THIS THING IS RED

This Thing is Red is an audiovisual project based on the processes of interpretation and representation and the inherited barrier within it.

It invites us to enter a world of collectively imagined useless and absurd objects that reflect the ways we perceive,

communicate and relate to each other.

The process starts with a participative exercise, similar to the quotidian experience of telling a story, where the most crucial aspect is the subjectivity and uniqueness of that narration. In the same way, different people were invited to describe an object. All of them described the same object in different ways, highlighting and ignoring specific characteristics, revealing aspects of their identities, and the ways they perceive and communicate. These descriptions were recorded and sent to outsourced professional 3D modelers, that were invited to create objects solely from the recorded descriptions. This second step of interpretation transformed a single real object into infinite fictional and virtual ones through the choices and decisions of designers from around the globe and within the possibilities and limitations of their rendering software.

On the one hand, the takeover of capitalism over the free web and the use of the technological process to allocate cheap outsourced human labor -functions as a metaphor to our current and most extended system of cold impersonal relations established through the so-called screen hegemony. Therefore, these imaginary objects confront us with the intersections of reality and fiction; everyday life layers of local identities, social conventions, collective and personal experiences.

On the other hand, the project explores the concepts of interdisciplinarity, participation, and authorship in the arts, questioning traditional notions that persist such as the existence of art disciplines or the mystification of the artist.

The results take the form of immersive video installations based on different compositions of 3D models representing objects, accompanied by subjective verbal descriptions that may or may not help decipher what they are which is their function. The audience is invited to witness a choreographed collection of interpretations.

PARTICIPANTS 2018

3D MODELS

Shane Whilden - United States

Fred Quayenortey - United States

Adrian Cooper - Great Britain

Septiyan Qomarudin - Indonesia

Tahir Hasnain - Egypt

Juan Sebastian Galarza - Colombia

Pablo Penso - Venezuela

Randy Catequista - Philippines

Volodumur Bondarchuk - Czechoslovakia

Sunhit Reddy - India