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Ortiz-Torres, Ruben

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Digital access to this material is pending artist's approval. Materials may be viewed onsite at the Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University.

I use different media (photography, video, film, painting, sculpture, baseball caps, custom cars, leaf blower machines, lawn mowers, writing, computers and more) to explore and participate in linguistic, aesthetic, social, and other collisions of art and culture in the shifting context of the New World Dis/Order. My work interacts with the cultural and iconographic postnational chaos. It does more than compile evidence of the processes of mutual distortion that define different kinds of international and cultural relations. It also documents the ultrabaroque ways of aesthetic production that have emerged from the global practice of cultural misinterpretation. Seduction is in direct proportion with the degree in which the political hybridizes with the popular and infects media. This eclectic art is a product of an inevitable miscegenation and celebrates the beauty of the impure.

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    2005 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Ortiz-Torres, Ruben (2007-01-23T15:24:47Z)
    Art has often been considered an "agent of transformation." However, what happens when the art and the spaces where we present it are in a state of flux and transformation? During the twentieth century, mechanics allowed us to incorporate notions of speed and motion into visual representation. New technologies give us the possibility to create forms in transformation, avoiding the limitations of particularity and singularity. These mutant forms might respond to a public space that is mutating too. Forms can be combined and recombined seamlessly as if we were altering their genetic or molecular composition. The public space has become more public in its virtual representation. Cities exist not just in reality but also in a mythical construction that we inhabit from elsewhere. Through web cams and the Internet we can access certain specific locations without having to be there. Here, radical hypothetical interventions within the public space and certain communities can actually become a reality.