existence, may come out. It is no longer art that emulates the world, but the world that guides itself by the images and codes that rule the culture of the masses. Life and its vicissitudes, miseries, wonders, and mysteries is a parade of small, large, and uninterrupted fictions before our eyes. What is not on the screen (large or small) does not exist. These artists simulate the simulacrum and concentrate on mechanisms that not only perpetuate but also strengthen the dominion of images over any other object or form of contact with the world around us. Wigs, stereotypes, extravagant garments, imitations of personalities of the international pop world, abundant use of Hollywood language, production of war material adequate for sensationalistic use and, joining all this, the excessive appreciation of appearances is at the core of the work of those selected, creators of real sensations caused by what is shown. I look, therefore I am. “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference,” describes Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, a kind of instruction manual not to pass unnoticed by these artists. A generation educated by a frantic and universal electronic nanny, these creators, born in the 1970s and buried in artistic production from the ’90s onwards, maintain a relation of repulsion and fascination for the serial construction of rules, truths, and myths, surrounded by an aura of glamour and pictured here through references that often have cinema as their matrix. The first point of inflection in the perception of the world and of the work of art, caused mainly by the exhibition of moving pictures—representation and reproduction of the real in the most perfect translation—, the popularization and seduction of the copy had in Walter Benjamin its most prominent prophet, when cinema made its moves on the horizon of artistic expression. In his classic paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), the German pointed out the loss of the “aura” of artistic objects, transformed into a possibility of fruition not only for few, but for the “masses,” in what results in a “new attitude” with regard to art. If in the early days of cinema the unexpected was a source of surprise and, consequently, of pleasure(4)—the image of a train arriving at Ciotat station, 110 years ago, frightening the Lumière brothers’ audience in a public exhibition, as they thought the locomotive was going to break out of the screen and crush them all, is already classic. Today the excess of familiarity with this kind of representation of daily successes (printed, aesthetic, and exciting, primordial sensations of modern men, according to Nietzsche) is the factor of estrangement that the artists in this Dossier want to attract attention to. The different notes from the contemporary world can no longer be heard through difference, but through what is excessively common. The young woman dreaming of fame who travels to New York and from there sends images of the supposed refinement reached; the singer who mixes folklore and dance music in a joke but becomes a radio hit; an exercise of war converted into a romantic landscape; stardom built by editing tricks and clichés that, as they are in current use, tend to surprise the critical capacity of viewers are some of the surprising circumstances of the work of these artists. Blogs, instant celebrities, simultaneous and massive cinema releases, reality shows, webcams, CNN, YouTube, and pirating are part of the daily life of these authors, soaked in the advents of the “information society”—fast, fragmented, excessive—and comfortable in the reproduction of their codes and in the manipulation of their rules. In the reflection they propose, image is, par excellence, a tool of control, from where fame, the concession to violence, and the surreptitious homogeny on a global scale come. “If the Real is disappearing, it is not because of a lack of it—on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication,” writes Baudrillard in The Vital Illusion(5). In the recurring exercises evidencing “videotization”(6) of life, the artists use largely known significants to produce new meanings. They pulverize the understanding of the real as something palpable, that may be classified and understood, taking to the extreme the presentation of images as the unique and last vestige of fiction transformed into reality and that, once again fictionalized, destroys itself. (1)Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). (2)“...The age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994). (3)Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). (4)Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London: Verso, 1989). (5)New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. (6)Jerzy Kosinski’s vidiot was originally published in 1971 and taken to the cinema (in the movie Being There) screen played by the author in 1979.