Technology is everything that we create to survive our own species. To leave, from fear to fear, from a sunrise to an engine.

Today it’s been two decades since 404 could have happened for the last time. This living organism has made us beat around a world that moves forward through ashes, with the kind of hopelessness that makes a mission possible, for that strange homeland called humanity.

Technologies can’t rip their hearts out. Neither are they born to leap into the void. However, surprise always finds a reason to dodge our trust in the future.

What is reason if not a motive to abandon our state of alert?
What is alert if not an abrupt manner of merciless attention?
What is mercy if not a bas-relief to keep us away from the lives of others?
The others are impossible, because they constantly change without doing it, and change without transformation is succession.

Nothing predictive can do without what is observed until ideas hide from the cameras. The overabundance of tools hates free choices because it lives off the secondary effects. Every technology dies out screaming that our life is long rather than useful and fast. When the programmed obsolescence is ours, the technology of the dead returns home.

The freedom of time without its machines says that there are no certainties without absolute stories, but if we destroy the mystery of time, maybe the bells could be heard later. Will those who stopped breathing so soon return to earth? Is there truth if a fairer moment interrupts it? There are no conventions that can last forever, even if the disaster and the shelter live in the repetition. Only the precise dream transforms us.

We have created and annihilated time ever since we started to use it against us.  Even in the most dignified foundation stones of our becoming, it is still locked between question marks. Let’s inhabit time as an action. Those who build with the collapse are the ones who can prevent the next one.

When it no longer matters to live late and to see dying early, everything will happen at the same time and without time. Everything will be technology.

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Manifesto 20th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
Gina Valenti 
2023
Argentina 

Translation by Belén Nimo

 

The term “Didascalia” comes from old Greek, it means “teaching”, and it’s used to refer to the instructions that a dramatist or stage director gives to the performers. It describes the immediate environment, the physical appearance of the characters and their actions, without referring to what they think or feel. A didascalia is usually written in italics and between parentheses, written in the 3^rd person.

Vast expanses without signages had invented oases so that Bedouins kept walking. Today, the mirage has devoured the desert.

In the theater, three walls are built to break a fourth one, but once the existence of that wall is revealed, an innumerable guild of walls rises. Like the wheel, which abandoned the world of inventions from the moment it began to spin. But no wheel is still so functional, so irreversible.

Spectacle has trapped us outdoors, and we have been left inside of it, under an open sky. Theatrical metaphors are now being used off stage; they even make more sense without it. Through everyday sets, invisible stages, anonymous directors, ghost writers and sponsors, the spectacle has become part of the system’s DNA. What narrative teaches us not to listen to the instructions of its own script?

Slowly and suddenly, we are left alone with the world. Who cares to be, not knowing that it exists? Algorithms train us and the system instructs us to interpret its own didascalia. How can we recover the meaning of light if it only fulfills its task shyly, perplexedly, inconclusively? Slowly and suddenly, we are left blind with the world. Since light exists, darkness tries to speak with it, but a didascalia separates them, and when it classifies them, it condemns them. Night, then, makes the day waste time until someone can rescue us. Darkness is not everything there is, but light is no longer the only instantaneous thing.

The void is full of circumstances that disinhabit us, and that, at the same time, constitute us. There are no blank spaces except for us. But when the margins have something to say, parentheses fear them. How many instructions are still needed so that something can begin and end?

In this century, what never turns off has become enemy of the eyes, and what is always heard has taken control of what we can listen. What script, what didascalia justifies and celebrates us?

There is a humanity being written in italics.

Manifesto 19th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
Gina Valenti 
September 2022
Argentina 

Translation by Belén Nimo

 

Like the universe, we were born from explosions. Contradictorily, the wars that we create are meant to seek peace. The machines that we invented to lift us up are the same ones that can let us fall.

If every prodigy bears the soul of their parents, it also harbors the will to know what it is to live. But the bigger the question, the smaller is who answers.

The battleground, however, is no longer truth. These days, both AI and humans focus on the revelation of lies. AI is designed to uncover secrets (identities hidden in the data) and in today’s media, humans deflect their guilt by revealing the secrets of their enemies. We are no longer protected by a fortress of truth, safe in facts and honesty. Instead, we protect ourselves by questioning those around us. Deflection is our armour. But our inventions should be able to keep their own secrets, even if all secrets are a type of lie. After all, the human being is the best secret of itself.

