Marcello Mercado
Das Kapital Teil 1 – Version 2015
Marcello Mercado
Das Kapital Teil 1– Capital Part 1, version 2015
1 channel video-sound installation,
15 min. 58″
stereo 4:3 black/white and colour
http://vimeo.com/133179369
Das Kapital unfolds as a long-term investigation into how political-economic critique can be translated into images—how theory becomes visual matter, and how the abstractions of capital return to the body.
Command lines, programming syntax, coordinate maps and editing instructions generate the seductive illusion of control over the screen and its embedded database. Yet this mastery is always unstable. The viewer—momentarily positioned as operator or overseer—moves in synchrony with the turbulent flow of capital and images, without ever fully confronting the material consequences of that virtual circulation.
After speculation comes correction; after abstraction comes impact. Chaotic global vectors, algorithms and fluctuating variables do not remain in the realm of the symbolic. They produce outcomes in flesh and blood. Industrial-age theory collides with digital-age technology, and this collision becomes the aesthetic engine of the work.
Das Kapital asks what kind of images emerge when one attempts to translate political-economic analysis into visual form. What does critique look like when reframed as a sequence of frames, codes, glitches or biological traces? Across its multiple iterations, the project becomes an image-laboratory where the human body, synthetic genetics, software processes and textual structures co-exist and mutate.
The work spans a wide range of formats—performance, animation, video art, video installation, bioart, software-based works, sound art, poetry and radio broadcasts—each one functioning as a distinct experiment within an expanding visual-theoretical archive.
«Marcello Mercado’s Capital is neither a finished product nor artware. His Capital is a work-in-progress. It will not be finished until the artist no longer believes in it or when he has given up its given up on its spirit.. Capital is an enterprise. In the sense of its purpose as a work, it has to fail constantly. It exists in a process of permanent re-writing, renewing, self-interpretation. At this level of excess and longevity, that is only feasible with electronic and digital machines. The wastage of material would be endless, if Mercado were to work exclusively in analogue. His factory fits on a table. In the beginning, he still needed hefty machines from Silicon Graphics, which only the laboratories of well-endowed institutions could afford. In recent years, he could deploy and create his bodily economy as that of imagery from off his lap. In this way, Capital recounts the story of digital image-processing over the last ten years too, and how an artist has reacted to it. Marx would have said, with his work Mercado would be expressing the status of the productive forces quite excellently. The artist would be functioning as a seismograph for the state of things.»
Siegfried Zielinski,
Marcello Mercado: Das Kapital (Capital) (1999-2009),
RECORD > AGAIN! 40jahrevideokunst.de – Teil 2
Edition:
Jan Arlt, Marcelo Santorelli, Marcello Mercado
Music:
Marcello Mercado
Produced by:
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln. Germany
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation and The Lampadia Foundation.
Centre International du Creation Vidéo Pierre Schaeffer
Montbéliard Belfort France
Fundación Antorchas
Marcello Mercado
Software and Hardware:
16mm Footage
Painted 8mm Footage
Rotoscoping
Frame by frame Animation
2D and 3D Animation
Flint, Flame, Inferno from Discreet logic on Octane from SiliconGraphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane
Flint, Flame, Inferno
http://tinyurl.com/q7l9ukg
Discreet Logic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Media_and_Entertainment
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, KHM
http://tinyurl.com/p4qog4u