When the visitor enters the dark and silent room that initially constitutes the installation called Mnemeg, a work made by Federico Díaz in 2002 for the space Electra, he moves, turns his head, leans, perhaps emits a few sounds. Only then does Mnemeg starts to reveal itself, at first in an abstract form, in a chaotic and fragmented fashion, and gradually, as the visitor approaches, in a humanoid form – in the image of the person who is looking for it.
In reality, Mnemeg was already here, but in a form that is invisible to our eye. It is precisely the vibrations generated by the presence of the visitor (his movements as well as his sounds, the beating of his heart, vibrations emitted by his mobile phone or only the warmth emanating from his body) that have literally made Mnemeg appear, feeding it enough to change it from the invisible to the visible. In this way, Mnemeg does not appear in our image, but in the image of that which is not visible, which is inside us: our hostile or curious attitude, the vibrations – perceptible or not – that constitute us, the waves that pass through us, conscious or unconscious, bodily or radio, and link us to the universe. Its strangeness thus consists also, perhaps above all, in our image.
Are the black holes constituting it the symbol of the very fragmentary knowledge that we have of ourselves, particularly of the mechanism of our sensations. Do they sum up, in the image of the ‘black hole’ which they represent, a mathematical model symbolizing at once the origin and the destiny of everything? In reality they are energy knots, through which Mnemeg lives off the presence of the visitor and communicates with him, gathering in that same image of the black hole – in an allegorical form – the three fields forming the basis of the work of Federico Díaz: abstract knowledge of the world, concrete experience and the Utopia of a creative and intelligent interactivity that connect these two types of knowledge. Mnemeg is in the image of man, as he is shown by Federico Díaz, as in reality he wishes him to be, as he literally creates him – meaning a simple membrane, a resonance tool, between the inner – the biological and the microscopic – and the outer – the cosmic, the geologic and the macroscopic. For the artist at least, it is more a matter of reconciling opposites than of finding links, and of clearing a path that technological progress and its mirages, modernity and its contempt for the ecosystem, have almost entirely concealed.
Therefore the work of Federico Díaz is above all thaumaturgical: he pretends he is healing a wound, the wound of a planet damaged by centuries of intensive exploitation, with no one caring to achieve a balance. The scar of an urban, industrial world, deserted on the one hand and submerged on the other, built in the image of a humanity without soul, without creativity and without concern for the future. The agony of a spiritual thought, which at first was able to link the macrocosm with the microcosm, and give the culture back its natural, biologic and physical origin. That which man has unlearned, art can re‐teach him: the intelligence of the sensible experience. Since the mid ’90s Federico Díaz has devoted himself to this strictly sensible art, based more and more on sensations. To erase himself, to erase the trace of his hand, his mind and his tastes, and finally the art work and art itself, together with its references, to erase the very thought of representation, to leave room only for purified sensation: that is the difficult goal he has chosen.
The use of new technologies allows him to disappear effectively as a person, in the creation of functional environments where the precision of phenomena can be equaled only by the absolute anonymity of their embodiment: it is an artificial intelligence that has, for the most part, generated them. In these mechanisms, where there is nothing to see, to touch, nor to understand, the visitor is left to face his own sensations. The conception of enlarged objects having simple forms, in which symbolism is reduced to a minimum and which are intended to emit an indeterminate sound (a shell in Nostalgia, 1993), or an object defined by its acoustical function (Bolb 1996), was still too marked by the subjectivity of the person who had conceived and shaped it. This led to a transition to installations consisting of cabins covered by more or less visible loudspeakers (the Dehibernations series, 1994), where abstract images, real or digital, are projected. Very soon the images as well as the hidden objects disappear, to make space only for sound (GUG, Fermion and Photon, 1997).
The artist defines an ideal space, where the progressive loss of the usual markers would be compensated for by an increased consciousness of the intensity of his own sensations: ‘the holophonic space’. In this mathematical space, a sound controlled in real time by a computer reacts in a multidimensional manner to the motion of the audience. This means a shift from the interactive to the co‐creative: thanks to the precision of technological tools (captors, data processing programs, information scanning on the web), the sound can adapt itself to more stable data, invisible and unconscious, than voluntary body movement alone. The audience can contribute to the generationof a work in perpetual evolution, without center or origin, developing like a net, in the image of the Web. It is thus possible to go from a production in a closed space, the museum installation, to self‐ ‐generated mechanisms mirroring the universe, whether architectural (E AREA), humanoid (Mnemeg) or communicative (e‐forum).
The ambition of E AREA stems from this: it is the name of a company, which he founded in 1998 with the intention of creating in the most precise manner a center of education and transformation of man. In this new phase, the harmony of plastic formation and pedagogical education, of the initial Utopia and the means of its implementation is almost perfect. Partly situated underground, functioning in a closed circuit thanks to solar and wind power, and drafted in the style of organic models, the plans of this place are described in minute detail in collaboration with Jiří Zemánek. E AREA consists of thematic rooms where the phenomena are taught through virtual, three‐dimensional reconstructions requiring the senses of the audience in their entirety.
Cosmology, the study of the planet as a model living from equilibrium, to be understood and managed with respect, a return to a spirituality close to animism, the foundation of a society based on participative democracy based on the internet and the development of the potential creativity in man are the subjects on the curriculum. In this way man will be able to solve, without today’s stereotypes, the problems intensified by globalization. Pushing to the extreme the dematerialization of the work to enhance its efficiency, Federico is today developing the E‐forum project, which allows subjects announced in the E AREA to be discussed in real time on the net. Mnemeg is an efficient embodiment of the global communication between the natural and the cultural, the human and the artificial, with only one possible outcome: the mechanism itself has become autonomous.
Mnemeg lives on vibrations caused by the visitor, in other words he integrates them, transforms them and creates them in his own image. Finally it becomes impossible, as his creator says, to determine what in Mnemeg’s reactions is the result of “the coded, the recorded or the living”, to differentiate for the public a “programmed” reaction from an “invented” reaction. Mnemeg is no more nor less foreseeable than an average visitor. Like him he has no face. Like him he fits statistics without ever conforming to them. Everyone must therefore see for himself what Mnemeg has in store for him.
Camille Morineau
curator of the Pompidou Centre