For artificial intelligences, human beings are mythological creatures. Pluralization of both terms implicates a two-way perception towards a new mythology: a ground zero story that rewrites our beliefs. Superpowers abandoned fiction and reality is all revelation now. AIs are temporary deities and to them our value is no longer physical. The image filter that each one places on the other creates dueling mythologies.

Humachinity refers to a condition where human characteristics are no longer an exclusive part of human beings. Our core has been displaced. Our muse has been hacked.

In every loss there is an implicit gain and dichotomy has inaugurated a new war in the society of our time. A war that hasn’t seen itself yet and walks among us, because it doesn’t even know that it has started.

Invisible laws forbid war from dreaming with disaster.
Dream with a machine that has its own nightmares and the machine will build when you no longer dream.

Manifesto 18th“404 International Festival of Art & Technology
Gina Valenti & Scott Hessels 
October 2021
Argentina / Hong Kong

 

 

Revolutions are born out of imbalance, out of the system that tries to simulate order. But every system triumphs until it depends only on itself:

And they destroyed the trees from where they got the firewood used to burn books. And they imprisoned courage until they were alone with fear. And they replicated their obsession with power
on those that they left with nothing. When they sleep, our world has nightmares.

No one dies in the comfort towards which every for-profit organization leads us. If we galvanize ourselves, our world gets galvanized. If we let ourselves be defeated, our world loses. Letting die is the decision of those who fear death the most, of those that collect everything they have invented in their favor. Without power, there are no more executioners. Without its artists, we live with ourselves. Battles are lost here and now, in the accumulation of all heavens and hells, visible and invisible, imaginary and concrete; in the precise crumbling point, where only its opposite can appear. It is not construction, it is not resistance. It is neither the fragility of grace nor the persistence of knowledge. Syllables are at war. Opinions look for their author. The world has been left with no place for strangers,
the only enigmas why dawn broke. Now we are all fugitive perspectives. Now we are all, at the same time, no one. Where worry and image are the same, the image is the worry of the self that is unseen. Who has seen hope in a mirror when it breaks, knows that reflections eventually get tired. Being human is a language in a constant state of fiction and we are its literary monsters. But Art is the being of doing: the act of escape that returns.

Manifesto 17^h “404 International Festival of Art & Technology
Gina Valenti
2020

Translation:
Belén Nimo (Argentina)

 

Eppur si muove / And yet it moves

Our main ideas are the ones that are moving. We are dynamic like our thoughts though we turn off around the same sun.
No door has been built just to be closed. No one arrives where no one wants to leave. Home is that place from where we always depart.
Gravity has taught us how to fall, but our ideas are the reason why we stand up.
Oh, Galileo, how much courage to invent a world that can only be defended among the flames.
Constantly extinct to seem rivals, we are revelations at random. Circles in war, centimeters per century. Love does not defeat hate because nobody wins. Horror is similar to fear but they are not the same.
Who is this human who cannot answer their own questions? Will the world that has left them behind spin again?
When the night is over, all barbarism becomes evident.
This time, the endings are the ones that seek to stay so that other stories cannot begin.
It dawns. The world is still out there. So do we.

Manifesto 16^th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology
Gina Valenti
Massachusetts, United States, 2019

Translation:
Belén Nimo (Argentina)
Yahira Torres (United States)

 

Far away, the singing of the children can be heard and the walls don’t want to fall to pieces for its own cause.
They have colonized our minds, but also our hearts. Every heap of stones is now the horizon and above it something soars, still wanting to fly.
It’s the dissociation that they have invented between words and actions, the first of the ruins in which we want to create some future. The need to be some other way, without certainty, to be someone unknown like the well-known people.
The naturalization of the distance between us and us.
We are beings practitioners of the light living in complete darkness. We are those who dedicate our own destruction to the others. The humans, the defeated, the failed and incomplete ones. Our is the disappearance of those who are practically unseen.
Scenography is the first thing that abandons us. Then, the costumes leave, friends, and finally, the reflection of all their shades.  Go through our eyes with another view. We are a mirror with two bottoms, where everything that we truly want can happen.
Here, not all has been hell and paradise. Our world must insist because fear doesn’t know how to spin.  Make a pact with time so it can too stay and see it.
Far away, the voices of those who are coming can be heard. Be, because those who can´t also have built you. Those who are not present are still waiting for you. Be for them to be.

