Dear Sara Orsi,

We had a chat yesterday about art, communication, manipulation, ‘de-coding’, and power. We agreed that I would challenge you to bend or decode a message I would send to you today. I referred in our brief conversation a YouTube video on Katyusha (the Stalin’s Organ), by a Russian, signed Colonel Thyran.

As you will notice, the 9’09” video is an audio and video minimalist repetition of small pieces of film and musical noise. Which means that the ambiguous meaning of this piece of unintended art, results directly from an aesthetic intersection between the user (listener/viewer) and the thing here called art. In pragmatic terms, this is what James Dewey called ‘art as experience’, which clearly challenges most boring post-structuralist de-constructionist exercises.

The little piece of minimalist YouTube editing is powerful as a crude synthesis of Hitler’s defeat, as well as a post-Cage composition.

To me, this is a great unintended work of art.

Please feel free to bend it.

Amicalement,
Antonio Cerveira Pinto
https://youtu.be/0bWt81vhIyY


Dear António,

I thank you the challenge and this little powerfull piece.

As I told you in our chat I’ve been developing a series of essays using the web browser as a canvas and the internet stored information as material for transformation through computation processes. These essays are compositions with scores made of code for computers to interpret in real-time. In the end, what you see exists only while it’s running. Besides that they are are just words as those words inside books when there is no reader.

Your reference to Cage, particularly to 4’33’’ – the silence piece that invites the audience to hear the sound of the environment – compelled me to invert this intense experience of power into a slight pervert contemplation moment. So my answer to this challenge is a three-moment composition that puts you as a viewer of slow war images while sounds of nature are played.

Greetings,
Sara Orsi