#alejandroduque

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Lab 3 - Alejandro Duque - Mamm #lab3 #mamm #alejandroduque

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His Personal Trajectory and Views in Art: An Interview with Alejandro Duque

By Claire Leggett

On October 10th, 2015 we had an incredible opportunity of interviewing Alejandro Duque, an artist from Columbia who recently finished his PHD dissertation in Switzerland at the European Graduate School. We sought to discuss four topics through our interview: how he arrived at the development of his current work/research, the topic of his drone projects, his interest in exploring sound as a medium, and his views on low tech/open source.

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Alejandro attended the European Graduate School located in Leuk, Switzerand for a PHD developing in his arts practice. His undergraduate degree was done in Columbia. He then did a masters in Spain on media and net based art. His masters work sought to show artworks seen only on a computer from home. He states that the goal was to “deny authorship” as an artist and get away from the “me” mentality that was happening as a trend within artist circles at the end of the 90s. He returned to Columbia after he received his masters, and was a professor at his old university in visual arts for a year and a half. He decided to return to school to do his PHD so he could develop and learn more about the computer as his chosen medium in his artwork, for him, “as a painter would like to learn more about his pencils or his brushes,” he says. He felt he could go a tech route, or he could explore this medium in its history and philosophy, then out of that knowledge, develop in it as a vehicle for ideas. He decided to go with the latter.

He states that his works and research are thus a cross-section between social critique, philosophy and technology: he is processing/presenting the works as a fusion of these. In his drone works he is playing with the ideas of flying being at the surface fun, while presenting the socio-political controversy of drones used as military technology. He films kids throwing stones at drones with several statements including neutrally presenting that it is a time of accessibility of hobby-ing to create one’s own weapons. (The stones, although they seem real in the videos, for safety, they are in fact made of foam to ensure in the filming process no one would be hurt).

For Alejandro, from filming drones to addressing just what the ear captures, his movement to bring sound investigations into his work started from a desire to implement/present sounds that would not easily be heard. This area of investigation has an extremely high allurement for him especially from exploring radio as a medium. He started recording space shuttles going by. Sound defined as ‘in noise’ informs his philosophically approached dissertation. For him, sound is a path to get into another realm, approached through experimentation.

His doctorate took seven to eight years and his most influential professor came from approaches which encourages experimentation in artworks. Through his masters and PHD, he states he learned to emphasize discoveries achieved in the process and collaboration of executing the concept at hand vs. striving just for an end result. Even though the end result is still important, the process guides you to this point not visa versa. He states that his task is to decolonize with art. To achieve this in a healthy work-life balance, he shares that “[he] fights [his] own fight to secure that space” to create the work that is needed, to have free time and to experiment.

We concluded with Alejandro’s views on the use of open source in art today. He says in terms of artists even approaching writing about their work that we live in a time of “how to” and not a time of manifestos. As for ideologies: he esteems a value of open source materials, as they are resources that people create in their free time curtailed out of their passions. As an example, open source code he says, is actually artistic in nature. He states that additionally with these resources that there is immediate collaborative potential. The artist can re-purpose or integrate the open source code into their work. For him, artists have an ethical call to make in protecting the rights to their work or not/in making decisions if people pay to use the artist’s ideas or not. He uses the example of the book Do lt (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist), which walks you through principles on curatorial methods, but, if used, you have to pay for the rights to follow the curatorial instructional steps. He finds this extremely ironic and harkens that using creative commons and copy left, for example, instead are excellent principles to follow to further Art.

To further gain access to his writings on these topics and more, Alejandro states that he aims to have his dissertation accessible online in the form of a free-download in the next year.

To hear the full interview: Conversations on Low Tech with Artist Alejandro Duque