Specular surface

​

Paula Marcondes’ work investigates how technology interferes with the way the subject perceives the world and relates to their own body. The question running through her research can be put directly: what does it mean to be conscious today? That consciousness is tied to attention and to presence. We live connected for almost the whole day, but connection does not necessarily mean presence. The phone interrupts activities, demands replies and cuts across moments once set aside for pause. Little by little it stops working only as a tool and starts taking part in the constitution of the subject. Part of memory is in it, and so is part of our relationships. The hand also learns its language. Touching, swiping and scrolling are gestures repeated so many times that they come to happen unnoticed. There is, then, an incorporation of technology into the body, almost like a prosthesis. Paula’s research begins precisely when she sets out to make perceptible a relation that habit has made invisible.

​

This relation with the screen also transforms the way the subject relates to images. There is an important difference between the screen of painting and the screen of the phone. Painting presupposes a certain permanence and establishes a distance between body and image. The touchscreen asks for contact. The image has to be touched in order to respond. The finger slides and immediately something else appears. There is an erotic dimension to the interface, because looking and touching come to belong to the same circuit of desire and reward. The subject touches expecting a response and, when it arrives, the next one is already promised. This also produces another experience of time. The image stops remaining and starts circulating. One replaces another quickly. That speed also modifies the one who looks. The subject is trained to abandon one thing for the next, and it is precisely for this reason that attention becomes a political question.

​

There is today an economy interested in keeping the subject looking. The longer they stay connected, the more information they produce. The screen solicits attention and turns behaviour into data. There is, then, a direct relation between perception and power. The subject believes they are merely looking, but while looking they are also being observed, recorded and turned into information. The phone works as an instrument of cartography: it records movements and habits. The very idea of territory shifts, because territory comes to be the body as well, and what the body does. There is, in this sense, a continuity between material extraction and data extraction. To manufacture a device, resources are taken from the Earth. Once produced, that same device starts taking information from whoever uses it. First matter is extracted from the territory. Then behaviour is extracted from the subject.

​

This is why consciousness, in Paula’s work, can be understood as a form of resistance. To be conscious means perceiving the mechanisms that organise our gestures before those gestures become fully automatic. It means noticing when attention is being steered and when the tool begins to determine the behaviour of the person using it. That consciousness does not happen outside technology. Paula works inside it and uses the very devices she puts in question. This prevents a moral reading of her production. Technology produces connection and dependency within the same structure. It can provoke anxiety and then offer tools to relieve that anxiety. It works as a pharmakon: it takes part in producing the problem and also offers ways of managing it.

​

It is in this context that the switched-off screen becomes a central image for thinking about her research. When the phone is working, the subject looks through it. Their interest is in the photograph, the message or the video. The surface all but disappears. When the screen goes dark, that relation inverts. The flow of images disappears and the glass appears. The crack and the reflection become perceptible. The black mirror produces exactly this inversion: the surface made to show the world starts returning the image of whoever stands before it. There is almost a strike of the device in that moment. The screen stops refreshing and stops soliciting attention. The machine interrupts the very thing it was programmed for. When it stops, it becomes possible to perceive the machine itself.

​

That switching off also brings matter back. The digital universe tends to appear as though it were immaterial, but every image depends on an infrastructure. There are minerals, energy and labour sustaining what appears as flow. When Paula works with devices that have lost their function, she makes that materiality evident. There is a difference between the technological duration and the physical duration of these objects. A device can become obsolete within a few years, while its matter remains for decades. It dies as technology before it disappears as object. Electronic waste becomes, in this way, a kind of archive of the present. The age produces its own ruins while it is still happening.

​

This relation between matter and memory allows the residue to be thought of almost as a relic. A discarded object goes on carrying time after its function disappears. Fragmentation gains importance in this process. When a device is taken apart, its identity begins to be lost. How much of it has to remain for it still to be recognised? At what moment does the phone stop being a device and become matter? Can that matter still carry the memory of what it was? These questions move the work from a discussion only about technology towards an investigation into memory, permanence and transformation.

​

Visibility is another problem running through this research. Making something visible can produce recognition, but it can also make it easier to identify and classify. Surveillance depends on visibility. The more legible a subject becomes, the more easily they can be turned into data. An important question for thinking about Paula’s work then arises: how to appear without becoming completely available? The discussion leads to the right to opacity, understood as the possibility of being present without having to become fully legible.

​

Shadow, noise and low resolution can be thought within this discussion. There is an association between definition and knowledge, as though increasing the quantity of detail necessarily meant understanding better. An image, however, can show every detail of a body and remain incapable of explaining that body. Opacity preserves what cannot be entirely converted into information. Shadow matters because it produces presence without offering transparency. It indicates the existence of a body without delivering it whole. Something similar happens with digital presence: the subject produces traces that go on circulating even when they are no longer in front of the screen.

The relation between light and darkness thus takes on a political dimension. Light can reveal, but it can also keep watch. The screen lights the face and extends the waking hours. It cuts through the night and takes part in a life based on continuous availability. For this reason, darkness begins to acquire another meaning. Switching off can mean interrupting. The darkened screen stops supplying stimuli and produces a lack. That lack opens space for another activity of perception. When no image is delivered, the subject has to produce something in the face of that absence.

​

It is in this interval that imagination enters the research. We live surrounded by systems capable of supplying images continuously. Visual abundance reduces the intervals in which an image has to be produced mentally. Removing the image creates a gap. Imagining comes to depend also on the capacity to remain before what has not yet taken form. Imagination acquires, in this sense, a political dimension, because it allows relations to be produced that were not yet given.

​

Childhood gains force within this discussion when it stops working as the memory of an idealised past. Play is also a technology. The toy establishes rules, organises gestures and creates possible worlds. The screen does something similar according to other structures. The question becomes which forms of attention and imagination each technology produces. Artificial intelligence radicalises this problem because the machine now produces images too. It becomes necessary to ask where the decision happens, what has been delegated and what still manages to escape the probable answer. Imagining gains critical force when it allows the creation of relations not yet organised by the system.

​

Montage and fragmentation matter precisely because they allow those relations to be created. When Paula removes materials from their previous functions and places them in other situations, she produces displacements of meaning. There is, however, a challenge in that operation. When an idea arrives fully resolved before the form, the work risks functioning only as the illustration of a thesis. The work gains force when the matter thinks alongside the artist. The crack has to be able to produce a problem that was not foreseen. Weight and reflection have to interfere with the experience. The work gains density when the viewer feels the problem before being able to name it.

Half-light may be the key that brings these questions together. It allows us to think of an intermediate zone between appearing and disappearing, between body and machine, between physical and digital. It is also here that the phygital can be understood in Paula’s production. The two dimensions are already mixed in everyday experience, and the work operates inside that contamination. Three regimes run through her research: the hyper-illumination of the active screen, tied to the capture of attention; the black mirror, when the flow is interrupted and matter reappears; and half-light, where something remains present without having to become fully legible.

​

The question that organises Paula Marcondes’ work can then be put directly: what has to be interrupted for it to become possible to perceive again? Consciousness, in this case, does not mean access to more information. Information already exists in excess. To be conscious means perceiving what habit has made invisible, recognising the device as a device, and identifying when attention is being steered. It is at this point that switching off gains critical force. When the screen goes dark, the flow stops and matter reappears. The body also returns by way of the reflection. Paula’s research finds its force in that interval, when the machine stops working for an instant and makes perceptible the structure that was organising the gaze.

​

Lucas Dilacerda

​