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Museum of contemporARY ART _ Funchal - 16 sePtembER TO 22 OCtObER 2005 In this 3rd edition of What is Watt? artistic event, in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Funchal, Forte de S. Tiago’s premises, we find once again the conducting thread in the variety of works of the participant artists: the mediation of artistic products through elements using electricity.
Since it's discovery and throughout 19th century, electricity has become the (in)visible and vital energy flow of social operability.
This alternate or continuous current flow started a new inscription or, better yet, a new paradigm of life experience and operability over real, when Edison in 1905, started the production and commercialization of the electric light bulb. The electric light bulb promptly became, as vehicle of luminosity, a powerful and effective process of introducing the issue of "Enlightenment", changing it's previous statement "I am the Light" to "I produce and supply Light".
Such an event could take place due to the usage of machine-based processes. Technique forged electric light production overcoming the clear metaphor of spiritual illumination by socializing it's productivity through voltages, frequencies and amplitudes. This new rationality, provided by technique, soon confronted the ancestral tone of the sacred (the sun, gold, the halo) with a more profane and mundane path in daily affairs: turn on the light bulb, turn the screen on, turn off the computer.
In the works shown in "What is Watt? 2005", the artists reveal different individual proposals that become available to the controversies of technical operability.
Thanks: Gallery Porta 33 , Departament of Art and Design Madeira University | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||