Estevao Haeser and students of Colégio Unificado
Ever since Einstein published his Theory of Relativity in 1905, the notion of time has been constantly going through changes. The concepts and ideas introduced to us by this book keep influencing science and our daily lives even today. However, it is common to see people happily using their electronic devices, such as GPS or mobile phones, without thinking about their working principles or the fact that these devices are only made possible because of Einstein’s ideas. Okay, but does this have anything to do with art?
It does! With contemporary art, in particular. After the Second World War, significant changes took place in the lifestyle of Occidental societies, thanks to things such as mass production and consumption, mass media such as television, as well as advertising. And considering the profound changes that occurred in the lives of most people, changes should also be taking place in the art sphere. The development of the capitalist market brought along a need to have people consuming more and more. Technology offered an interesting opportunity: expensive products that become obsolete within a few years’ time. But at the same time, technology also turned into something affordable. Video and photography equipment became something that people could actually own. The possibility of creating images, giving a subjective meaning to the standardized world, is still on the increase. The tools that we have today could not have been imagined by Einstein. And artists have taken advantage of all this technological development to create art.
The Brazilian exhibition at Eksperimenta! 2014 is a way to showcase some thoughts about the scientific development and its influence on our lives today, but not through words, not in a textual way, but in an artistic way. We will present our understanding of the Euclidean notions of flat space and how we can subvert it with art. We will use Einstein’s ideas and some of the technological tools that those ideas gave rise to in order to expose the possibilities of subverting the common notion of time. We still cannot reverse time, but we can register the passage of time and reverse it just for fun, just for art, by means of technology. To do so, to be capable of achieving such ambitious results, we will use simple techniques such as stop motion animation and modular origami.
Our art exhibition pays homage to these two great scientists who keep travelling through time and history to teach us, challenge us and transform our lives.