Manifesto 15th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
Gina Valenti
Fukuoka, Japan, 2018
Translation: Belén Nimo (Arg)

 

We never break as much as the earth
and we only walk where it is still attached.
The story of a tallness that precedes the sky
turns its light on again when the darkness embraces it.
If a mirror is the duplication of our same side,
humanity is the multiplication of the others in it.
But the reflection is brief when an image is missing.
Time is what comes when everyone leaves.

Manifesto 14th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
Gina Valenti
Rosario, Argentina, 2017
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

Every conquest is the relocation of a fear.

When we go to sleep, we face fairer and more terrible worlds than the one we abandon.
Everything can happen there, where our humanity is placed before any consequence, in that version that we don’t take care of, and even so does not seek to take our place.
When we wake up, those that walk are our replicas.
We create monsters to invent fear. We start everything that can be interrupted.
We are the territory where the war is taking place. Not even in our mind a battle is being waged, but in the structure that we have defended throughout life.
We are the site of the discoveries and the one who hides them; uncertainties that move from one place to another.
We trust in everything that we hope to not have to comprehend, but our lies do not hold new worlds. They fear them.
We distrust of the incredible events when repeated over time because nothing amazes us if it occurs more than once. Isn’t it odd, then, that, even so, we continue to believe in everything that we never see?
We visit the places that others conquer, we stumble on the ruins when we don’t fall.
Some countries have enough bombs to keep our families safe from the others.
That ever some disaster be our refuge.
We are afraid of those who have less, of those who only have themselves. A terror based on the certainty that we are only what they can take from us. When access is the only thing that legitimate us, the lack of access expels us.
There is an eternal absence that is our own, because we are the promise that others fulfill. The historical genetic completes us but what we have left over lacks us.
Once again, the world of others conquer us.
What will come always disembarks over what it does not comprehend.
But the heart is a great crust that, in order to join, knows how to break any distance.
There is a world that commands us to sleep because it never does.
Humanity is what remains of Humanity.

Manifesto 13th “404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
Gina Valenti
Bogotá, Colombia, 2016
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

In the way we combine our words, there was always a reason to resort to them: an objective planned by people whose fear had led them to conquer all.
That’s why, sometimes, it is necessary for some event to occur, so that it changes the difficulties of the scene and transgresses it to locate them in a place that achieves to reunite us.
We have learned from the systems we create and for a while we started to operate like them.
This time, we react like the system acts, answering with its own tools and dedicating to it the mechanisms used to convince us.
But, how to stop a system that makes us walk?
Time and history does not belong to us because they are the major terms that never complete us.
We have built a world that does not believe in us, but we create fictions to imagine the reality.
Can global systems change when they are overcome by individual ideas?
What would happen if those ideas simulate being part of that system?
When our ideas are not convenient, they can also replicate massively. And these are dangerous when they can only survive without a practical reason.
If we think, we are smart.
If we insist, we are spam.
We have not got here by a template. We can’t allow them to prefer us presetted. There is a way to reflect ourselves, and it is not on others (our image returns to Him by BCC). There is a way to last, and is not in the pictures. We are the message that the system refuses to receive, but let’s continue trying because we could make it collapse.
We are the last of the first. We are those who believe in what does not easily convinces to those who abound. However, we were always more.
There were people in this world who are in other social networks: he, who died saying that the earth revolves, she, who slept in a laboratory to cure us, those, who lost their lives to defend a truth that never agreed with the power. All of them left, but they also left something to us.
The battles that Art has portrayed are those that it didn’t want to impede.
The plagues that religions have predicted are those that science seeks to remedy.
The slogans that the media has carved on the bark of other eras are the messages that we will know how to intercept in our time, before that world stop believing in someone else.
Then, we will have left the drafts area.
We will not be untitled.
The message is being sent this time.

