Cristobal Cea

Works Featured:

"Ghosts of Concordia" (2016)

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Statement:

What is my work about? Nothing in particular: Nevertheless, I can enumerate some of the characteristics that define it; It is nostalgic, somewhat spiritual and it aches from a kind of silence that I can not yet understand. Paradoxically, it is work that has always been related to new technologies and –most of the time- created against their flow.

Handmade Cell Towers that jam communication signals (NoFi and ColdSpot), or embody a metaphor for the penetration of digital culture and its economy in cultural spaces (La Necesidad). Memorials of grief and pain for computers that can not feel such a thing (Big Blues, Catastrophic Failures), and prototipes for haptic communication (Tacto), are some of the works I have developed under the precept of thinking of the human trough the lens of the digital: A lens that nowadays exerts a great influence on our conduct and expectations for the future.

During the past two years, I have concentraded my attention in “Reversals”: A series of 3D animations and site-specific installations, that take as its starting point, newsreel of events that where once global in the Internet and are now mostly forgotten: Floods, fires and protests that I then recreate as computer animations. In these, the workflow of digital postproduction and 3D animation, is reversed to allow an extended gaze onto this events –such as the floods of concordia, the shooting of a boy in Venezuela or the burning of a church in manhattan-, that deserve a longer attention span than the one we can usually give.

The notion of distance, I suppose, is a central point of this series of works that I am currently creating: The inconsolable distance between spectator and the geography of the events, the very human need to try to bridge this divide, and rescue this news, this floods, this protests and fires, from the oblivion and carelesness specific to a time –our time-, when the flow of images seems to overflow our capacity to care for what they represent.

Links:

http://www.cristobalcea.com