Exhibition ‘Yes to all’ from 20 November 2022 to 20 February 2023 on the screens of the Plenilunio Madrid and Vialia Estación de Vigo shopping centres.
The screens in shopping centres are large windows to information, advertising and cultural content. Yes to all opens the opportunity for international artists to rethink how the context in which their work is to be shown can condition the work itself, challenging the limits of software, distorting possible advertising realities and proposing new ways of looking at hardware.
The shopping centre is a space without limits, without rules, without truth, it is an empire of confusion where there are no prejudices, order or hierarchy; a space of saturation where the ambition for “more” and accumulation as an end in itself reigns. A place that organises ideas, invades our senses and seduces us, goes straight to our tastes and attacks our weaknesses. This space learns from us, knows us better than we know ourselves, expands into all areas of our lives (Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, 2002). The shopping centre is, for many, the new public space. A sort of air- conditioned city that hosts some of our most important life experiences. The first moments of adolescent independence, the first aesthetic decisions, the first kisses, the first adventures. A non-place-home (Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1992) that accompanies us wherever we go. A safe, comfortable space, but at the same time saturated, crowded, where we are one among many, where the collective overcomes the individual. A phenomenological space, built from the senses. A place that satiates us, that excites us and that bores us.
In the same way, the Internet has become a perfectly organised space of disorder. In a few decades of history, the way we consume content on the net has been established. The structure is always the same; the formats are getting closer to each other. The same code and the same goal: a social vision and a need for visual recognition in less than a second. It is so fast because there is no night; everything is on and available 24 hours a day (Rafaël Rozendaal. Exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, text by Marti Manen, 2016).
These two worlds come into contact through very thin devices that are superimposed on any material. A thin but very deep digital layer that covers the marble or the landscape and transports us to an immaterial reality, that of the 0’s and 1’s transformed into brilliant points of light that, together in thousands, become technological windows that take us to new, imagined places. These moving images augment the spaces and adapt their rhythm to the ever faster changing society. Images move, circulate in an infinite loop of screens, are copied and reproduced (Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 2017). Digital baroque, technological mannerism, data- sensitive cornucopia. This liminal space, where anything can happen, is a place for art.
SMTH in collaboration with MMMAD Festival are proud to present the II International Open Call for Digital Arts under the theme ‘Yes to all’ in Plenilunio Madrid and Vialia Estación de Vigo shopping centers. In this second edition, they are looking for digital artworks that experiment with the space and format where they will be exhibited: SMTH’s large scale screens located in several of the most important shopping centres in Spain.
The call opened on 1 September 2022 and closed on 25 October 2022 at 23:59 (GMT+1). A total of 284 proposals were received, of which 132 were accepted as they fulfilled all the requirements of the call.
The members of the jury, composed of Claudia Maté, Doreen A. Ríos, Joel Blanco and an institutional vote (composed of a representative of SMTH and a representative of MMMAD), evaluated the works received independently.
On 3 November at 19:30 (GMT+1), meeting telematically, the different evaluations were discussed and the following 20 finalists were selected (in alphabetical order):
Álvaro Ruiz, España
Ben William Dawson, Reino Unido
Caesar Arenas, España
CROSSLUCID (Sylwana Zybura & Tomas Toth), Polonia / Eslovaquia
Debbie Ding, Singapur
Dorian Rigal Minuit, Francia
Isabel Merchante, España
Ivo Loyola, México
João Pedro Oliveira, Portugal
Juan Covelli, Colombia
Kinnari Saraiya, India
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan and Katherina Sadovsky, Turkmenistán – Rusia
Manuel Bueno, España
Manuel Lareo Fernandez, España
Nero Cosmos, Suiza
Robert Seidel, Alemania
Serafín Álvarez, España
Taichi Machida, Japón
Theo Ellison, Reino Unido
Yorgos Papafigos, Grecia
The jury highlighted the high quality and heterogeneity of these 20 finalists, deciding after a round of debate to award the five prizes and exhibition to the following 5 works:
‘You Press The Button’ de Debbie Ding, Singapur
‘The limit is a facade’ de Dorian Rigal Minuit, Francia
‘Objetos perdidos’ de Ivo Loyola, México
‘Moving cities’ de João Pedro Oliveira, Portugal
‘Pantalla-espacio’ de Manuel Lareo Fernández, España