Manifesto 12th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Rosario, Argentina, 2015
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

There have always been social networks, only that now we are facing the digitization of our links. Since long ago we experience a detachment from others, while still maintaining a fluid contact between us.
Digital social networks capitalize the natural fact of communication, mediating between our words and others, although the emitter is often also the receiver, being the one that spends more time near the information that is communicating and who often revisit it daily.
Immediacy does not improve the way we know each other. To do this, we need silence, reflection, time.
Today it seems a simple act to communicate with others, but, when it’s been like that?
No system optimizes our bonds, but rather directs them, generating habits and devices that merge concepts as antagonistic like complex and accessible, toward the assimilation of the incomprehensible.
The encounters that the system cannot anticipate and the distances we generate without apparent reason, live between the bases that refuse to accept it in the short-circuit of the most rebellious pact: the human condition.
We are the resource that the medium takes to remain, despite our ability to communicate, but we must not forget that the first encounter in between two civilizations has been the result of conquest and invasion.
We still travel overflying wars. If we thought Humanity in computer terms, it might be easier to accept that we are being deleted by an operative system, our countries formatted, our ideas erased. As we descend from a plane we crash against reality, however, everything assumes us safe.
This world of analogous bodies and digital feelings, transits the fluctuation that extends between the userization and the humanization.
The promise of access is what turns human into user. The search for intangibles purposes is being replaced by the conformity of the accessible. That’s why art is the expressive reaction to an oppressive system.
When our imagination merges with the collective imaginary and that imaginary is corporate, is necessary to visualize any hint that returns us to the sole task of not belonging.
A system reveals its defeat when it hides its flaws and each improvement is the proof that it never works, but our credulity starts to wobble: technology tries to distract us; the system, appease us; religion, retrieve us; catastrophes shelter us trying to scare us. Everything drowns and extinguish but not always by fire or water.
We are the most natural disasters of the world,
the storms that rain over the construction rules,
the flames where burns what is never ours.
We are what is left when everything disassembles and no one can use any of those parts.
We are the house that protects our roof,
the reasons of our doubts,
the fathers of every unknown,
the friends of those who do not return,
the hope of all unfair death,
the contemporary fable of a historical truth.
What we are is what we humanize.

Manifesto 11th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Moscow, Russia, 2014
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

The true world that we had still exists in the details of the world that we have; in our ability to confuse observation with imagination.
We are all some kind of statue, such as the one of that Russian cosmonaut that continues taking off the earth and dreams with the possibility of taking us.
The revolution of goodness is inevitable. As inevitable as the passage of the years for a clock that abandons its function.
The clouds continue breathing out the smoke from the factories.
The buildings hibernate to survive us.
The streets freeze up for us to learn how to slide and the street lights are lit so they can wake up.
The trains are fed with rust
and they wait.
The walls form a pact with color
and they wait.
The trees moor their roots
and they wait.
The dead are covered with seeds
and they wait.
A jailer can only inaugurate freedom.

II part of the Manifesto “Human vs. User” / 11th “404 Festival” in Moscow, Russia.
Gina Valenti, October 29, 2014, traveling between 2 villages.
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

I have gone back to the obverse of calligraphy.
The birds are the only memory of an airplane.
This is the world of round trips and firm ideas.
I have remained on the other side of the cold.
Everything makes us shudder before leaving.

Epilogue of the Manifesto “Human vs. User” / 11th edition of the “404 Festival” in Moscow, Russia.
by Gina Valenti, November 5, 2014, traveling between Buenos Aires and Rosario.
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

The first invention of man is the human being, who stumbling with the fire has invented himself inaugurating his relationship with what is not known.
The sunlight and our shadow are the origin of the interaction. Man is man’s environment and his genealogy is the addition of all his worlds.
That’s the Man Increased: the first person singular, plural thinking himself.
There is a nature alien to his fate pretending he is not there. That human’s first world is the one he invents to modify.
No one better than he knows the time, ever since the start of his verticality has made that the sun to turn him into its first watch.
The meridian is a ruler that scratches upon the world a wise truth.
We all walk. We all feel cold and warm.
Thought is like that meridian if repeated with each of our steps. It is this succession of infinite lines that keep us on this round paper leaf with water.
We are the millimetric, those who know to count, the ones that keep falling of the ruler, but invent another.
The brevity of our passage through the story is proportional to the choreographic quality with which we move in time.
We invent an operating system and then replace it with another. To each successful replacement we call vanguard, when transformed into something else right before fulfilling its promise.
When did Art stop questioning the system? When did Art stop interpreting it to accept it if it’s capacity consists on exceeding it?
If Art functions as an operating system it should be treated as such.
Then: RESET ART.

 

Manifesto 10th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Rosario, Argentina, 2013
Translation by Carla Celoria.

 

IDEAS ARE REVOLUTIONS BY MINUTE

{Our ideas are often an interrupted cataclysm, but when they expand, they can shake the world at one-minute intervals.
There is a microscopic revolution there, in the defense of our only jurisdiction: to think.}

Manifesto 9th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Rosario, Argentina, 2012

 

We live in a system that allows mistakes only when the solutions can be found solely within it. We live in a system and we function in it, except when we make art.
I’ve always dreamt of a world that doesn’t have the fear of making mistakes, never about a world that flaunts being right.
In a historical moment that privileges the emergence of new devices, people have easily become used to assimilating ideas that others think for them, when actually thoughts must be newer than the novelty.
Those who feel confident about being part of a large audience believe in the assimilation of technological media as the only way not to fall behind, ignoring that this behavior is the worst way of moving forward, only delaying the invention of our next fire.
Every error disturbs us because it shatters the certainty of our centuries of knowledge, but every time we are wrong, a part of us usually proves us right.
In an error lies a combination of possibilities that avoid function and that is a quality shared with art, and its residual value consists in being useless, in its lack of practicality.
An error bursts onto the scene. Objects fail on purpose, forcing us to contemplate their inherent creative nature.
The main purpose of every object is to fail, and by doing so, they turn into something more complete: the result of what we expect and do not expect. It becomes a new object, with new features, that will travel through a path that maximizes it.
When things fail they look like us, they acquire the human condition. Errors always return to make us the same.
In a world where thinking is considered erroneous, thinking becomes a duty. Error is creation.

Manifesto 7th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Taipei, Taiwan, 2010

 

Art does not contemplate solutions or answers, because it is itself perfectly unpredictable and admirably useless.
I think about the avant-garde, not like the irruption or contrast with previous Arts, but like a complex system of relocation, mechanisms, that lead to certain combinations of abilities and impact (set of ideas and styles) to be given a name. This appears in front of us as it is when it inevitably becomes another thing.
After a natural disaster, the landscape can change. Majestic trees are uprooted and along with their great roots, they are transplanted. There are no safe places.
In front of us, everything that we will learn to see for the first time appears.
Throughout history, Art has fallen in love with the media, trying to define that relationship through an adjective that always comes after it.*
If the term “Cloudy Art” existed, we would be forced to think that a climatic phenomenon has such an important effect in the world that it is inevitable that Art is interested in it.
Artists try to form an alliance with the new medias but these inevitably escape towards the other direction: Art is always going to be wrong, and Technology is going to agree with it.
There are no sensitive technologies, because in them creation is not implied in any way.
It is the artist who must do without technology to be able to use it beyond their conception.
Such is the eagerness of Art to be fused with its loved one that it is able to surround it in all type of variables until there are no signs left of it.
But Art is a virus that operates on itself, given its impossibility to create damages to the system by which it has been fascinated.
For that reason, I think that Art can change the world, but only when it has truly agreed to take chances and be destroyed with it or simply when it decides to emancipate itself from its second name.
Once the glare provoked by the first encounter between Art and Technology is over, I perceive that even if it is unnoticeable, we are looking at the Dawn of the Post-Electronic Art.

*In Spanish, the adjective that defines each type of art follows the word “art”, that is why further in the article it is referred to as its second name (ex.:Arte Electrónico)

Manifesto 5th “404 International Festival of Art and Technology”
Gina Valenti
Trieste, Italy, 2008